De Facto’s First Off the Map in The Hague

• 18 March 2025
• Author Suzanne Hendriks

The lines we have drawn on our maps and onto our world are food for thought this evening. ‘Which borders would you like to get rid of?’ we asked our visitors. ‘Let’s get rid of the border between the Noordzee and the Atlantic Ocean, it’s a colonial relic and only used to stretch fish quota’, one replied. ‘I could do without the snow line’ (sneeuwgrens), another responded, ‘I don’t like skiing’. We clearly had a well-travelled audience with us, with people who have visited Somaliland, Transnistria and Taiwan.

The evening was full of stories about borders, the demarcations on the maps and in our minds. What happens to borders when they turn into battlefields? What happens when a country ceases to exist? What happens when we think differently about maps and movement? It was an inspiring evening, filled with live music, presentations and live interviews.

Alex Tugushin kicked off the evening on his guitar. Born into a Russian speaking family in the Soviet Union in a part that turned into Ukraine, he came to the Netherlands to play guitar on the streets and stayed. He now works as a sound engineer for documentaries, like the ones by Jelle Brandt Corstius. The most recent one he worked for, From Moscow to Maidan, is being aired at the moment by Dutch public broadcaster VPRO. His rendition of the song Обiйми. Океан Эльзы, meaning ‘Hold me’, original by Okean Elzy voiced his worries about the war in Ukraine but also about what will happen after the fighting stops. De Facto’s own Jorie Horsthuis interviewed him about the communities that have been driven apart by war and polarization, in the whole country as well as in his family. How to continue living together once the borders have been moved and redrawn?

Jorie Horsthuis shared her experiences in Nagorno-Karabakh, a country she visited when she had just finished her studies Political Sciences and Journalism. Nagorno-Karabakh was a de facto state in the South Caucasus, as an enclave within Azerbaijan. It was controlled for 30 years by an Armenian de facto government which declared independence in 1991. One and a half year ago, in September 2023, Azeri forces took over the whole enclave in a 1-day war, after which the whole population of over 100,000 inhabitants fled across the border with Armenia. Jorie kept in touch with some of the people she met in 2008 and visited them again, living in exile in the capital of Armenia.

Henk van Houtum, professor of political geography at Radboud University, took over the stage with a flaming presentation, based on his book Free the Map, in which traditional maps are challenged and new cartographic stories and representations are discussed and encouraged (click here for De Facto’s review). In his compelling presentation, he argued that with the ubiquitousness of maps, it’s easy to overlook that all maps are a story, not a reality. Van Houtum uses the example of Magritte’s painting, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” to illustrate this point. The painting reminds the viewer that although a depiction of a pipe might look like a pipe, it’s in fact NOT a pipe itself, and this is also the case with maps. It’s not THE world you are looking at when you are gazing at a map, but a depiction of it. Something you should keep in mind with any map you get your hands across. Another eyesore he addressed is the way red arrows are used to depict migration. If you would use the same red arrows to depict the hordes of tourists that come to France every year, it becomes painfully clear how these arrows are used in a political context to portray migration as a threat, as an aggression. They don’t do justice to the multiscope of experiences human movement is.

As always, graphic designer Floor Koomen took a deep dive into something small that tells a big story. This time it was the de facto state of Cabinda, which sports a kalashnikov on its coin and has a conman messing around with Cabinda’s wish for self determination.

And of course, there was some flag waving at a nerdy quiz by researcher Suzanne Hendriks. The winner took home a bottle of Ukrainian Spirit, to toast to better times.

We are happy to announce we will be back at Zaal 3 on May 7, in The Hague, so alert your Haguanese friends and family. On October 8th, we will be back at Mimik, Deventer. Hope to see you at one of our next events!

(thanks to Jerney Hakkenberg for all these photos!)