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The Matter of Maps

Lena MK

Writing in progress

From critical cartography to counter-mapping, the matter of maps has been increasingly analysed, questioned, and experimented with. Their definition, context and means of production, as well as their materiality have radically evolved in the last century, from hand-drawn “official” (institutional) maps to encompassing a wide variety of practices such as self-published digital visualisations or collective textile cartographic abstractions. Critical inquiries brought changes in 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. A wide range of examples demonstrating how each project pushes back to its local context is provided in This is not an Atlas: a global collection of counter-cartographies (Kollektif Orangotango+ 2018). Bringing these initiatives together into a publication also provides useful frame of reference, highlighting the collective change operating at a larger scale. As an art historian with a practice of cartography and data visualisation, my encounter with this book raised the question of how I could learn from it and work in this direction myself?

[re-write intro, remove restitution to directly tackle counter-cartographic approaches and narratives]

As counter-cartography tackles ways of thinking and ways of making, all the while considering the maker’s positionnality, it presents a good fit with the topic of restitution and reparation1. On Turtle Island (or North America), restitution is always deeply interlinked with the land (Engel 2023). In art history, restitution also emerges in the question of narratives, in the stories and the histories that are told on a subject matter. For example, in the case of public art, which was generally commissioned by those in power, it has tended to the over-representation of normativity (Vernet 2021). Monuments and art in public space often present a bias toward men artists 2, favouring settlers or those of European origins, a colonial and capitalistic vision of society, considering the land and people through the lens of power and control. However, especially in recent years, public art also began including artworks and artists who challenge these narratives (Alvarez Hernandez 2021). My engagement with public art comes from the work we do at Maison MONA, a cultural non-profit based in Tiohtià:ke · Montréal. Through research-action, artistic residencies and cultural outreach, we work at the crossroads between art and technology to the democratise and broaden access to art, heritage and culture in public spaces in the province of Québec. In a project tackling public art and its visibility in the digital space 3, my colleagues and I worked on a data set of artists who have at least one public artwork in the MONA database. The frame of our project led us to analyze the dataset with a focus including gender identity. 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. This became an opportunity to tell a new story, about the entry of womxn artists in the public art sphere.

Counter-mapping, as methodology and as posture, became a strategy to renew the imaginaries of public art, thwarting the dominant narratives in order to share a more diverse history of public art. This paper therefore aims to contribute to the contemporary mapping landscape from an art historical perspective with […] and counting, a research-creation project on public art by womxn in Tiohtià:ke · Montréal. It also strives to challenge how we think about and through maps, how we might “use” them and how they work through us.

Inscribing the elements of […] and counting into an academic narrative is an opportunity to expose the back-and-forth dynamic between research and creation, where theory serves as inspiration and practice provides fertile ground to further theory.

This article takes the reader on a spatial journey through the installation, following a slow backwards movement. It begins nested deep in the soft creases of the fur-covered surface of the map, in the heart of the material questions. Progressively zooming out, we slowly distinguish the shapes and objects that construct a new story of womxn and public art in Tiohtià:ke · Montréal.

Leaving its rugged edges, we enter the space of its installation and the temporality of its participatory activation.

Deep within the soft creases

As a researcher of mixed transnational origins who settled in Tiohtià:ke · Montréal, working with cartography on unceeded territory has heavy historical and contemporary implications. The western scientific, colonial and imperial uses of maps is strongly critiqued in critical, radical, and decolonial cartography, as documented in Martel and MK (2023). Counter-cartography, in aiming to reverse these power dynamics and produce more diverse epistemologies, can look to “indigenous cartography [as] inspiration for non-hegemonic and emancipatory practices.” (Halder and Michel 2018). Indigenous artists and writers have structured counter-mapping discourses using Indigenous epistemologies. By creating theoretical frameworks from personal, collective, and mythological stories, they reactivate the kinship networks that also shape ancestral laws, land management practices and modes of identity formation (Marcoux 2024).

Decolonial narratives and monuments can also provide relevant approaches to counter institutional practices. PeoPL (2018) by Laura Nsengiyumva is a reproduction of the Léopold II’s equestrian statue made of ice. The pedestal, placed upside-down above the sculpture, is fitted with incandescent lamps that slowly melt the sculpture during its exhibition at the Nuit Blanche 2018 in Brussels (Bisschop 2022, Yakoub 2021). On Monumental Silences (2018) by Ibrahim Mahama presents reinterpretations of a monument to the missionary-father De Deken, including a collective and participatory performance in which the public was invited to interact – mutilate, destroy, remodel – a clay reproduction of the monument (Bisschop 2022). Both artists used careful consideration to reflect the stakes of their narrative in the materials chosen to enact them.

