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Simon Evans
Born in 1972 in London, England / Lives in Berlin, Germany

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): Tell me about your interest in maps.

Simon Evans (SE): In my work, maps make places. They are large environments for a worm like me to rule. Maps are made of blood. The science of cartography is limited. Sometimes I will take an existing map and redraw it so it becomes my own. This is not an exercise in alienation, but just a little bit of space. I conquered my hometown by making a map of it. Each map is its own idea. When I was a kid I would go into museumsand look at abstract paintings as if they were landscapes.

AP: More specifically, can you tell me about Light Evil (2007)?

SE: I had just moved back to London after 12 years and was having a very bad time there, very overwhelmed and lonely. I had been reading a book about Harry Beck, who in 1933 redesigned the London Underground map into the version we now know. The London Underground map before he redesigned it was very confusing to people. He simplified it into a circuit board–like form. He was an electrician and those were also modernist times. So I turned my feelings of being overwhelmed into a small section of the London Underground Tube map, a section of the Victoria line on which I lived. I guess the work continues the idea of all geography being about power. I was able to gain and define a view of my London experience with the use of this map.

AP: And what about the lists?

SE: Top 10 Reasons Why I Make Lists.
1.  Essential frailty and meanness of   what characterizes human  existence. 2.  Easy advice. 3.  Lego reductionism. 4.  Art is myth of ordinary language. 5.  Because I’m not good at writing    poetry. 6.  Obsessive neurotic activities    keep trauma at bay. 7.  The reference to duty. 8.  The next opportunity to get real. 9.  Because arbitrary top tens  evaluate how we are living. 10. Imagination is words that  go away.

AP: Also you often have works that refer to the diary, which maps personal life into a narrative or a list.

SE: Yes, the diary pieces are an attempt to let it all hang out. Apologies are big business. This is the time of the memoir. Someone let out the secret that secrets are desirable and now we can’t shut up. I heard someone on the radio today say we’ve become our own Big Brothers, like Stalin turned into Andy Warhol.