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FIFTH DRAFT

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America invertida - Joaquin Torres

CARTOGRAPHIES OF INVISIBILITY

Format: An analytical essay exploring theoretical, historical and critical approaches to counter.cartographies.

Key Topics: Counter cartographies, collaborative practices, Community mapping, crowdsourcing, re-publishing maps and cartographies, map visual language, diagrams

I. Introduction

Background

FROM COLONIALISM TO TECH-REPRESENTATIONS

Cartographies have broadly been understood as an instrument of power and domination. They define the territory, draw its borders and resources and consolidate the power of economic blocks. Societies have been oppressed by maps converting them in victims of a representation that define how they have to live. Maps have frequently been related to technical and reliable knowledge, realities represented in cartographies are mainly considered true, but the scientific objectivity of the maps should be questioned, as well as their intentions. They appear to be supposedly neutral to hide their real interests (Mesquita, 2016).

Maps have had a crucial role in the history of colonialism. They have been used to order and dominate the colonizers over the colonized. Furthermore, they are considered an institutionalised practice that implied legitimisation of territories. Indigenous communities developed their own cartographies to put themselves in the maps and to defend their lands and rights. More indigenous territory has been claimed by maps than by guns. (Nietschmann, 1995). These communities started to reverse maps representation visualising their resistance and claims. Indigenous cartography was an important inspiration tool for non-hegemonic worldviews and emancipatory practices.

This critical approach to cartographies, deconstructing traditional maps and diagrams have been explored by artist, architects, designers and activist in the post-colonial era. In 1943, “America Invertida” from Joaquin Torres, revindicated under the slogan “The south is our north”, the intention of challenging the conventionalism in map-making. Since then, alternative cartographies have been a huge area of exploration as socio-political communication tools for artist like Öyvind Fahlström who represented geopolitical tensions of the Cold War and changes of capitalism or Mark Lombardi who visualised global political and economic networks. In the ’80s Nancy Peluso introduced a specific terminology for community mapping: “Counter- cartographies” to explore how maps could be used by communities to represent themselves and stake claims to resources.

When internet globalization exploded worldwide a new range of possibilities opened up with digital communication, which has played an essential role in the development of counter cartographies and the process of collaborative making, collection of data and representation. The Internet has also generated new formats of online claims like data activism (Dataviz activism - Market café magazine) or Hashtag protests (#Metoo). This digital era also brings abundant tools that allow map-making more accessible to people and give more possibilities for cartographic representation. Nevertheless, digital tools also imply restriction of representation when working with visual and graphic language like algorithm oppression (Ramón Amaro), western supremacy in digital representation and default hierarchical structures in visual diagramming. Therefore, we need to have a critical approach when creating a visual representation in the digital era.

Precisely because maps are powerful tools to communicate, It is necessary to keep questioning and reinterpreting them to make sure they are still useful, and always rethink which one is the best representation for societies. Radical cartographies are necessary tools to fill information gaps and to put vulnerable communities in maps and data sets. There is a need for developing “science with people” rather than for people, specially in those fields characterised by “ irreducible uncertainties and ethical complexities ( Funtowicz & Ravetz 1994).

Statement

Diagrams, cartographies and maps can be transformed into socio-political communication tools which empower communities and give visibility to their common interests, revealing invisible realities and making the reader raise awareness about social crisis. This mechanism challenge the traditional storytelling of cartographies becoming a collaborative design instrument that spread knowledge through alternative map-making processes.

II. Body of thesis

CHAPTER 1: ANATOMY OF COUNTER CARTOGRAPHIES: Analytical reflection of elements, protocols and communicative strategies behind them.

