COUNTER-MAPPING
POWER RELATIONS
“The act of mapping is concerned with producing knowledge, which is projected and distributed on a map, so that people can use it. Visualizing, conceptualizing, recording, representing and graphically creating spaces are acts of mapping. However, a map is not an objective and neutral image of the world. As historian Brian Harley has noted, we are used to thinking of maps as exact and accurate representations of reality, when these representations carry errors, omissions, points of view, and values. Behind a map hides a set of power relations with specifications imposed by a particular individual, the market and/or the state bureaucracy.” [1]
Mapping itself is a political process, because behind the cartography, there are people who make and define this map and their choices of representations - whether territories, things or people - are linked to power relations and ideologies. As the Brazilian researcher André Mesquita points out, we are conditioned to believe that maps are “mirrors of the truth”, since the objective of these institutions linked to the interests of the state, military and political bourgeoisie is to serve surveillance and governance. In this way, it is possible to reaffirm these powers through ordination and territorial and border domination, through the exploitation of natural resources and the control of public spaces.
MAP AS TERRITORY BUILDER/DESTROYER
Political and power issues have always been so tied to cartography that, in many cases, information and borders that were on the maps and did not actually exist in the territory began to influence and define the space in order to adjust to what was included in the records. cartographic. In the same way, what was not on the map, despite existing, began to be unimportant and to disappear in the political field - we have as an example buildings and villages that were destroyed because cartography was “mirroring and forming the very reality that they intended”. represent".
“Weizman's statement about 'mirroring and forming reality' marks the condition that maps produce, and even precede, territory – whether in war or in our everyday life. Forming this reality implies distorting and erasing it. Maps involve presences and absences, they build knowledge about a territory in order to dominate it.” [1]
DECONSTRUCTING THE MAPS
“If the State uses cartography to occupy, destroy or control, why can't we subvert and use cartographic tools in favor of social struggles, valuing a collaborative and dialogic process of map production? Instead of just accepting the authority of imperial and military maps, why not make cartography a collective and community practice, capable of mapping invisible networks of power and systems of oppression to which we are all subject? Inverting the image of the official map itself and the interests of dominating the use of cartography are acts that reconfigure the articulations between political action and the possibility of imagining the world from below.” [1]
Cartography, from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th century, had an “aura” of infallible and immutable information, and it was believed that cartographic truth could only be obtained from systematic measurements. In the first half of the last century, the Dada movement began to explore the unconscious of the city, a theme that would later lead to the development of surrealist wanderings, lyricist drifts and situationist playful cities, giving rise, in the second half of the century, to the a cognitive cartography - psychogeography. Examples include Naked City: illustration de l'hypothèse des plaques tournantes , by the French philosopher Guy Debord (1957) and New Babylon by the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys (1963).
That said, in 1989, the English geographer John Brian Harley published his article Deconstructing Maps and, from there, an intense discussion was created among the theorists of the area, establishing a new period in cartography, which was later called as “post-representational cartography”. Harvey discusses the neutrality of maps that silence and omit factors as important as what is represented, and considers cartography from a relational perspective, as they portray numerous ongoing processes.
From that period on, maps also began to serve as instruments for the construction of counter-narratives and counter-maps, which propose alternative ways of thinking, feeling and inhabiting the world. These, no longer subordinated to restricted groups to be conceived, begin to dispute representations of space with forms of power, a kind of “cartographies combat”. There are several worlds shaped in different ways according to the variations of existing groups and individuals, so these worlds can also be cartographically represented in different ways and not only by the State and the elites.
“If the map is a specific set of power/knowledge claims, then not only the state and elites, but the rest of us can equally make equally powerful and contested claims. (CRAMPTON, 2010, p. 41)” [3]
COUNTER-MAPPING
“These practices were named by artist, media theorist and activist Brian Holmes, as 'countercartographies', in light of Foucault's thinking on conduct and counter-conduct: 'Critical and dissident cartographies emerge against the background of dominant mapping technology. They appear as counter-conducts in the sense given by Michel Foucault' (HOLMES, 2006, p. 25, our translation).” [two]
Countercartography, therefore, is the practice of dissent, of deconstruction and reconstruction that critically reappropriate the map and oppose the consensus of the traditional model dictated by specific and privileged groups. It reveals, highlights, criticizes and transforms aspects, contradictions and invisibilities of contemporary reality. It too, like montage and rhizome , is beyond the goal of creating a finished image.
