Alighiero Boetti’s La Mappa del Mondo (Map of the World) presents a world map on which the territories of countries are depicted in the colors of their national flags. Over 150 of these embroidered maps were created between 1971 and 1989. The Italian artist only drew the outlines of the countries and subsequently handed the maps over to embroiderers in Afghanistan to complete. Boetti also spent time there regularly during the nineteen-seventies, and between 1971 and 1977, along with various other people, was even involved in running a guest house in Kabul, known as One Hotel. 

The maps should be read as an ongoing project unfolding over more than a decade and a half, in which Boetti traced the shifts and changes in territories that arose over the years, thus rendering tangible the ever provisional and controversial nature of political demarcations. The artist also gave the embroiderers some room for manoeuvre. That included, for example, opting to use a different color of thread, depending on what was available in Afghanistan, which was struggling with grave economic and political problems. La Mappa del Mondo is a snapshot in which the political and also economic circumstances at the time of production are literally sewn into the fabric of the image.