In the theoretical sphere, new materialisms and authors such as Karen Barad argue that « matter matters: the material matters because it bears meaning » (Vitali Rosati, 2024, p. 62). Therefore considering that ideas, thoughts and concepts are expressed in a physical, material instance, the medium I chose for my map needed to effectively defy colonial mindsets about the territory. Instead of the virgin terra nullius symbolised by a blank sheet of paper, the bureaucratic medium, I thought that raw organic material (untreated/not industrially produced and transformed) could convey the living nature of the land. As I was researching this question, it happened to be the bi-annual shedding of my (late) dog, Saphira. Her fluffy and soft fur attracted people to the point I sometimes noticed them “discreetly” reaching to try to touch it as we cross 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 sourcing4. Far from disposing of the shedding, I often used to leave little bundles out and about for animals to pad their nests with. It is the fabric of homes, bringing insulation and comfort in both its origin and reuse in the wild (? non human; animal realm).

Thus I created my basemap by covering a white insulation panel, the structural base for the map, with the off-white shedding. From the originally rectangular shape of the panel – an unused byproduct of my partner’s work in construction –, I cut out the shape of the island of Tiohtià:ke · Montréal, choosing a natural border over the colonial government’s administrative demarcations. The rough edges of the hand-trimmed Styrofoam contrast with the rectangular, glossy or slick sheets of paper commonly used for maps. As an attempt to forgo the capitalist, extractivist and alienating urban network set by the automotive industry, I chose a reference grid formed by the open data on cycling paths. Using a projector, I superimposed the digital map and traced the routes with a light orange felt pen. To affix the shedding to the panel, I drew upon my drag experience: to make an artificial beard, one simply glues patches of hair to the intended area. Though the first bushes rarely seem convincing, persevering patiently usually leads to a satisfying result. I therefore proceeded to glue little balls of fur to the surface, following the pathways. Some areas are detailed enough to reveal the urban grid, while others are visually covered in off-white fur. In a western section of the island, the insulation panel remains visible as I ran out of shedding.

[re-write and/or better connect next paragraph]

In her essay Fibre Creatures, Furry Beasts: Queer Textile Crittercism, art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson provides an interesting lens on the use of organic materials in art practices:

Textile crittercism attends to work that takes critterly form, to practices that use animal and insect by-products, and to art that stages creatureliness (embracing touch and the body’s base necessities for survival) as an oppositional tactic in the face of masculinist demands to prioritise logic and rationality (Byan-Wilson 2024, 25)

In the case of Peruvian American artist Sarah Zapata, Bryan-Wilson highlights how her furry sculptures wield tactilty and pleasure as political tools, refuting the ‘hands-off’ protocols of art spectatorship (2024, 23). Using materials that cry out for touch nurtures a relational approach. It queers the field of possibilities and « connects the human and the non-human » (Bryan-Wilson 2024, 23) which, in a mapping context, can therefore (re-)connect us to the living nature of the represented land.

Tactile findings

As the fuzzy hair can’t quite be tamed, the surface of the map only evokes the built infrastructure. This fit well with my intent to offset the god’s eye view which, enhanced by an imperial paradigm and visual technologies, made the map a formidable instrument of power (Ramaswamy 2014). As an alternative approach, I was inspired by indigenous epistemologies of “tactile data visualisation” (O’Connor et al. 2023). Tactility allows for different interactions with cartography: the “viewer” is invited to physically interact with the map, going beyond the visual sphere to experience a sensory implication with the mapped territory. As textile artist and theorist Anni Albers reminds us, « [o]ur tactile experiences are elemental » (1974 [1965], 62). In this map, the haziness of surface decenters the visual process of knowledge-making. The serpentine paths are present throughout the map but invisible at a distance. As fingers gently parse the fur to find and follow the arteries, touch becomes the guiding sense through the interface.