“As I tried to affirm, a counter-cartography is less a visual object, which accumulates information, and more an opportunity to go beyond the representation of traditional maps to generate dialogues and discoveries, enhancing their narratives together with interventions in public spaces. His practice is both a critique of how maps work and a means of generating new modalities of research, collaboration, and organization.” [1]
COUNTER-MAPPING PRACTICES
Since cartography began to be explored by contemporary artists, different types of actions have been applied to maps: tearing, folding, perforating, tearing, burning, dissecting, cutting, gluing, grouping, rearranging, reassembling and other infinite experiments. These cartographic practices can be called counter-cartographies when, as explained earlier, the question arises of what cartography is, for whom and why it is done. Furthermore, it points to existences and potentialities not previously considered and, through unusual articulations, produces spatializations that, both on the map and in physical space, are beyond the consensus of political, economic, social and spatial models.
Another important aspect for the development of these practices is that, from the 20th century onwards, in a world increasingly represented by digital mapping interfaces, moving and locating oneself in space and time were increasingly mediated by media. locative devices, that is, smartphones, smartwatches or devices that contain GPS (Global Positioning System). According to the architects Cristina Akemi and David Sperling, we have become “geo-localized” subjects and contemporary spatialities and territorialities have entered the era of “hyper-geolocalization”. These locative media have been gaining increasing power in the field of contemporary art, both to unveil the operating logics of these devices and of hegemonic cartographies, and to carry out, based on the criticism of cartographic devices, new aesthetic experimentation and political actions.
“Acting in the interstices of the operating logics of these systems, they indicate that there is an opening for other possibilities of action to be explored in the sense of denaturalizing both the normativities that surround locative media and the modes of perception they modulate." [2]
Some lines of counter-mapping practices were raised by David Sperling in order to contribute to the visualization of common fields of experimentation:
TRAGETORIES-NARRATIVES
They presuppose the body involved and in displacement through space. Everyday experience and unforeseen events, decisions and contingencies, rules and deviations are traced by the body itself in the space in action. The trajectories-narratives are of the order of micro spaces, of frictions between bodies, of discoveries.
“A whole lineage of urban walkers or artists from the wilderness can be included here, the narratives that go back to the flanéur , to Dadaist visits and surrealist wanderings, and situationist psychogeographies.” [3]
VISUAL FILES
They become cartographies as they document, analyze, organize and collect information. Considering a world with excess information, there is a procedure for extracting quality visual files, among the existing quantity, and this can be done by approximation, association and/or montages.
“This line goes back to Georges Perec and the “ Attempt to deplete a Parisian place ” as well as to the photographic works of Bernd and Hilla Becher ( Pitheads , 1974, among others), Edward Ruscha (E very Building on the Sunset Strip , 1966 ) and the Boyle family ( Journey to the Surface of the Earth , 1970).” [3]
DIAGRAM GRAPHS
They shape and give visibility to processes and interrelationships of an abstract nature or that have been made invisible. It unveils connections between agents and powers, states and potencies, present and becoming, making them explicit through the drawing of abstract lines or similar contours.
“they select fields of action and design projections of configurations of (always) partial totalities, in movement, in a process of (dis)articulation. (...) Here they can be identified work Öyvind Fahlström (WorldMap, 1972) and Aliguiero Boetti (Mappa, 1979-85), as Mark Lombardi (among others, George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens 1979-90 , 1999), and Bureau d'Études ( Wartime Chronicles , 2001), such as the practices of Iconoclasts ( Talleres de Mapeo Collectivo , 2006) and Counter-Cartographie Collective ( Disorientation Guide , 2006)” [3]
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES
MESQUITA, Andrew. Countercartography and the Experience of Mapping Power . Escola da Cidade, 2017. Available at: https://ct.escoladacidade.edu.br/contracondutas/editorias/mapas-imagens-e-intervencoes-praticas-de-oposicao/contracartografia-ea-experiencia-de-mapear-o -power/. Accessed: Oct. 2021.
KIMINAMI, CAG; SPERLING, DM Artistic counter-cartographic practices and the destabilization of maps . Oculum Essays, v. 17, e204492, 2020.
SPERLING, David M. You Are (Not) Here : Convergences in the Expanded Field of Cartographic Practices. Indiscipline, [S. l.], v. 2, no. 2, p. 77–92, 2016. Available at: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/indisciplinary/article/view/32766. Accessed on: 9 Nov. 2021.
MESQUITA, Andrew. Dissident Maps : Propositions About a World in Crisis (1960-2010). Thesis (Master in Social History) – Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences, University of São Paulo. Sao Paulo, p. 284. 2013.
SPERLING, David M. Countercartographies as aesthetic actions and political redesigns . Youtube, 2017. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOQi-Z8rx_8. Accessed in: Oct. 2021.
CARERI, Francesco. Walkscapes : walking as an aesthetic practice. São Paulo: G. Gili, 2013.