One of the starting points was an extensive road and city map collection from all over Europe of his grandfather. Jo was born in Germany. He has lived in the US, in Asia and is currently based and works in London, UK. After a year as an exchange student, Jo had the opportunity to travel around the United States. At the time, he not only used the RandMcNally road atlas but invested in one of the very first handheld GPS devices. 

Until this day, it’s the tradition as well as modern science and technology that fascinate him. He loves rummaging for old maps in charity shops and is eager to understand the scientific foundations of a sextant, but also relishes in experimenting with the most advanced navigation systems. Mapperia now combines his lifelong passion for maps with coding, technology and craft.

It was during Covid lockdowns that he began to teach himself how to code. He soon linked his newly acquired knowledge with maps: the idea to split an area into different layers: streets, buildings, railways, water, green spaces,  and map them all separately was born .These layers laser cut from different coloured paper allow the viewer to disaggregate and recompose an area. 

Challenges kept adding up. Just one of the more accessible ones: Whereas streets and buildings usually have a connection to the frame of the clipping, lakes or parks do not so you need to introduce small connections to keep everything in place. That visual tweak has now become a feature rather than a necessity of Mapperia’s maps.

After endless trials, fine tuning of the laser cutter, revised models and constant amendments to the code, the first map was born, for Battersea and Clapham Common in the London borough of Wandsworth, close to Jo’s home. And it was only when he first saw what he had created that he started to realize how much it made his mind wander and travel. He has since built a whole library of maps and has worked on almost anything that has crossed his mind, from Vancouver to Tokyo, a small Channel island to Hong Kong, from Rome to New York. And he’s still as enthusiastic about each one of his art works as he was about the very first trials. And he has created maps for people who found him on art fairs or on Instagram: from a map of a family farm in Scotland to a map for the housewarming of a daughter in law in Amsterdam – he now takes inspiration from stories and places from customers and makes them come to life in a beautiful piece of art.