Triste Tropique – Topographies of Sadness

Depression Pond, Miserable Lake, Agony Island, Road to Nowhere and all the places featured in this maps have been gathered by Damien Rudd with a scientifical precision. The work also offers the exact scales and localizations useful to each place, as well as a sad index.

This is graphical set is enhanced with a text commissioned to French rising star author Cécile Coulon, for whom the geography form the raw material of the inspiration, and which here gives short comments for each map, sometimes illuminating, sometimes desperate. Cécile Coulon offers us above all a parallel path of reading, adding to the irony of cartographic work the finesse of her poetic gaze. This is also the first time Cécile Coulon is published in English.

Projecting ourselves in Triste Tropique is a visual and fictional promise to find a place adapted to our bilious dispositions.