The Word for World exhibition is on view from Friday 10 October 2025 to Saturday 6 December 2025 at the Architectural Association in the AA Gallery, 36 Bedford Square, WC1B 3ES.
The Word for World book by Ursula K Le Guin is available for pre-order.
When Ursula K Le Guin was writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World presents a selection of these images by the celebrated author, many of which have never been exhibited before, to consider how her imaginary worlds enable us to re-envision our own.
Le Guin’s maps offer journeys of consciousness beyond conventional cartography, from the archipelagos of Earthsea to the talismanic maps of Always Coming Home. Rather than remaining within known terrain, they open up paradigms of knowledge, exemplified by the map’s edges and how a map is read, made and remade together.
The exhibition coincides with the release of The Word for World, a book co-published by Spiral House (a new imprint of Silver Press) and AA Publications. The book brings Le Guin’s maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and how they are represented and imagined. Edited by So Mayer and Sarah Shin with contributions from Federico Campagna, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Daniel Heath Justice, Bhanu Kapil, Canisia Lubrin, Una McCormack, David Naimon, Nisha Ramayya, Shoshone Collective, Standard Deviation and Marilyn Strathern.
Please join us on 10 October to launch the book and open the exhibition – tickets are free and available to book:
The Word for World book launch
With Federico Campagna, Bhanu Kapil, Una McCormack, Nisha Ramayya, Marilyn Strathern and the editors So Mayer and Sarah Shin
AA Lecture Hall, 36 Bedford Square
Friday 10 October 2025, 4-6pm
The Word for World exhibition opening
AA Gallery, 36 Bedford Square
Friday 10 October 2025, from 6pm
More events will be announced soon!
“This book and accompanying exhibition at the Architectural Association both borrow their title, The Word for World, from Le Guin’s novella. They begin from where her fable ends: in a world in which a new kind of singing and a new kind of death have already come into being. Through centuries of epistemic violence and colonial capitalism, ours is a time so separated from the dream that we remain asleep in the nightmare of reason. If the Athshean word for world is forest, what other words could ours be?
When Le Guin started writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. Space and distance – how to travel across the galaxy, for instance – appear as themes across her work, but she expands modern, Westernised ideas about representation and reality: a dream or a story, too, can be a map. From a young age, Le Guin’s imagination was seeded by the books she read in her father, influential anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber’s library – ranging from mythologies from around the world, to Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, to French classics and British modernists – while Napa Valley, where the Le Guin family spent their summers, inspired the ur-place, where space becomes time, in Always Coming Home (1985).
The Word for World exhibition’s dream-like design by Standard Deviation draws from Le Guin’s holistic approach to narrative and place, especially the fractal notion from The Dispossessed (1974) that ‘to be part is to be whole’. Each map is a world in itself, and as part of a bigger whole: the exhibition interprets the forest, valley, archipelago, mountain, and house depicted in the maps to create an otherworldly place in itself.
Similarly, this book brings together contributions from a variety of perspectives and practices to respond to Le Guin’s maps, weaving together many words for worlds. Many kinds of writing – including personal essays, stories, interviews, poems and recipes – meditate on the shared ability of maps and language to recall what has been and to call into being.” – So Mayer and Sarah Shin, ‘Pandora Can't Read the Map’, Introduction to The Word for World
“Beginning from thinking of myth as a multidimensional map, we wanted to create a dream-like space, emphasising nature, metamorphosis and fluidity. In the exhibition design, our challenge was to translate into three dimensions our interpretation of the metaphysics and fractality of Le Guin’s worlds – and her insistence on uncertainty, non-euclideanism and non-linear side trips and reversals out of the one-way trip of Westernised modernity. . . In the blue forest of the exhibition, Le Guin’s maps combine with leaves in cyanotype prints – the first form of architectural prints. The maps as blueprints are seeds of future worlds, while pebbles are microcosmic representations of mountains. Le Guin’s original images form archipelagic clusters, while the talismanic map of the valley – the ur-place of myth and memory – overlooks the show. A talismanic map is symbolic, powerful – locating one where one is in the landscape of time, which is ‘not an arrow, nor a river, but a house, the house he lives in. One may go from room to room, and come back; to go outside, all you have to do is open the door.’” – Standard Deviation