Walking and Mapping
As I travel, maps collect in my pockets, thin and ragged with repeated use. My fingers wrap around them, wadded-up, like a tiny globe, allowing me to touch their entire surfaces all at once. Each part becomes more crinkled and accumulates tiny rips along its folds as I walk through the territory it represents.
My relationship with the map is a point of conflict for me. It is an abstraction, simplifying the landscape into a static shape. This is fiction. The map lies. The map’s lines separate and divide. At the same time, the map is my companion and my protector. It prevents me from feeling lost. It is my guide. It lets me see everything all at once, zoom out, and shift my perspective.
Like the map, Michel de Certeau’s essay, Walking in the City, has also been a supportive theoretical framework for understanding how I walk through the cemetery. Cemeteries are functionally small cities of the dead, and I swap the two terms when reading Walking in the City. De Certeau begins by looking down at the city from its tallest building, reading it like a map, equating traversing the city with a form of language building. The way we see the city from above is very different from being inside, immersed in its small parts, beyond the parameters of this larger visibility. Walking through cities is a subjective act. The organization of streets shapes the way we navigate their public space, and, in return, agency. We create habitual routes as we walk, and these paths form our understanding and memories of the city. As walkers unconsciously use the space of the city, their trails intertwine, weaving towards and away from each other, creating impromptu choreography and living drawings. These traces might be transcribed onto the map, but the codified abstraction is only a relic of what is lived in time and space.
For me, walking is a way of developing a relationship with a burial site. It is productive, political, a long tradition, and an activity of pleasure. Walking becomes a form of making and an extension of my artwork. Through walking, I attempt to locate the borders of a place and in the process listen to all its parts. I seek to locate where the cemetery (and death) begins and ends.
Where is the threshold between life and death?
How do I pass through it?
When I walk, I am also performing an improvisation through these spaces, leaving a trace, perhaps invisible, and inevitably crossing my footsteps with others I do not know. This becomes my form of poetry.
As I travel, maps collect in my pockets, thin and ragged with repeated use. My fingers wrap around them, wadded-up, like a tiny globe, allowing me to touch their entire surfaces all at once. Each part becomes more crinkled and accumulates tiny rips along its folds as I walk through the territory it represents.
My relationship with the map is a point of conflict for me. It is an abstraction, simplifying the landscape into a static shape. This is fiction. The map lies. The map’s lines separate and divide. At the same time, the map is my companion and my protector. It prevents me from feeling lost. It is my guide. It lets me see everything all at once, zoom out, and shift my perspective.
Like the map, Michel de Certeau’s essay, Walking in the City, has also been a supportive theoretical framework for understanding how I walk through the cemetery. Cemeteries are functionally small cities of the dead, and I swap the two terms when reading Walking in the City. De Certeau begins by looking down at the city from its tallest building, reading it like a map, equating traversing the city with a form of language building. The way we see the city from above is very different from being inside, immersed in its small parts, beyond the parameters of this larger visibility. Walking through cities is a subjective act. The organization of streets shapes the way we navigate their public space, and, in return, agency. We create habitual routes as we walk, and these paths form our understanding and memories of the city. As walkers unconsciously use the space of the city, their trails intertwine, weaving towards and away from each other, creating impromptu choreography and living drawings. These traces might be transcribed onto the map, but the codified abstraction is only a relic of what is lived in time and space.
For me, walking is a way of developing a relationship with a burial site. It is productive, political, a long tradition, and an activity of pleasure. Walking becomes a form of making and an extension of my artwork. Through walking, I attempt to locate the borders of a place and in the process listen to all its parts. I seek to locate where the cemetery (and death) begins and ends.
Where is the threshold between life and death?
How do I pass through it?
When I walk, I am also performing an improvisation through these spaces, leaving a trace, perhaps invisible, and inevitably crossing my footsteps with others I do not know. This becomes my form of poetry.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.