Finding one’s way

~~~~

Now we slowly emerge from the fuzzy patches to wonder: where are we ?

ingold: wayfinding

Tim Ingold, in his book titled Lines: Brief history (2016 [2007]) distinguishes modalities of travel, and thus the relationship between the traveller and the land. On the one end, wayfaring

travel

To sum up so far: I have established a contrast between two modalities of travel, namely wayfaring and transport. Like the line that goes out for a walk, the path of the wayfarer wends hither and thither, and may even pause here and there before moving on. But it has no beginning or end While on the trail the wayfarer is always somewhere, yet every ‘somewhere’ is on the way to somewhere else. The inhabited world is a reticulate meshwork of such trails, which is continually being woven as life goes on along them.Transport, by contrast, is tied to specific locations. Every move serves the purpose of relocating persons and their effects, and is oriented to a specific destination. The traveller who departs from one location and arrives at another is, in between, nowhere at all. Taken together, the lines of transport form a network of point-to-point connections. In the colonial project of occupation, this network, once an undercurrent to life and constrained by its ways, becomes ascendant, spreading across the territory and overriding the tangled trails of inhabitants. (85)

these lines, drawn across the surface of the cartographic map, signify occupation, not habitation. They betoken as appropriation of the space surrounding the points that the lines connect or – if they are frontier lines that they enclose (87)

gestural trace, or the line that has gone out for a walk, has no business in the discipline of cartography. Far from becoming a part of the map, it is considered an excrescence that should be removed (Ingold 2000: 234). For the cartographic line is not the trace of a gesture, nor does the eye, in reading it, follow the line as it would follow a gesture.These lines are not traces but connectors (88)

« Occupant knowledge, in short, is upwardly integrated. And this finally brings us to the crux of the difference between these two knowledge systems, of habitation and occupation respectively. In the first, a way of knowing is itself a path of movement through the world: the wayfarer literally ‘knows as he goes’ (Ingold 2000: 229–30), along a line of travel. The second, by contrast, is founded upon a categorical distinction between the mechanics of movement and the formation of knowledge, or between locomotion and cognition. Whereas the former cuts from point to point across the world, the latter builds up, from the array of points and the materials collected therefrom, into an integrated assembly. » (Ingold, 2016, p. 92)

Going beyond vision makes space for tactile ways of knowing responding to Bruce Mau’s call « to explore, experiment, and invent new formats and combinations of sensory experience, new ways of telling stories. » (Mau 2018, 20). Multisensory design practices are also more inclusive, as they « [support] everyone’s opportunity to receive information, explore the world, and experience joy, wonder, and social connections, regardless of our sensory abilities. » (Lupton and Lipps 2018, 9)

Piercing narratives

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 can provoke physical reactions: sometimes even just on sight, they are associated with a feeling of them piercing skin and even causing bloodshed. I therefore decided to use needles to activate the location of each artwork by a woman on my map.

Using a chronological order materialises a narrative of how womxn artists progressively entered public space, emphasising their relation to each other. While exploring the chronological view of the data, where each dot is a public artwork in our dataset3, I noted several phases. First, the lonely outliers, sparsely

I also wanted to include the first cluster, between 1982 and 1987, where some of them were finally able to stand together

in sum, those that defied the odds in a public art sphere blatantly dominated by men

I therefore chose to begin the map with these 18 needles.

Timeline of gender repartition in public art (1950 - 2024)

Figure [tbc]: Timeline of artworks in MONA database, ordered by
À droite: Deux motifs de la galerie d’art ASCII, sans auteur·rice documenté·e, s.d.

I only realized the extent of the ritualistic dimension during its practice: 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, and also solved the questions of “how many needles should I place? When is this piece complete or when do I stop?”.

data, code, map

~~~~

?

~~ ~~

Story-making / story telling

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how we « use » maps

requires participation / exchange:

description of installation + participatory approach

~~~~~~ […] and couting became an installation focusing on the history of public art made by womxn. Its central component is a map of the Tiohtià:ke · Montréal, cut out from a white insulating panel made of extruded polystyrene a few centimeters thick. It is about 1.5 meters at its longest and half as wide, forming a crescent characteristic of the island’s topography. Its surface is covered in patches of white-beige dog hair. The patches fill the gaps between the pattern formed by the urban cycling paths, hand drawn with a light orange felt pen. Sticking out from the patches are acupuncture needles indicating the location of the first – 18 at the instantiation of the project – public artworks made by womxn. For its participatory activation, the map rests flat, propped up to a table’s height. It is accompanied by a computer and a second screen, displaying respectively the source code and a digital version of the map run on a localhost. Participants are invited to ~~

To find the location, they can use the other needles/artworks as references while also following the both tactile and visual topographical references of the cycling paths and the fur patches. The title updates the count as each participatory action enriches the map, progressively activating a new narrative on public art and its history 5. 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 map6.

The following are still to be activated, just as this history is yet to be made.

  1. This project originated during a doctoral seminar on restitution, repatriation and return in museum studies (Prof. Abigail E. Celis, Fall 2023, Université de Montréal) ↩

  2. The data from the MONA research project is further described in the acknowledgments, ↩

  3. Notebook documenting the data visualisation experiments: https://observablehq.com/@maison-mona/chronologie-et-genre?collection=@maison-mona/gender-analysis. ↩