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Feature

paul schweizer is a geographer and popular educator. As part of kollektiv orangotango, he co-conducts collective art processes in public space. He co-edited This Is Not an Atlas and curates the notanatlas.org platform. Currently he co-organizes collective mapping processes in Europe and Latin America in order to facilitate a global dialogue of critical cartographies.

cristina t. ribas works as an artist and researcher, working with collective processes in academia and self-organized cartography and improvisation workshops. She is part of the project Arquivos Táticos, alongside Giseli Vasconcelos and Tatiana Wells, and organizes the open platform Desarquivo.org.

<h5>“Nothing in the world is as soft, as weak, as water; nothing else can wear away the hard, the strong, and remain unaltered. Soft overcomes hard, weak overcomes strong. Everybody knows it,  
nobody uses the knowledge.”  
—Lao Tzu [^1]

“I am not interested in an unknowability that shadows knowledge of a colonized other, or a dangerous feminine one either, but rather an unknowability that we can learn from thinking with difference.”  
—Astrida Neimanis [^2]</h5>
  
  
Traditional, arid cartography—say, a typical school world map—could be belittingly described as the science of imposing continents and demarcated grounds onto the irrelevant in-betweenness of the world’s oceans. Waters are depicted as adverse obstacles when moving between relevant solid territories, or as mere voids, and are thus often invisibilized in traditional cartography which seems to be obsessed with the dry and static, rocks and metals. Arid cartography tends to depict water as a knowable separate element, enclosed in its rightful domains—rivers, lakes, oceans—visualized with graphic elements such as static points, lines, and demarcated surfaces. And then there’s the material fact that water, for centuries, constituted a major threat for paper maps, its mere presence posing the menace of maceration and dissolution of cartography’s sacrosanct product.

With Lao Tzu’s words in mind—“as soft, as weak, as water; / nothing else can wear away / the hard, the strong”—why not engage this watery threat, the threat of transformation and becoming other, by integrating the very materiality of water as an aesthetic force. This is what we are rehearsing to call “hydrocartography.” As Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis [^3] suppose: “By drawing upon the reservoir of unknowability carried within all waters, we may situate ourselves in ways that challenge land-based preconceptions of fixity.” Taking any map to a walk alongside, with, and through watery bodies allows us to experiment with the liberating potential of hydrocartography—our sweating bodies, sudden rain showers, and our water-loving daughters potential accomplices in this endeavour. Understanding ethics as an enabling alternative to morality, as “becoming attuned to the complexity of the world and our immersion in it,” and thus as “actively working on and reshaping relationships,” we feel engaging an ethics of water can help us think through how we relate to each other, and the generative unpredictability of any cartographic encounter. [^4]

Since 2019, the two of us have been collaborating, divided-connected between Latin America and Europe, different yet related in the way we position our cartographic-artistic-militant practices, sharing experiences, places, comrades, and the intention to share more. Yet, we feel this kinship is not (just) some- thing between autonomous individuals—demarcated points in space. Rather, it is a condition that we share with countless others—lines between points. In fact, more than just connecting “human points,” this very condition, we feel, also connects us to more-than-human entities—multifold and aggregated points.

Since 2020, in public conversations and mapping workshops that we have held at art schools, we’ve contextualized our respective and shared mapping practices by seeing ourselves as “becoming bodies of water” [^5]—implying the overwhelming yet beautiful acceptance that our bodies’ water is the very water that forms and circulates through other human and more- than-human bodies; the Atlantic Ocean at the coast of Santa Catarina, the frosty clouds of the German winter, the snow on Mount Vesuvio’s peak… all of these waters, notwithstanding their varying physical states and qualities—other yet same—circulate literally within and between bodies, in a planetary flow, across space and time. In Neimanis’s words, we are “engaged, embedded, embodied \[…\] situated, implicated—in time, in space, in other bodies of other beings.” [^6] Taking this seriously necessarily comes with a radical realignment of modern cartographers’ self-conception. The cartographer’s gaze can no longer adhere to an external, top-down, bird’s-eye perspective—the abstract, totalizing gaze at the world as an object to be ruled. On the contrary, the hydrocartographic project acknowledges both the world’s fluid condition and the cartographer’s becoming (in) these flows. If the waters of the world flow through us, wouldn’t then the only imaginably (im)possible way to map the world be to flow with them?

