For a lack of inspiration, we're losing what makes our world rich. Though our planetary ecosystems are in dire straits, we also stand to lose the lion’s share of cultural wisdom that has made it thus far in human history.

 

Atlas Altera is a fictional cartographic exercise to reimagine our backdrop. Instead of achieving a homogenizing "end of history," in the strange yet familiar world of Altera, cultural differences flourish. One of the main goals of the atlas is to represent on a political world map at least one language from every language family currently in existence, or which is being revitalized.

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The worldbuilding is developed from a series of alternate history scenarios, as well as a dash of alternate geography. But unlike darker irredentist fantasies and conventional alternate history, the project is about making room for those that lost out in the drawing up of borders without the winner takes all logic.

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Recognizing how the classroom prop of a political map has the power to rally and erase, and being pragmatic with territoriality, Atlas Altera puts into focus countries as the base unit to illuminate the diversities in our own timeline—peoples and their dialects, knowings, wisdoms, practices, traditions, beliefs—which everyday threaten to vanish.

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Apart from thematic maps, the lore of Altera is doled out in map plates and chorographic narratives, inspired by the tradition of chorography and regional geography.