Counter-Mapping as an Analytical Practice
Maps are powerful tools to represent and codify spatial and social relations between places, objects, persons and stories. Exploring different historical practices of spatial representation, participants have reflected on the design choices cartographers of different cultures make in mapping their world. Exercises of “counter-mapping”––representing that which is not commonly mapped––sharpens the attention to that which did not make it onto the conventional map.
Lea van der Weide: Horse-Mapping and Stick-Charting
Lea van der Weide revisits a familiar landscape through the animal spatial sensory, expressed in the manner of a Marshallese stick chart from the nineteenth century. Mapping a horse ride through the olfactory perception of a horse, she offers an alternative cartography of a landscape otherwise navigated with the help of Google maps. Re-mapping this environment with an attention to soil textures, botanic and scents––horses avoid the smell of pigpens, for example––and using physical objects to represent spatial relations, van der Weide asks what features of the landscape remain unseen by the geographies drawn up by humans of the digital age.
Jenny Nüesch: A Travel Diary of Pacific History
Over the course of one semester, Jenny Nüesch has mapped her intellectual journey across Pacific History by tracing trans-Oceanic migrations, kinship connections and (post-)colonial power relations. Like any map, hers puts relative accents on sites that matter in her personal exploration of Pacific pasts.
Foregrounding the island of Rapa Nui, Jenny reorganizes space according to the historical narratives that emerged from her research into the local experience of a single island in the vast ocean––and it expresses the role of personal experience in the imagination of time and space.