Before the arid mapping starts, there is the unmapped void—an idealized blank white page. Yet to employ an ethics of water is to see that whatever site we may be mapping is far from empty, clear, devoid of influences. Shifting our eyesight from arid cartography to hydrocartography includes an emotional and subjective reflection. For us, this has been, intrinsically, part of a need to rethink our practices and ourselves. We began by mapping out instinctively and practically our own interdependent relationships, intensified by the COVID\-19 pandemic reality in different forms and weights, believing that whether living in distant continents or being distanced due to pandemic security measures, we move and are moved by common currents.

In order to open ourselves up to these other forms of mapping, in the workshops we organized, we felt that starting the mapping with meditational “inward walks” and body-mapping exercises would facilitate this process. In the former, we prompted participants to produce images from known reference spaces—be they homes, streets, districts, or other contexts. We’d begin by walking in our homes as we walk when in a rush on the street, to agitate and energize the body, then sit down with eyes shut listening to the facilitator’s inward-walking instructions, which attempt to awaken the body’s perceptions and memories of cartographic encounters: “Listen to your feet; how did the ground that they walked on feel? Was it hard, soft, cold, prickly, comforting? Feel your eyes’ memories of the territory. Interrogate your hands about their experience; what materials did they touch? How did they intervene?” With eyes shut, we can imagine the maps as manifold interfusing currents, an ocean of “pluriversal” [^7] fullness, beauty, and vitality. Hydrocartography enables us to enact this radical change of perspective. It implies map-makers’ and map users’ right to get lost in the map, to misunderstand, and to derive other meanings. Lastly, we’d draw with watery materials the images that came to us.

Hydrocartography does not participate in the partitioning, dichotomizing, and belligerent rhetoric of national and administrative maps. It is of no use at all for states’ or landlords’ purposes of rendering land decipherable and thus controllable. By mapping from within and embodying the sensibility that bodies contain water, hydrocartography doesn’t just refuse the imperialist cartographic reflex of expanding what’s known and represented. It also rejects ambitions to simplify and diminish the represented topic to a tangible, unequivocal visualization—clearly demarcated points and lines, harsh contrasts, neatly single-coloured surfaces. The sharp dividing line as a graphic element is foreign to hydrocartography. What were borders in arid maps (a clash of binary oppositions) can only be zones of confluence, commingling, and fusing—blurred, opaque, overlapped, whirled shades—that make us see complexity and multidimensionality, leaving space for diverging understandings. These confluences are, indeed, zones of becoming (one an)other; new tones appear.

This reminds us of the notion of _ch’ixi_, shared by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui from andina Abya Yala: a form of thinking the coexistence of white and black colors, this encounter creating a sort of grey checker pattern. Cusicanqui analyzes _ch’ixi_, as well as other concepts, to set up an Aimara Indigenous epistemology, to refer to identities composed by contradictory stains, from different references in time and space, against homogeneity. [^8] Another way of conceiving of this confluent zone is through Neimanis’s notion of “ecotone”: 

> As transition areas between two adjacent but different ecosystems, ecotones appear as both gradual shifts and abrupt demarcations. But more than just a marker of separation or even a marker of connection (although importantly both of these things), an ecotone is also a zone of fecundity, creativity, transformation; of becoming, assembling, multiplying; of diverging, differentiating, relinquishing. Something happens. [^9]

In committing to the creation of ecotones—relations between diverse (territorial) experiences, identities, and imaginations—hydrocartography needs to develop new graphic expressions. We strongly encourage experimentation with streaks, confluences, and membranes as graphic elements of mapping—multiple, colourful, straight, wavy, patchy, crooked, interconnected, and interwoven. From the point of view of the cartographer’s desk, this may be hard to visualize, so let’s take a walk at the riverside. 

Walking on the margins of a river, we might notice the delicate zone of difference between the water that flows along and the soil we step on. However, our feet, pushed down by our watery body’s weight, liquidate the zone of distinction. While the river flows, taking our eyes to dive into its current’s design, our feet carry the mud, exposing the newness of this contact. We are mapping while we are walking. We are blurring the zone of contact that we just met. The riverbank might be solid, yet at any time, beautifully and fearfully, it might drop inside the river itself—a memory from the Amazon River pops up in us, accompanied by the skin’s memory of the warm humid air, the ears’ memory of the mighty torrent’s constant murmur. The river continuously transforms, composing ecotones. Its bank’s soil, the plants overgrowing, the animals inhabiting it, the air breezing, and us; we are all bodies of water, watering it. No impermeable lines divide where the same water flows through. The same is true even for those spaces in which human intervention has struggled for centuries to conceal and delegitimize lively water flows; rivers have had their courses changed. But all of a sudden, scales are reversed. What seemed controlled by machines, measurements, predictions, numbers becomes a flow. The waters show their force.

