I have been thinking about Participatory Mapping as a project tool. In ‘Diagrams of Power and Performing, Patricio Davila explores how diagrams of power work against representations that claim omniscience by speaking from a position, and “making visible what and who gets represented and who does the representing.” 1
Projects whereby research knowledge is generated via community participation.
MINNEAPOLIS AND ST PAUL ARE EAST AFRICAN CITIES
For a residency at the Walker gallery, artist Julie Mehretu worked with 30 young people who were from the East African diaspora, attending Edison and Roosevelt High School. She gave the teen participants cameras, audio recorders, and notebooks to chronicle their everyday lives over a two-week period, and design team Entropy8Zuper! then created Minneapolis and St. Paul by using the self-ethnographic images, audio, and text provided by the participating teenagers.
MATERIAL ATLAS
Also a new project by Seetal Solanki, Material Atlas, a participatory online platform that is co-created with ten creatives from Sub-Saharan Africa, the British Council and Ma-tt-er.
“A living map of materials, language, landscapes and practices. An emergent space that places an emphasis on the material and immaterial wealth of different geographical regions around the world. Material Atlas begins to decolonise language beyond the typological framework that exists in the current dominant universal understanding of materials, offering a more nuanced and blended approach that is co-developed by various practitioners around the world” 2
SITUATED KNOWLEDGE
I have also been reading about Donna Harrways theory of Situated Knowledge. I wonder if participatory mapping can be a way of de-centering knowledge. Again, these are big scale participatory projects. But how might this approach feed into a workshop design?
“Situated knowledges work like an apparatus of producing “[…] a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others’ practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions”3
THE SEVEN CONTINENTS SONG
In the world of Year 1 education. My daughter has been learning about the Continents through this very catchy song.
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MAYFAIR MAPS
I went passed Atlea Maps in Mayfair and noticed these antiquarian maps in the front window.
ORPHAN IMAGE
This is an orphan image, I found on Wikipedia. I forgot to label it when I dropped it.
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