Ancestral Cartography, 2023
Woodcut CNC
Edition of 40
30 ⅜ x21 ⅝ in
Collaborating Printer: Alexis Nutini
Ancestral Cartography begins with a question: what happens when you map a city through the language of the body? Alexandre Mwilambwe brings together two distinct visual systems — urban cartography and nzoloko scarification, a traditional form of body marking rooted in his African heritage — and layers them onto a single surface. Streets and symbols, grids and scars, anonymous figures and inherited signs converge into something that reads as neither map nor portrait, but both at once.
Mwilambwe made this work during his residency at Brandywine Workshop and Archives in Philadelphia, collaborating with master printer Alexis Nutini. The city itself became part of the source material, its visual texture folded into a composition already charged with the marks of ancestral identity. The CNC woodcut process, precise and mechanical, carries the weight of imagery that is anything but — scarification is intimate, earned, and permanent in a way that no map of streets can be.
The work asks us to consider what we choose to record, what gets etched into skin versus stone, and whose cartography has historically been treated as the definitive one.