When listening deeply during mapping processes, we notice the given environment is not just the _where_, but also the _who, what, and how_. Indeed, we, our bodies, minds, and actions, are not separated from it—precise dots and lines on the map—but are connected _in, to,_ and _through_ it. We ourselves are part of it, wet bodies as wetlands: blurred stains, smeared, petered-out spots.

Just as we have soaked arid maps and their graphic elements, we shall commit to wet the cartographers themselves, which is to say: reject any pretension of a distanced view and, instead, accept that we are (be- coming) in this together. Hydrocartography is to take a collective walk at the riverside. It is when neither the maps nor ourselves stay the same, performing a watery movement, flowing with intuition. Situated in boundlessness. It calls us to engage in the “subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters,” as Donna Haraway [^10] puts it, to drift along the maps inside us, and to be(come) multicoloured shades dripping, scrolling across the map.

[^1]: Lao Tzu, _Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way_ , trans. Ursula K. Le Guin. (London: Shambhala, 1998), 78.
[^2]: Astrida Neimanis, _Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology_, Environmental Cultures Series (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 144.
[^3]: Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, “Toward a Hydrological Turn?,” in _Thinking with Water_, ed. Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 8 
[^4]: “Compared to morality, ethics entails _more_ fidelity to our relations in their immediacy—to all the forces that compose us and affect us— not less.” Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, _Joyful Militancy: Building Resistance in Toxic Times_ (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 281.
[^5]: Astrida Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water,” in _Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice_, ed. H. Gunkel et al., Breaking Feminist Waves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
[^6]: Neimanis, _Bodies of Water_ , 145.
[^7]: Arturo Escobar, _Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
[^8]: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, <em>Un mundo ch’ixi es posible</em> (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018).
[^9]: Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism,” 107.
[^10]: Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 4.

Writer

Maps

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Mapping

Environment

cristina t. ribas and paul schweier share their concept of “hydrocartography,” which begins with the assumption that the cartographer is wet, indistinguishable from what they chart—and from that position, capable of dissolving the presumption of maps as static.

Hydrocartography: Mapping with Waters

Editorial

**Jac Renée Bruneau** is a writer, editor and organizer based in Toronto. She was formerly the editor of _C Magazine_.

Maya Wilson-Sanchez is a curator and writer based in Toronto.

The countless languages of maps materialize the countless ways we relate to land. Maps create relations between us and where we are, where we have been, and where we’d like to go. There are maps shared through stories; ephemeral maps drawn on the ground and erased by the wind; tactile maps made to resemble the shapes of coastlines; speculative maps of the future; and, ineluctably, maps of empire. In many cases, the function of a map is not to represent reality, but to imagine something in excess of it, and give form to _that_.

“\[O\]ur bodies’ water is the very water that forms and circulates through other human and more-than-human bodies; the Atlantic Ocean at the coast of Santa Catarina, the frosty clouds of the German winter, the snow on Mount Vesuvio’s peak… all of these waters, notwithstanding their varying physical states and qualities—other yet same—circulate literally within and between bodies, in a planetary flow, across space and time.” cristina t. ribas and paul schweizer (the latter of kollektiv orangotango, a network of critical geographers, friends, and activists who question space, power, and resistance) offer this reminder of total fluidity as a central aspect of what they are “rehearsing to call ‘hydrocartography.’” In contrast to traditional, arid mapping, which “render\[s\] land decipherable and thus controllable,” hydrocartography begins with the assumption that the cartographer is wet, indistinguishable from what they chart—and from that position, capable of dissolving the presumption of maps as static. This spirit of disruption through intimacy, association, and sensory perception runs through the issue. 

