doc

The Matter of Maps

Lena MK, version submitted for peer review on September 2nd

About the article

Synopsis

This article recounts and analyses the research-creation process that led to the participatory mapping installation titled […] and counting (2024) in the light of its approach to counter-cartography. The installation space welcomes participants to learn about and contribute to a map about the entry of womxn artists in the public art sphere of Tiohtià:ke · Montréal. Data and algorithms cross with queer textiles practices to embody new and more diverse narratives. Through these situated and sensory interfaces of the map, meaning is embedded into materiality and touch becomes the motor for cartographic interaction as well as knowledge production.

Résumé

Cet article relate et analyse les étapes de la recherche-création qui ont mené à l’installation de cartographie participative intitulée […] and counting (2024), à la lumière de son approche de la contre-cartographie. Cette installation invite son public à apprendre et à participer à une carte au sujet de l’entrée des femme·x·s artistes dans l’espace public à Tiohtià:ke · Montréal. Données et algorithmes se mêlent à des pratiques textiles queer pour produire de nouveaux récits de la diveristé. À travers les interfaces sensorielles et situées de la carte, la matérialité devient porteuse de sens et la tactilité guide les interactions cartographiques ainsi que la production de connaissances.

Biographical note

Lena MK is a research-creation doctoral candidate in art history and computer science at Université de Montréal. Her doctoral research, at the crossroads of textility and algorithmics, experiments with the physicalisation of cultural data as a new form of access to collections. Passionate about cultural outreach and mediation, Lena has developed a specialisation in data visualisation and cartography as methods to shape and share situated narratives. As founder and technical director of Maison MONA, she creates, develops and maintain projects aiming to democratise access to art and culture in public spaces in Québec.

Content

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 I began my PhD program in research-creation1, I wanted to experiment with counter-cartography, especially how it tackles ways of thinking and ways of making, all the while considering the maker’s positionnality.

As an art historian with a practice of cartography and data visualisation, counter-cartographic approaches are particularly relevant to tackle overlooked narratives. In the case of public art, as it has long been commissioned by those in power, it tends to the over-representation of normativity (Vernet 2021). Monuments and art in public space present many bias, such as toward a dominance of 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 (Walsh et al. 2020, 8-9; Alvarez Hernandez 2019, 47) . 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. Inscribing the elements of […] and counting into an academic narrative presents an opportunity to further the back-and-forth dynamic between research and creation. While theory serves as inspiration, practice provides fertile ground to further theory. Following Miriam Suchet’s advice in Indiscipline!, when considering the role and impact of research-creation, this article documents my public art experiment to « allow others to see the transformations that alter [my] ways of thinking » (Suchet 2016, 69).

My writing 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. Progressively zooming out, one can progressively distinguish the shapes and objects that construct a new story of womxn and public art on the island of Tiohtià:ke · Montréal. Leaving its rugged edges, we enter the space of its installation and the temporality of its participatory activation. Each transition also follows a sensory crescendo to reverberate the depth of the proposed tactile experience. It begins with the internal perception of being immersed in the material. Moving outwards slowly exposes layers of visual and spatial awareness. Finally, active participation mobilises the agency of touch and its potentially sharp impact on the collaborative building of a new narrative. By sharing this experience, I strive to challenge how we think about and through maps, how we might “use” them and how they work through us 4.

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 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 sourcing 5. 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.

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.

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. Furthermore, the fuzzy fibre offsets the god’s eye view and the visual process of knowledge-making. The formidable instrument of power, usually enhanced by an imperial paradigm and visual technologies (Ramaswamy 2014), turns to fluff.

Tactile findings

As we slowly emerge from the fuzzy patches, we might wonder: where am I ? In Lines: Brief history (Ingold 2016 [2007]), Tim Ingold analyses maps by considering considering their relationships with both the traveller and the land. The anthropologist highlights two knowledge systems of habitation and occupation, opposing wayfaring and travel as ways of moving within the land. On the one end of the spectrum, paths across the land are shaped by the its inhabitants. Tangled trails follow the path of the wayfarer. They have no beginning nor end, as they are continually woven into a reticulate meshwork by the ways of life (Ingold 2016, 85). On the other end, in the colonial project of occupation, travel and transport form a network of connections between select locations. « The traveller who departs from one location and arrives at another is, in between, nowhere at all. » (Ingold 2016, 85). Looking at maps, these antagonistic modalities of travel can be distinguished by the shape of their lines : wayfarers draw fluid streaks that compose a sketch. In the case of destination-oriented transport, the line become jerky. It jolts on the surface, fragments into a series of connected dots to form a route-plan. In terms of narrative, pre-composed plots replace the storytelling that accompanies the hand-drawn sketch (Ingold 2016, 77). Tim Ingold’s theoretical insights strengthen counter-cartographic practices to think and make from our positionnality within the land, building knowledge as we experience it rather then from afore-collected information and materials. It also provides an additional layer of interpretation to […] and counting. As the fuzzy hair can’t quite be tamed, the surface of the map only evokes the built infrastructure. The hand-drawn serpentine paths are present throughout the map but invisible at a distance. The only way to move across the map is by wayfaring. Fingers gently parse the fur to find and follow the arteries, touch becomes the guiding sense through the interface.