• POINT A: The development of counter-mapping does not follow the traditional in the elaboration of maps. It develops its own codes creating experimental elements that manage to reach reader as a unique and attractive document, the rule is there are no rules.
  • The necessity to create pictographic codes that challenge conventionalism: Filling the traditional gaps in representation. Pictographic Grammar (Bureau d’Études- Non-visual conventions), Isotypes (Otto Neurath - Popularised information). 
  • Deconstructing the world map: Speculations with cartographic projections. Lewis Carroll Anti-Mercator Poem and Empty Map, Surrealist World Map 1929.
  • Inaccuracies: They are not technical maps. Alfred Korzybsky: “The map is not the territory” the language create a map used by people to represent the reality that is perceived.
• POINT B: A radical representation is a decomposition of complexities and a rearrangement of these at different levels of information that allow the reader to have different interpretations and understandings based on the type of reading that is performed (Micro / Macro readings).
  • Multilayer cartographies, levels of information. Overlapping. Designing graphic interpretation - Johanna Drucker.
  • Density maps. The compactness of information (No endless zoom-in).
  • Freedom of reading: Where is the starting point?. Jan Tschichold: “As a rule, we no longer read quietly line by line but glance quickly over the whole, and only if our interests are awakened do the study in detail”.
• POINT C: Radical cartographies are maps converted into advertising elements in which attention calls and references to the reader are made in a direct and obvious way. The cartographies are not intended for a technical and specialized public but understood as elements that propagate among all types of communities
  • Slogans/ Call for action: Cartographies as advertising.
  • Making maps attractive (aesthetic objects - Map art). Mark Lombardi, Öyvind Fahlström. 
  • Identity mirror. Communities feel identifies and represented with design elements. Iconoclasistas - Who owns the land?

CHAPTER 2: THE POWER OF COLLABORATIVE MAPPING: Crowdsourcing practices as a technique to build democratic cartographies.

• POINT A: Crowdsourced processes allow people being part of the elaboration of democratic datasets based on their own claims and realities and not in burocratic and political protocols.
  • Why to contribute: Idealism or local need?. James Surowiecki - Wisdom of crowds.
  • Unavailability of information: Filling data gaps. The supremacy of western data. Missing maps platform. Bourj Al Shamali's maps (organisation that don’t share the maps with the citizens. Google maps blurry areas. Data borders.
  • Availability of use of GIS - PPGIS ( Public Participation GIS). OSM (Open Street Map).
• POINT B: The process of community mapping is a mechanism to create communities around a common interest having inclusion, transparency and empowerment values as connections among participants.
  • Create local communities through maps: Parish mapping (more 1000 communities in UK linked to maps); The Green Map System (a global eco-cultural movement energised by local knowledge, action and responsibility).
  • Mapathon - session for collective mapping and community making online.
• POINT C: The production of counter cartographies is not limited to experts but it expands to the rest of the people willing to contribute, you can be an occasional cartographer.
  • Workshop as laboratory: Iconoclasistas, A new social cartography in the Amazon.
  • Mapping for Human rights: Amnesty international open letter how to map for Human rights
  • Manuals for community mapping (DIY): Manual for collective mapping - Iconoclasistas; Making maps: A visual guide to Map Design for GIS - John Krygier and Denis Wood. Illustrated guide for Ballon mapping

CHAPTER 3: SHARING RADICAL MAPS WITH PEOPLE, GIVING THEIR KNOWLEDGE BACK! (Post digital strategies for re-publishing cartographies.)

• Ambitions and motivations of publishing counter-maps.
  • Political pressure. Mapping sexual harassment in Egypt.
  • Calls for action / create a social movement. Community gardens maps NYC.
  • Didactic. Protest map, Cartoon and propaganda.
  • Critique. Uneven digital geographies project.
• Post-digital mediums to spread cartographic knowledge.
  • Make it part of the city: Mural Anti eviction map, Knitted Flood Wall.
  • Experimental narratives: Lize Mogel - Performing infrastructure, Political poetic session - Anti eviction maps.
  • Self-printing diagrams: Political action maps in Germany.
• Radical Atlas: the importance of collection in maps (Interconnections across space and time).
  • Unfinished collection, ongoing publication.
  • Some Collections of maps: Ej Atlas, An Atlas of radical cartography, Anti-Eviction Atlas, This is not an Atlas
• Open access, a handy publication.
  • Creative Commons license. Reappropriation, reproduction and redefinition of maps.
  • Streaming cartographic publications. Always available, always updated. Mapping safe passages project.
  • Anti-counter cartographies: the other side of open access. When companies appropriate collective mapping processes to have profit.

III. Conclusion

Summarize the main points.
Make a strong/ memorable final statement: For centuries cartographies had been defined by state and domination and now the reflect individuals’ voices. Thanks to technology and collaborative tools this process is currently accessible to many more people and practised to fight for the defence of people's rights.