Isles of Seven Cities

A phantom island is an island whose existence has been accepted for a certain period of time (sometimes centuries) and has been mentioned on maps, but which has subsequently been removed because it has been proven not to be real. There are many possible explanations for these geographical fictions: geopolitical and economic interests, cartographic copyrights, rumours, memes, hoaxes, legends, and more. These phantom islands have never physically existed, but they have had a real impact on the Western world. Isles of Seven Cities is not a monograph, but rather an artist’s book – a hybrid edition that combines the visual and textual narratives of these seven ghost islands. Fictional and real archives meet in a non-linear, fragmented logic, as a meta-island emerges from the whole.