Tactile epistemologies have long been sidelined by western knowledge production. Tactile data visualisation, such as « incorporat[ing] stories (qualitative data) and numbers (quantitative data) into [indigenous] textiles, fabrics, governments and ceremonies » was long disregarded by western powers, both as representations of legal agreements and as historical approaches that would include indigenous epistemologies in data visualisation (O’Connor et al 2023, 68). Textile practitioners and their tactile knowledge were also sidelined. Anni Albers notes in 1965 how we have increasingly grown insensitive in our perception by touch. Modern industry saves us time and manual labour, but « it also bars us from taking part in the forming of material and leaves idle our sense of touch and with it those formative factulties that are stimulated by it. » ([1965] 1974), 62)

In the context of cartography, reinstating a sensory-driven narrative relinquishes control over to land to favour an embodied relationship to it. 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. 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 in the map 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 a chronological view of the data where each dot is a public artwork (Figure 1), I noted several phases. First, the outliers, sparsely distributed on the timeline up to 1981. Then, a first cluster forms between 1982 and 1987. It felt like some of them were finally able to stand together. More clusters come after that, following waves of public art production. I chose to begin the map with the first 18 artworks by womxn, those that defied the odds in a public art sphere blatantly dominated by men 6.

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

Figure 1: Timeline of artworks in MONA database. This view starts in 1951, when a yearly production cycle becomes apparent in our data.

To place each needle, I used a digital map generated on my laptop with a d3.js script. Then I 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 for the digital map. 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.

As if performing a ritual, the experience of carefully placing each of the 18 needles brought a feeling of agency, both upon the history and the geography of public art made by womxn. It seemed almost necessary to share this feeling with others, embracing the collective approach to promote a history in the making. […] and couting became an installation intented for participatory activation. In such setting 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 7. Participants are invited to

  1. add “to the count” in the code,
  2. search for the new artwork that appeared on the digital map, using the browser console to access its metadata,
  3. and place a new needle on the equivalent location of the physical map.

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. One such participatory activation was organised on April 17th 2024, during a end-of-year student exhibition 8. Since then, the map states 28 and counting. The following are still to be activated, just as this history is yet to be made.

Emerging unscathed?

[…] and counting presents as a spatial installation but it was (and is) a temporal journey. This article documents several steps of the creative process that led research on counter-mapping through situated, material and sensory interfaces. It shares strategies for embedding meaning into materiality, embracing touch for knowledge production, nurturing collective agency, and bridging the gap between algorithmic and textile makerspaces. If many of these ideas occurred at different times, they are only brought together into a linear narrative through the writing process. I experience research-creation as a particularly meandering process: the ramifications of a thought or a creative decision, both of which might have emerged as intuition, can later shape a large portion of the outcome. And by outcome, I mean as much the participatory mapping installation as this article. Time might still reveal new layers of meaning-making in this proposal, especially as further activations of the installation may continue counting.

If this article already tackles some elements of documentation, different directions could continue adding depth to this experiment. For example, considering further activations brings to light a possible object/installation biography. How might we document […] and counting’s journeys? We can turn our critical inquiries onto the production of documentation, considering which voices should or can be heard, what formats to record them with, and how and where to share them. Moreover, when considering the layers of narratives, this article focused on the experimental counter-mapping process. However, the story of the entry of womxn artists in the public art sphere on the island of Tiohtià:ke · Montréal that was central to the installation may seem relegated to the sidelines of this publication. This is in part due to the aforementioned questions regarding the documentation of the lived experience. During the first year of my thesis, I was discovering many aspects of research-creation, and while enthralled by the creative possibilities, I was not as attentive to the production of documentation. Even now, I am not sure how to share the many thoughts, feelings and conversations that occurred while considering each artwork we mapped. Writing about such a narrative would feel more considerate in a publication dedicated to the topic, such as Valentine Desmorat’s thesis on the entry of women artists into Montreal’s Contemporary Art Museum (2024). In this regard, I hope for this article to motivate further diverse writings on counter-cartography, and on public art.

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 database9. This dataset therefore contains 1528 artworks, described with properties such as title, artist, production date, and geolocation. We initially 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 amongst 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

  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. I use men artist, a purposefully odd-sounding turn of phrase, to accentuate the double standard with women artists. ↩

  3. Towards a digital commons of public art was a Maison MONA project funded by the Canada Arts Council. Between 2023 and 2024, our team experimented with the potential, viability, and usefulness of linked open data (LOD), while also aiming to generate interest in the semantic web within the artistic and cultural community. The main focus was to increase the visibility of artists involved in public art on the Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikipedia platforms. By identifying the current initiatives, needs, and issues specific to the visual arts sector, this project intends to equip artists with good wiki practices and thus to foster the development of a digital commons of public art. ↩

  4. Part of this research-creation was presented at the International Cartographic Conference 2025 in Vancouver (pending abstract publication). ↩

  5. Saphira was an Alaskan Husky breed we adopted a few years ago. I used her shedding of Fall 2023, and ran out while covering West Island. She passed away in May 2025 and we miss her very much. ↩

  6. The timeline published in this article covers the years 1950 until 2024. In the notebook documenting the data visualisation experiments, I created several other views to better understand the entire time frame. https://observablehq.com/@maison-mona/chronologie-et-genre?collection=@maison-mona/gender-analysis ↩

  7. 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. The digital map is accessible at: https://lenamk.site/doc/viz/carte/ and the code is published on Github: https://github.com/lenaMK/doc/tree/main/viz/carte. ↩

  8. Exhibition of the research-creation doctoral students of the art history, cinema and media studies department (Prof. Frédéric Dallaire, CIN7008, Winter 2024), public activation on April 17th 2024 at Université de Montréal. ↩

  9. The MONA database was created as a data source for the MONA app. It unites public art collections to enable in-situ outreach and cultural mediation with a free mobile app. ↩