内容摘要：Relatives had reported receiving ransom demands for the musicians, who were aged between 20 and 40 years old.

Relatives had reported receiving ransom demands for the musicians, who were aged between 20 and 40 years old.

One cartographer’s claims, though, shook the cartography world in 1973, causing an outpouring of condemnation on the one hand, and on the other, a loyal cult following.German activist Arno Peters declared his Peters Projection as the “only” precise map, and the true alternative to the Mercator model.

Peters, whose parents had been imprisoned by Nazis and who focused on social inequalities as a journalist and academic criticised the Mercator projection as “Euro-centred”.The fervour with which he and his supporters promoted the projection as a scientific feat and a social justice breakthrough bordered on what some called propaganda. It caused concerned groups like the United States National Council of Churches to take notice and immediately adopt the map.Critics, though, were quick to call out Peters on two things. The map, observers pointed out, was only distorted differently: Where the Mercator projection makes areas near the poles appear much larger, the Peters projection relatively represents accurate sizes throughout, but slightly stretches areas near the equator vertically, and areas near the poles horizontally.

“There was also the fact that this map had already been presented by another cartographer decades ago,” Braun said, explaining the second problem.Scottish scientist James Gall indeed first published an identical projection in a science journal in 1855, but it went unnoticed. There is no proof, some researchers say, that Peters outrightly plagiarised Gall, but critics say his failure to credit the earlier researcher is still problematic.

In 2016, the debate resurfaced with renewed vigour after public schools in the US city of Boston switched to what many now refer to as the “Gall-Peters” projection. Officials said the move was part of a three-year effort to “decolonise the curriculum”. Teachers said they were amazed to see students questioning their view of the world after the switch.

However, many experts and map enthusiasts were annoyed by the fact that Boston chose Peters, and as such, gave the projection renewed relevance.“It was like entering a kind of time tunnel,” he adds.

Vallejo suffered memory loss around the ordeal of his arrests, imprisonment and torture.The process of creating the image provided “a feeling – not exactly of relief – but rather of reconciling memory with the past and perhaps also of filling that void created by selective amnesia, which results from complicated, traumatic, and above all, distant experiences”. He found the reconstruction a “valuable experience” that helped him process some of these events.

‘We are not reconstructing the past’Emphasising that memory is subjective, Garcia says, “One of the things that we are kind of drawing a very big red line about is historical reconstruction.”