The Matter of Maps
Lena MK
Notes for the oral presentation at ICC2025.
slides
will be published as an article (writing in progress) for Intermédialités
Presentation
Intro
- thank you , intro
- PhD candidate in art history and computer science at Université de Montréal
- doctoral research funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
- founder and technical director of Maison MONA
- cultural non–profit aiming to make art more accessible in the province of Québec
Plan
- Today, i will be presenting a participatory installation titled […] and counting. It’s main element is a map of public art made by wom·x·n in Tiohtià:ke · Montréal
- I’ll begin by situating both the theoretical and territorial contexts of my work
- then we will delve into more details of the research-creation process
- by which I mean a type of practice-based research
- where theory serves as inspiration for creation
- and practice provides fertile ground to further theory
I :heart: Maps
Maps have changed radically, from the historical maps that first caught my interest ten years ago, to current contemporary and artistic practices. Critical inquiries especially brought changes into cartographic practices by questioning and challenging
- what and who are or aren’t part of a map
- why and how they are represented
- in addition to who participates when and how in the process of map-making.
As an art historian and a programmer, I make maps and data visualisations
- when I read about Counter-cartography and the political practices of mapping back (in this amazing publication)
- I wondered how I can apply these ways of thinking and ways of making in my own research, in the field of public art
Public art
Because they were generally commissioned by those in power, monuments and art in public space demonstrate many biases
such as
- presenting a predominance of men artists,
- or favouring a colonial and capitalistic vision of society
However, especially in recent years, we can see more and more artworks and artists who challenge these narratives
Both these examples are local btw
My engagement with public art comes from the work we do at Maison MONA. Through cultural outreach, artistic residencies and research projects, we work at the crossroads between art and technology to the democratise access to art, heritage and culture in public space.
- In a project tackling public art’s visibility in the digital space , my colleagues and I worked on a data set of artists who have at least one public artwork in our database. The frame of our project led us to analyze the dataset with a focus including gender identity.
- [timeline]
- After years of experiencing the gender gap while doing research or preparing cultural outreach programs, it was the first time we could take a quantitative insight to analyse the presence of womxn creating in the public art context.
I also saw an opportunity to tell a new story, about the entry of womxn artists in the public sphere.
Counter-mapping, as a methodology, became a strategy to set aside the dominant narrative in order to share a more diverse history of public art. It was also a posture
Turtle island
crucial in regards to my own positionnality on Turtle Island
- As a researcher of mixed transnational origins who settled in Tiohtià:ke · Montréal
- also right now, as we are currently on unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples
- cartography on and of unceded territory must be considered with its substantial historical and contemporary implications
In short, I didn’t want to just make a « map ».
I was eager to challenge how we think about maps, how we “use” them and how they work through us.
– 8min –
So what should this map look like, what shall it be made of?
Material narratives
I drew inspiration from an essay by Allison Bischop presenting two artists whose practice pursues the decolonisation of public space in Belgium.
- Both artists found a way to reflect the stakes of their narrative in the materials chosen to enact them
- By enacting them in public, or even with the public, they provide a sort of cleansing or healing ritual, creating a new shared history and showing us a way forward.
Matter matters
In the theoretical sphere, these ideas relate to new materialisms and authors such as Karen Barad, arguing that « matter matters: the material matters because it bears meaning » (Vitali Rosati, 2024, p. 62).
Considering that ideas, thoughts and concepts are expressed in a physical, material instance
- my map’s medium needed to effectively defy colonial mindsets about the territory
- instead of the virgin terra nullius
- one could associate with a blank sheet of paper, the bureaucratic medium
- i looked for a raw, organic material
- by blurring the distinction between the animate and the inanimate
- perhaps i could convey the living nature of the land
As I was researching this question, it happened to be the bi-annual shedding of my dog, Saphira.
Saphira
- Her fluffy and soft fur was like a tactile magnet
- I often noticed people, “discreetly” reaching their hand out, trying to touch it as we crossed paths on the street.
- This intuitive touch was exactly what I was aiming for, and her shedding seemed an excellent way to use an organic material whilst preserving any waste, destruction or loss of life in its sourcing.
Thus I created my basemap
Basemap
- by covering a upcycled white insulation panel with the shedding
- I cut out the shape of the island
- choosing a natural border over the colonial government’s administrative demarcations.
- as reference grid, I set automotive habits aside in favour to cycling paths.
Overview
- Some areas are detailed enough to reveal the urban grid
- while others are visually covered in off-white fur
- Part of the panel remains visible on the western section of the island, as I ran out of shedding.
Yet the fuzzy hair can’t quite be tamed, and thus the surface of the map only evokes the built infrastructure.
Tactile data viz
- Focusing on the indigenous epistemologies of “tactile data visualisation”
- allowed me to offset the all-knowing god’s eye view
- Instead, tactility creates a sensory experience, where one physically interacts with the map
- our senses are enhanced by the use of an organic material
- especially one that sparks our curiosity
- in museums, for example, art historian Julia Bryan Wilson argues that the use of organic matter,
- which she affectionately nicknames critters and furry beasts
- “combat the normal ‘hands-off’ protocols of art spectatorship”
– 4min – (no slide change)
Quite on the contrary to the hands-off paradigm,
- a sensory and tactile interaction is central to this proposal
- as the haziness of the surface decenters our visual habits
- the paths are hard to see.
- our fingers must gently parse the fur to find and follow the arteries
- touch becomes the guiding sense through the interface of the map
Sensory experience
Thinking about tactile care practices,
I found that using acupuncture needles could provide a form of ritual.
