Mapping is a central practice in colonisation. As colonists advance their invading lines, they chart the land, recording topologies for agricultural, extractive, and manufacturing potentials. Many things are erased in these maps, including communities, scared and custodial sites, histories and cultures.

This webinar features three presentations by artists located in lands deeply impacted by colonisation and its residual power dynamics. In each presentation the artists, scholars, and activists describe how they agitate and disrupt conventional mapping and generate works that incite critical conversations about the ongoing affects and politics of colonisation – on culture, ecology, and place.

• Inefficient Mapping as an Ethical Wayfinding Practice – Linda Knight

Artist Linda Knight developed inefficient mapping as a methodologic protocol in an effort to develop a critical research practice built on resistance and an ethics of care. Inefficient mapping takes as a foundational principle that practices of traversing the land must include an ethics of care for the histories and politics of a place. Inefficiently mapping is not just a human wandering about in spaces and taking notice of things to draw them. Inefficient mapping thinks differently about the ethics of the encounter because it takes the flaw of being human, of being the coloniser or colonised that has fenced off, stolen, fought for, hunted on, farmed, listened to, birthed on, hacked up, planted into these spaces and keeps that central during the process of navigating. Mapping inefficiently is a non-dominant navigational practice that wayfinds through phenomena using practices of inscribing that are a practice of political caring, because the mappings aim to facilitate an ethical wayfinding that is attuned to affect.

Linda Knight is an artist and academic who specialises in critical and speculative arts practices and methods. Linda devised ‘Inefficient Mapping’ as a methodological protocol for conducting fieldwork in projects informed by ‘post-‘ theories. In her role as Associate Professor at RMIT University, Australia Linda creates transdisciplinary projects across early childhood, creative practice, and digital media. Together with Jacina Leong, Linda is a founding member of the Guerrilla Knowledge Unit, an artist collective that curates interface jamming performances between the public and AI technologies. Linda has exhibited digitally and physically in Australia, UK, USA, Canada, NZ, and South America and has been awarded arts research grants and prizes with international reach and impact, most recently this includes an Australian Research Council Discovery project that designs novel technologies for framing and enabling young children’s active play.

Website: https://lindaknight.org/

Inefficient mapping IG: @lk_inefficient_urban_mapsGKU: https://guerrillaknowledgeunit.com/

• Mapping the Aesthetic Dimensions of Power – Alys Longley

Artists Alys Longley and Máximo Corvalán-Pincheira have been developing the art project Mapping Porous Borders / Mapeo de Bordes Porosos, since 2017, working between Aotearoa New Zealand and Chile to engage artistic mapping through installation, performance, drawing, and collaborations.  Their upcoming exhibition Beberemos El Vino Nuevo, Juntos!/ Let Us Drink The New Wine Together!  presents a body of artistic maps made during the pandemic by artists around the globe, which will be exhibited in both physical-museum and virtual spaces. The aim of this work is to resist isolation and border closures through artistic practices of collaboration and solidarity.We consider how artistic maps can enable us to question structures of power, space, politics, territory and control, while also opening possibilities to think worlds upside down and anew. We consider the role of contemporary art in mapping work to allow vital space to think beyond proprietorial and status-quo conventions and assumptions, to recognize the urgency of imagination, multi-vocality, intangible resources and more-than-human agencies.Dr Alys Longley is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher with twenty years experience in creating live performance, artist books, installations, international collaborations, artistic research projects and creative teaching projects. Her work explores methods of performance experimentation, interdisciplinary practice and artistic research. Alys’s books The Foreign Language of Motion (2014) and Radio Strainer (2016) are published by Winchester University Press (UK). She has co-edited the books 'Artistic Approaches to Cultural Mapping, Activating Imaginaries and Means of Knowing’ with Nancy Duxbury and Will Garrett-Petts (Routledge, 2019) and co-edited a Special Issue of City, Culture and Society with Nancy Duxbury on Mapping Culture: Making the Intangible Visible (2016). Alys is an Associate Professor in Dance Studies, Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland, New Zealand. 

• Mapping Urban Plantiness – Alexandra Crosby & Ilaria Vanni

In this presentation we introduce selected projects that seek to answer the question: how does our understanding of cultural, environmental, and social histories of place change if we let ourselves be guided by plants? One of the methods we use to answer this question is to design plant-led maps. The first map we present (Marrickville Walks 2017) showcases a project on recombinant ecologies – or ecologies that are the result of human interactions, such as the case with cities in settler-colonial societies. We argue that in order to make recombinant ecologies present, as well as visible, we need a different order of maps, able to place the observer back in the thick of things, and to capture the entanglements between humans and more-than-human gatherings. The second project (The Planty Atlas of UTS, 2019) maps a small inner city area around the university where we work, Ultimo. In this project we spotlight some of the historical and contemporary trajectories of this area starting from Gadigal Sydney, by following plants.The third map is part of a work in progress (The Green Square Atlas of Civic Ecologies) that amplifies individual or organisations’ initiatives that bring together care for place and care for the environment in an area of large urban renewal in Sydney. The presentation concludes with an explanation of the various steps of our mapping methodology. Mapping Edges is a research studio that explores the relationship between plants and people and what it tells about the past, present and future of the urban environment. Mapping Edges is: Alexandra Crosby, University of Technology Sydney. Associate Professor and Associate Head of the School of Design in the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building. Ilaria Vanni, University of Technology Sydney, Associate Professor in International Studies and Global Societies. We work on Gadigal Country.

This event will be recorded and the resulting video will be shown on our YouTube channel.

Livingmaps Network is an independent not for profit organisation, we receive no core funding. Our main income comes from live events which we have been unable to organise this year. We are asking for donations of £3 – £5 from people who wish to attend our online events to help us cover our running costs. We greatly appreciate your support.