SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email

Joseph Berkner Joseph Berkner

Joseph Berkner, a geoinformation-science student in Berlin, is sick of hearing people talking trash about migrants.

“These days there are many discussions about refugees in the media here in Germany,” emails Berkner, who’s 24. “And when I see comments on websites like ‘They don’t belong here’ or ‘Most of them are men or criminals,’ I feel like many of these people have never been in contact with people of other nations (or made bad experiences once and therefore created their own stereotypes for the rest).”

So Berkner dove into an unusual project to convey a difference message: acceptance. Using Inkscape, he started drawing at the bottom right of a navy-blue screen and, an eternity or so later, ended at nearly the same point. What emerged was an incredible map of the world executed in a single line, linking together its cities...

...and islands…

...and even its border and title:

“ One Line–One Map–One World” is now available in a variety of forms (duvet cover!) for holiday shoppers who want to spread tolerance, or maybe annoy a bigoted uncle. Berkner explains more about its meaning on his website:

This differentiation are supported by maps. In mapping, lines are (mostly) used as borders to divide the space in sections: borders between land and water, borders between different altitudes or borders between nations. As a person who loves to make maps, for the last weeks I was thinking about what I can do to draw a line to CONNECT instead of DIVIDE. So I created a world map consisting of a single line. When watching the map from far away you cannot see the connections. It looks like everything is divided. But if you go closer you can see that everything is one. To realize that we are somehow all one community you need to go close to others. By keep drawing borders there will be no solution to all those problems we have these days. Let’s try to draw connections…

“One Line–One Map–One World,” $84 for a print, $65 for a shower curtain, and more options at Fine Art America