- Acupuncture is an alternative medicine practice that defies western scientific knowledges.
- Following ancient asian traditions, needles are used to stimulate selected locations of the body.
- Acupuncture needles, and needles in general, can provoke physical reactions
- sometimes even just on sight, they are associated with the sensory experience of piercing skin and even bloodshed.
I therefore decided to use needles to activate the location of each artwork by a woman on my map.
- Following a chronological order materialised a narrative of how womxn artists progressively entered public space
- and it emphasised their relation to each other.
But how many should I place?
Timeline highlight
Going back to the chronological view
- I noticed a subgroup: the first 18.
- Those that defied the odds in a public art sphere blatantly dominated by men
- [slide]
- I also made sure to include the first cluster, between 1982 and 1987, where some of them were finally able to stand together
- [slide]
- This first subgroup became even more obvious in the embroidered timeline I later made
I therefore chose to begin the map with these 18 needles.
[Screen and map view]
As you can see from this preliminary picture,
- I was mapping the data using a script on my laptop
- then visually followed the cycling paths to find the artwork’s location
- between every needle, i « upped » the count, updating the title that was generated on the digital map
in a minimal, almost « bare » computing approach
- I did not go beyond the basic UI/UX
- instead, I wanted to take the time to search for the each new dot as it appeared on the screen
- accessing the artwork details through the browser console to learn about it
- and foraging around the fur patches to find my way
Rituals
It was only while I was doing it, that I realised how ritualistic it felt
- carefully placing a needle for each artwork onto the map
- I felt an agency both upon the history and the geography of public art made by womxn
- It seemed almost necessary to share this feeling with others
Participatory activation
To share this experience, I created an ongoing activation process.
There you can see
- the map propped up to a table’s height
- is accompanied by a computer and a second screen, displaying respectively the source code and a digital version of the map
- Participants are invited to
- add “to the count” in the code,
- search for the new artwork that appeared on the digital map,
- and place a new needle on the equivalent location of the physical map.
The participatory process also became a way to reveal my methods:
- I use data and write code to create digital visualisations and maps.
- Exhibiting the code and the digital map reinstates this algorithmic approach
- even when the “end result” is a physical map.
Conclusion?
The map currently states 28 and counting.
- The following are still to be activated, just as this history is yet to be made.
- I wish we could have continued at ICC2025, but I couldn’t find a solution to the transport constraints
- Perhaps these constraints are another way to anchor the map to the territory, as it simply can’t go as far from it as we do
In closing, I hope to have contributed some thoughts on counter-mapping through situated, material and sensory interfaces to this exciting conference.
The scripts, data visualisation and some documentation are available online. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any follow up questions, I’m especially welcoming feedback as I am planning a publication on the matter.
Thank you very much!
Possible questions
- couldn’t bring the map, aerial transport was too complicated with the delicate placement of the needles
- what’s the current count?
- how did you make the texture? drag → making a beard
- orientation? montreal north is 57° off the cardinal north
- when are the participatory activations? when I find a local opportunity. So far, there was one last Spring at my university.
Acknowledgements
This proposal is an extension of the research project Towards a digital commons of public art (funded by the Canada Arts Council) lead by at Maison MONA, a cultural non-profit based in Tiohtià:ke · Montréal. In this pilot project tackling public art and its visibility in the digital space, we worked on the identification and the referencing of public art artists active in Québec and who have at least one artwork in the MONA database. This dataset therefore contains 1528 artworks, described with properties such as title, artiste, production date, and geolocation. We intially had very little previous data on the 781 artists that produced these artwork. During the project, we identified artists who are yet to be added to Wikidata, and chose our participants amonst them based on EDI criteria, favoring womxn, BIPOC artists and artists who have an artwork outside of the cultural metropolis of Tiohtià:ke · Montréal. For the artists’ gender identity, we researched their mediatic gender identity, using available biographies from galleries and their personal websites. Participating artists were then contacted and could choose which information they wanted to make public, including their gender identity, while for the rest we used the available mediatic identity in Fall 2023. The public artworks in our database are dated between 1750 (even though it was only moved much later to its current location) and 2022, and most were produced between 1960 and 2022. Geographically speaking, they are on the territory commonly called the province of Québec, though most are located on the island of Tiohtià:ke · Montréal.
References
(to be completed)
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- Alvarez Hernandez, « Le monument dans un champ élargi : les pratiques performatives de Giorgia Volpe, Claudia Bernal et Constanza Camelo Suarez », Espace art actuel, dossier thématique « Sortir/Come out », Laurent Vernet (rédacteur invité), no 127, hiver 2021, p. 14-21. https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/espace/2021-n127-espace05876/95142ac/
- Bisschop, Allisson. 2022. ‘La force de l’art actuel face à la statuaire coloniale : les artistes et la question de la décolonisation de l’espace public en Belgique – Journal NaKaN’. 2022. https://nakanjournal.com/la-force-de-lart-actuel-face-a-la-statuaire-coloniale-les-artistes-et-la-question-de-la-decolonisation-de-lespace-public-en-belgique/.
- Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2024. ‘Fibers, Creatures, Furry Beasts: Queer Textile Crittercism’. In Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, edited by Lotte Johnson, Amanda Pinatih, Wells Fray-Smith, Barbican Art Gallery, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Munich London New York: Prestel.
- ‘Call for Papers – No.47 « Counter-Mapping / Contre-Cartographier » – Intermédialités’. n.d. Accessed 1 February 2025. http://intermedialites.com/en/2738-2/.
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