About

Mapping Paris is an open-access digital research output in the form of an online portal. It is a dynamic map of Paris for the period between 1946 and 1968, inscribing artists and the infrastructures that sustained them. The map identifies ateliers such as Mourlot, Lacourière Frélaut, and Crommelynck; galleries including Maeght, Arnaud, and Galerie Huit; periodicals such as Derrière le miroir and Cimaise; institutional exhibitions at the Bibliothèque nationale de France; Salons including the Salon de Mai and Réalités Nouvelles; as well as cafés, clubs, studios, and private residences where intellectual and artistic exchange took place. Conceived in collaboration with William Jeffree at the Design House Studio, the portal is a research tool in its own right. It is designed to enable a dynamic reconstruction of networks that can be difficult to apprehend through linear mapping alone.

The portal’s dynamic animated model enables artists and poets to appear within the city according to documented periods of activity and move between the locations with which they were associated. As time advances, figures enter and exit the map, their presence shifting between ateliers, galleries, publishing houses, Salons, and intellectual meeting points. When filtered by year, only those individuals and institutions active at that moment remain visible, allowing the viewer to observe patterns of simultaneity and encounter as they unfold. Selecting a single artist reveals their network of printers, dealers, critics and collaborators across multiple sites. Selecting a gallery or workshop reveals its selected exhibition history and the groups of figures connected to it.

Mapping Paris is designed as an expandable and open framework, intended to support future research, allowing additional information – figures, sites, and relationships – to be incorporated over time. The project proposes a different mode of apprehension, situating artists within the geography of Paris and tracing their movement between studios, ateliers, galleries, publishers and institutions. Seeing these trajectories unfolding across the city over time enables Paris networks to emerge as a lived topography of places, routes, presences and encounters.