During her conversation with Kyra Kordoski, the artist Maureen Gruben shares anecdotes about navigation in Tuktoyaktuk in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of the western Arctic—and how those practices influence her work. “\[I\]t changes all the time and it’s never the same. It’s such a slow mapping process. You notice each and every shift in the land. Some places are receding, but others are building up. It becomes more personal every time. More like home.” In _Big Hello_ (2021), a work that “pairs over a hundred second-hand cell-phone cases found in thrift stores with ‘uppers,’ the beaded tops of moccasins and mukluks that had been found at the dump or gifted \[…\] the beads create a counterpoint to the immediate data the phones’ map apps would have provided.” Again and again, Gruben comes back to the influence that modern maps have on pace, and her valuation of the opposite; “\[b\]eadwork operates on slow time.”

“The process of doing beadwork is meticulous and disciplined; it requires stillness,” writes Annette Lee—founder of Native Skywatchers, an initiative that “seeks to remember and revitalize \[I\]ndigenous star and earth knowledge” in the face of light pollution. “This stillness is echoed in the night sky,” she writes. Lera Kotsyuba’s “Star Stories and Indigenous Resistance Against Light Pollution” highlights perspectives from those advocating for ethical negotiations of space in the attempt to ensure colonial procedures on land are not replicated beyond our atmosphere, acknowledging the importance of the sky in numerous Indigenous worldviews. (Coco Zhou’s instalment in our One Thing column, about NASA naming their most recent Mars landing site after Black science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, corroborates the inordinately ham-fisted nature of upwards expansion.) Following conversations with Mi’kmaw astronomer Hilding Neilson (related to his work with legal scholar Elena E. Ćirković) and Karyn Recollet, an urban Cree writer, artist, scholar, and professor, Kotsyuba ultimately turns to the work of the artist Margaret Nazon. Based in the Inuvik Beaufort Delta, she renders details made visible by the Hubble Space Telescope in beads, a fruitful entanglement of traditional and modern technologies that suggests the potential for respectful, generative coexistence.

The complexities of Big Tech are at the centre of Sophia Arnold’s feature on Novi Sad–based Vladan Joler’s project _New Extractivism_, which endeavours to visualize (to attempt rigorous transparency of) the labyrinthine insides of data extraction. The artist, who’s the leader of SHARE Lab—a “research and data investigation lab for exploring different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labour exploitation, invisible infrastructures, black boxes, and many other contemporary phenomena on the intersection between technology and society”—at one point makes the striking remark that although he was living without a cell phone for a while, he ultimately decided that with the time he was spending trying to refuse the conveniences of today’s tech, he could be working on much more interesting problems. This issue began with close cogitation on cartography’s function as a meaning-maker, definer, namer, decider, but as we went on editing, we kept coming across these (at first surprising, and then pleasantly concordant) glimmers of reflection about time. What is it about trying to orient ourselves that gets us thinking about the ways that seconds, hours, and years are pushed around, sped up, wrinkled?

Experiences in space are of course inextricable from experiences in time, though Kat Benedict makes the joyous case for the _dis_orientation of both in their writing about Lucas LaRochelle’s Queering the Map— an online project that allows contributors to anonymously affix a narrative to any given point on the world map. A moderator screens submissions for slander, but otherwise doesn’t discriminate. There are tales of transitions, first kisses, first kinks, first admissions, heartbreaks, as well as cryptic textual abstractions that feel just as snug in this expansive (if still very abbreviated) portrait of the planet. Kicking off the piece with Alfred Korzybski’s famous one-liner “the map is not the territory,” Benedict moves through postulations from Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, and Jean Baudrillard, to eventually frame LaRochelle’s map as _the territory itself_, providing a substrate for self-defined origins, asynchronous community, and generation over representation

Sophia Larigakis’s entry in this issue’s Composition column brings about a similar feeling of communion—but through a singular rather than collective account. Riffing on a project proposed by artist Max Neuhaus in the early ’80s to “clarify an emergency vehicle’s position in space” and make “the city soundscape more tolerable, that is, more aesthetically pleasing,” the writer creates an aural topography of pandemic NYC: from the “surreally amplified” birdsong, to the surge of ambulance sirens, the nightly clanging of pots and pans, curfew cell-phone notifications, the sonic weaponry of the police, and the “ruckus and din” of “fireworks as a stake in Black joy.”

