A Free Festival of Mapping
In June 2005, collective members centered around the 56a Infoshop, a South London social centre, put on a Free Festival of Mapping. Running for an entire month, the Festival based itself initially on an exhibition of alternative maps and mapping. The basis for this exhibition is an archive of alternative and hand-drawn maps called The Map Room (is open...) that is curated and accessible at 56a Infoshop. This collection encourages the international creation and use of personal maps and charts from simple drawings of a person's hometown and how they choose to represent it, to more considered maps or charts of geo-politcal systems or past histories of radical activity. By use, we mean that the maps we make and pass around function as an essential practice in understanding and changing the world we find ourself in. By collecting maps from all over the world, we hope to be able to encourage travellers to take copies of these maps and explore the world in new ways. They may be walking the streets of London with a map of the routes taking by Giordano Bruno in 1583. A self-guided radical tour of Copenhagen may introduce the city in a wholly new and illuminating way. A map made by newly settled refugees could demonstrate the sense of confusion a new visitor would have on arrival in Plymouth and so on...
Our Cartography Includes
We are not expert map-makers nor experts in history or geography but this does not limit the creation and potential of our maps. We do not seek to make art objects but rather to create beauty in life. The beauty comes in a recognising our common ground.This is the sense of our practice of radical cartography.
Already you can see that this kind of 'mapping' does not always mean the physical production of objects but includes conversation, emotions, discovery or simply walking with friends and strangers. We map what we see and feel and what we desire for our world because the power over us tries it's hardest to falsify whatever passes before our eyes. Through this practice, through Festival, through participation, we have created by self-mapping something closer to our terrain, our histories, our subjectivity and the possibility that the world can be turned upside down.
Examples from The Map Room (is open...)
· Radical Southwark, a hand-drawn pictorial map of one district of South London detailing numerous accounts of radical activity from 1381 to 2006
· A quickly made hand-drawn map of Sacramento in California depicting public and personal events that shaped the authors life
· A map on a notebook page showing the way to secret Day of the Dead ceremony in remote North Mexico
· An incomplete chart of British Left Wing groups from 1930 til 2006 or an extensive chart of Anti-Psychiatry groups in 70's and 80's London
· An alternative mapping of Venice from 2001, of London from 2004, of Palestine/Israel from 1990
· A practical map of our local area showing where edible plants, fruit and flowers may be collected and at what times of the year
· A mapped landscape of the novel 'On The Marble Cliffs' by Ernst Junger
· A map from the large anti-capitalist protest on June 18th 1999 inThe City of London that shows where major financial institutions have their offices. Similar maps for Mayday 2000 and G8 Scotland 2005
Self-Mapping At The Festival...
Throughout the month, participants and observers were encouraged to self-map, both individually and collectively. By self-mapping we mean a process of making connections creatively between the individual's own life experience and the reasons how and why they come to be in any one place at any one time. Self-mapping tells and shares our stories.We called the Festival 'You Are Here But Why?' to reflect but to also act on the wider questions that maps and mapping bring up. What is a map but an attempt to describe a reality. More often than not the map is a wholly inadequate representation of our realities, mediated by the prevailing morals and conventions from a society that we oppose. A map functions like lined paper for writing on. It's form defines a rigid way, or 'truth'. It exludes more than it includes. We propose to self-map like writing the wrong way on lined paper. The question 'You Are Here But Why? is of course a loaded one. How did any one person get to stand in the 56a Infoshop one day in June 2005? It seemed a beautiful starting point to think about all the reasons why we are here at this point in time and space. It is also fairly impossible to remember or imagine all of those reasons but in that process we make connections between our personal history, good and bad, and the outside influences that make up the answer to why we are here now.
Some of what we mapped...
In this way, we were able to map a thirty year history of radical London by getting everyone who came to the space to annotate a large chart with their own knowledge of groups, papers, print shops and social spaces. Curiously, we were able to watch some of our own forgotten personal history appear on the chart by the hands of total strangers.
We mapped the effects of precarious labour on our body by handing out simple pictograms of the human body with space to include an individual's own experience of working. In this way, we shared our aches and pains but we also mapped our own subtle resistance on the job.
In a day out we mapped the hidden landscape of South London talking a long and unusual route over many hills by following an ancient pilgrims route. This long sunny day was a chance for random people to come together and share a walk, some food and sore feet.
We created a photographic exhibition of the process of gentrification in our home area and the same process as it was experienced by a friend of ours in Santiago in Chile, thousands of miles away.
One Sunday, we walked in our local area and uncovered some of it's subterranean secrets from disused tube lines to church crypts to utility tunnels.
We discovered a new way to look closely at our local social history by playing a game called '50 Things That Are There'. People were given a map of the nearby streets and a list of 50 pieces of text that could be found in these streets. These ranged from manhole covers, pub signs, grafitti on walls or in concrete, plaques, flyposters etc. They were given one hour to find as many of the texts as they could. The winner found 36 texts!!
