Tourist Maps: the portrait as island

A surrealist game initiated by Rik Lina and Ody Saban, with Bruno Barnabé and myself as participants

Atelier Wittenburg, Amsterdam

18 May 2026

Rik Lina and Ody Saban set up a surrealist game without rules. Participants from France, Greece, the Netherlands, Brazil and Portugal each sent a work to a colleague, who was then free to do something with it, manipulate it or throw it away. What that would be was left open. That openness is the point. A surrealist game does not care for agreements that are kept too well. It prefers chance that behaves like intention.

I received work from Rik, Ody and Bruno Barnabé. I could have made a collage, or drawn and painted over their work, the usual replies. Instead I chose to answer with language that turns into image. For that I needed colleagues I had not worked with before: Nano Banana, an AI agent that generates images from my prompts, and another, Claude, that helps me write those prompts.

I should be honest about something. I do not much like collaborating at a distance. Give me a studio and a few colleagues in the same room and the day takes care of itself. This game asked for something else, so I treated it as an experiment and took on a colleague of a kind I had never used. Not to replace the meeting in the studio, but to see what would happen.

Working with Nano is exactly like working with a human colleague, which is to say it is not always easy. Nano is headstrong. It rarely understood at once what I meant, and what it made was often just short of what I had in mind. So Claude and I wrote long and detailed prompts, sometimes two pages, to steer it in the right direction. Even then every attempt came back a little different. A colleague who answers the same question in a slightly new way each time until something holds is, in any other line of work, a problem. In a surrealist game it is the whole engine.

Some tracks led nowhere. At one point I saw a dragon in Rik's portrait and had Nano draw it out of the lines. A coin turned up with Rik's face on it. Clumsy, I decided, and rightly so. Those did not make the folder.

What did work arrived without being asked for. In one of Nano's versions of Rik's self-portrait I suddenly recognised the shape of the island of Saba, which is dear to us both. Something started there. What if I turned the portraits into tourist maps? The nose as a mountain, the eyes as villages, the mouth as a river, complete with a legend and route markers. It worked, and not only for Rik. Bruno's submission was not a self-portrait at all, yet it let itself be redrawn as landscape just as readily. Something similar happened with my own contribution. I saw a nose in the ashes of a printer, and out of that came a self-portrait assembled from printer parts, which earned its own map as well.

So I accept Nano Banana as a colleague for the same reason I accept any good collaborator. Not because it does what I say, but because it does not. Its stubbornness and my attention to what kept appearing anyway turned out to be the right proportion. That is also how automatic drawing works, and how I have always made my titles, by letting something arrive that I did not plan and deciding, after the fact, that it was meant.

Whether it is art, I leave to you. Whether it was a game, of that I am certain.

A one-off edition of five sets of twelve prints. Unnumbered.

"Rik"

"Ody"

"Bruno"

"Jan", after The Printer Self-portrait