Razan Al-Salah’s artist project _No Man’s Land_, guest curated by Dana Qaddah, takes on another topography that someone had an idea to refashion, this one much more pernicious. To look up the area known as Canada Park on any old search engine would suggest that that someone—the State of Israel—succeeded. Visitors are seen leisuring in a national park that was once home to the Arab residents of Latrun, Imwas, Yalo, and Bayt Nouba before their total expropriation as a result of the Nakba and the Six-Day War. Here, as in a number of other stolen regions in Israel/Palestine, the Jewish National Fund deployed a reforestation program utilizing “fast-growing pine trees and evergreens—non-indigenous to the region \[…\] effectively erasing traces of people and obstructing their ability to return home.” I urge you to spend a few minutes taking up Al-Salah’s invitation to counterflood the search engines with images of Palestinian protest over the loss of this site (see the QR code on the last page).

It should go without saying that the tactics of erasure highlighted in _No Man’s Land_ unfortunately have much in common with Canada’s own. And, as Mimi Gellman writes, “It is now understood that the political and cultural ramifications of mapping have implications that go far beyond the charting of unknown territories into a claiming of space and an assertion of sovereignty over Indigenous lands.” The Anishinaabe/ Ashkenazi/Métis visual artist, designer, and educator describes a shift within geography and mapping studies in the late ’80s that changed the criteria of maps— which conventionally included things like “direction, scale, coordinates, and at the very least some mimetic relationship to the landscape being discussed”—to include more encompassing definitions. Her text goes on to examine artworks by Sonny Assu, Katherine Boyer, Bonnie Devine, and Pudlo Pudlat as examples of Indigenous counter-mapping approaches—“which use cartography and maps to correct territorial injustices and disrupt the power dynamics embedded within colonial imaginaries.”

Leah Decter and Tania Willard come at the complexities of stolen land from another angle, focusing in on one of the most pressing questions in “Canada”: how settlers, newcomers, and their descendants can engage in ethical guesting, that which is “relational, respectful, and reciprocal.” Playing with the language involved in providing directions, poetic prose is interwoven with excerpts from a potent letter written in 1910 by the Chiefs of the Secwepémc, Syilx, and Nlaka’pamux Nations and presented in Kamloops, BC, to premier Sir Wilfred Laurier. “As you cross over colonially designated territories, question the lines, the borders, the power of prescribed boundaries, and maps as tools of domination. \[…\] Before your next turn, you need to tear down farm fences, yard fences, and construction fences that have become borders.” Tarin Dehod engages in this kind of close looking and attendant tear-down in the first installation of our new Tilling column, examining how colonial roots underlie non-profit governance structures, and sharing findings about ungovernance. It is “clear how absurd it is for ARCs to continue business-as-usual artistic programming upon a shared foundation that is antithetical to our very reason for existing.”

Many of the reviews extend the universe of this issue’s theme. Zannah Mae Matson’s review of Candace Fujikane’s book _Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai‘i_ discusses “how land and history are mapped together through stories that transcend the settler divisions between living and non-living.” Courtney Miller’s review of “Overburden”—an exhibition presented across two galleries in rural BC—highlights the works of artists “who question settler-colonial and capitalist perceptions of land as a source from which to profit,” and Jayne Wilkinson’s engagement with Will Kwan’s recent solo at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery takes these reflections on extraction a step further, describing Kwan’s work as being “about the economy of the land but ultimately about how the idea of nature can be marketed, bought, and sold as much as the tangible resources extracted from it.” Greta Hamilton observes that Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell’s book _Outdoor School_ (2021) “offers an encouraging vision of artistic and pedagogical responses to climate change” and Julian Jason Haladyn gives a thoughtful reading of Shelley Niro’s outdoor exhibition in London beside the Antler River. Lastly, Karina Roman Justo writes an exciting examination of Oscar Santillán and Alessandra Troncone’s new publication about quipu textiles that considers a “cartography of shadows” through Indigenous epistemologies.

Citing Ahmed’s “The more a path is used, the more a path is used,” Benedict goes on to extrapolate that, “\[i\]n other words, the path is made clearer with each use, reiterated by each passing body, begetting further use.” In yet _other_ words, the path most likely to be taken is the one that’s been left unquestioned. But everyone in this issue—in their numerous, unpredictable, motivated approaches to mapping—explores the potential of the medium as a world-making tool, and gets us thinking about taking literally any other route.

issue-150-p14-18.pdf

Editors Jac Renée Bruneau and Maya Wilson-Sanchez reflect on the issue’s theme: _Maps._

Editorial: Maps