12 Maps, One Project

Join us as Pedro Santamaria walks us through the collection "Europa, 12 mapas y un proyecto", an initiative of the Biblioteca Nacional de España to commemorate the Spanish European Union presidency last year. 
The exhibition is currently set up at the Central Public Library in Floriana as part of the activity "The Story of Europe, Map by Map", organised by the Spanish Embassy in Malta, The European Commission Representation in Malta, and Malta Libraries on the occasion of Malta's 20-year anniversary of joining the EU.

About the project: 
Europe: 12 maps, one project is an exhibition on a selection of cartographic representations of a space with a certain identity. But what is that identity? What is Europe? A continent? A geographical reality? A political community? All that, and much more.
Europe is the result of a historic process that reaches ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, Christianity, the Enlightenment, the expansion of the West, the world wars and a thousand more events.
Maps, the eyes of history, show us scenes and figures of what its battles, pacts, towns and cities were. Maps are portraits of countries, their territories and their inhabitants. There is no definitive map, much in the same way there is no definitive portrait of someone. Each describes a series of phenomena or tells a succession of facts, but these are not exhaustive.
Maps express what their authors sought in space and how they represented it. They talk about what we were or what we believed to be.