Osei's drawings look like diagrams until you try to follow one. The key is complete, the scale is stated, the contours behave — and then a road runs into itself and the whole apparatus quietly stops working. We spoke about getting lost on purpose.
Your maps never lead anywhere. Is that the point?
I map places that can't quite exist, so that the real ones make sense. A map that resolves has stopped thinking — it has become a set of instructions.
How do you begin a drawing?
With a rule. Every line must meet another at 60 degrees; water is always drawn from the north. Then I break it. The pleasure is entirely in the moment the system fails and something stranger takes over.
Doesn't the break undo the discipline?
The opposite. You cannot break a rule you never set. The three weeks of obedience are what make the fourth week legible as a departure.
Without the system it would just be drawing, and I am not a very good draughtsman.
Terms Osei uses
- The key
The legend of a map. Osei always completes it, even when the territory it describes is impossible.
- A break
The deliberate failure of the drawing's governing rule — usually one per work, never announced.
- Walking scale
A drawing large enough that it cannot be seen from a single position.
You live in the 13e. Does the neighbourhood get into the work?
Constantly, and never directly. The 13e is a place built by several plans that disagreed with each other. That is exactly what my drawings are.
A map that resolves has stopped thinking.