Agora 02 - IDENTITY : BREAKING MAPS REDRAWING BORDERS

The identitarian construct of our societies and territories has been violently shaped by the idea of the border and the cartographic technologies that draw and convey it.

“From the economic import of European world maps of the 15th century to the racist introduction of redlining to American urban plans throughout the 20th century; to the evolution of those plans in zoning, real estate redefinitions of neighbourhoods, and displacement through gentrification, maps have been used to perpetuate power or to grow it. There has historically been a politics inherent to mapping: maps are drawn from very specific viewpoints and principles, and are typically literal visualizations of the worldviews of those in power.”
_{Historiographies, The Decolonial mapping toolkit, Patrick Jaojoco}

Operating by differentiation and alienation as social and political machines of control and domination, these planning tools, these ways of projecting are anchored in our education.
It is urgent to become aware of the agendas embedded in them.
How could maps be used to strengthen the knowledge of our complex and coercive world? How could these technologies be hijacked to serve a different set of values towards ecological, economical, political and social justice?
How could the relationships between maps and power be reclaimed to force a more democratic social evolution ? How could the mapping toolkit be flipped upside down? How could drawing and mapping be used to render visible suppressed realities?
How could the process of the making of the map be put in the hands of the colonized, the invisibilized, the enclosed and the exteriorised?
How could it decolonize our understanding of space and its representation?
What could going away from the hyper defined image of cartography today bring ?
How could we use this change to represent qualities of territories and space beyond the quantitative ?
How could we imagine mapping that would account for lived realities, struggles, perceptions, experiences ?

The Atelier Magazine is glad to welcome Léopold Lambert, Nitin Bathla, Bárbara Maçães Costa and Denise Bertschi to discuss these topics. 

Léopold Lambert is an architect, writer, and editor in chief of The Funambulist, a magazine that engages with the politics of space and bodies. Nitin Bathla is an architect, artist, researcher, and educator currently working on his PhD at ETH entitled Delhi without Borders focusing on investigating circular migration to Indian cities as an emerging phenomenon of extended urbanization. Bárbara Maçães Costa  architect, artist, researcher, and lecture doctoral candidate at EPFL organising a seminar on the subject of cartography, drawing, landscape theory and environmental aesthetics. Denise Bertschi is an artist-researcher and a doctoral candidate at EPFL in collaboration with HEAD–Genève, where she works at the intersection of artistic research and Swiss colonial history.



Zoom ID : 891 3623 4108