Other Cartographies – the 2nd mLAB Symposium at the University of Bern, April 4 – 8, pursues “Geography’s Search for Artistic-Activist-Feminist Visualisations.”
Register now to participate in workshops, lectures and presentations with critical cartographers and activists such as Lize Mogel, Élise Olmedo, Katrin Singer, Pablo Mansilla, Geobrujas, Irène Hirt, Katharina Schmidt, Sébastian Caquard, Ana Medez de Andés, Joni Saeger and many more…
As the invitation to symposium puts it:
“Make the invisible visible. Turn the map upside down, inside out, tear it apart, cut it, reassemble it, weave new territories, connect distant bodies and places, re-imagine the world otherwise.
Over the past decades, feminist, critical, and counter cartographies have revisited cartography´s troubled history, showing that maps are never innocent, neutral or objective. Cartographies are embedded in global power structures and have been instrumentalized in service of empire, colonialism, capitalism and other geopolitical and -economic projects. Geography, a discipline in which maps have played a key role in training, researching and teaching from the beginning, is actively engaging with critique and mapping practices. Is it even possible to use established cartographies to change existing power structures? “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 1984). Is there instead a requirement for different forms and techniques of mapping that have their origins outside the traditional disciplines? Aside the work of critical, feminist and black geographers and cartographers, artists and activists have been at the forefront to “criticize, provoke and challenge our ways of thinking about space, place and maps” (Halder & Michel 2018: 13). Artists have challenged aesthetic customs, formats, materials and have consequently pushed the boundaries of what counts as a map. Activists have reappropriated mapping practices as a participatory and collective medium of political resistance. Artists, activists and academics alike have transgressed the norms of conventional cartography to remap and henceforth reimagine territories, societies, power configurations, and intimate-global connections.
In the second mLab Symposium, we will open up the space for conversations at the intersection of art, activism, cartography, and geography asking:
How can quantitative and qualitative data complement each other on the same map and thus produce new forms, representations, materialities, and affects? What are the possibilities for mapping the entanglements of global, large-scale, quantitative data with intimate, subjective, qualitative data to tell other stories of the world? What challenges arise when we produce, create and politicize maps in transdisciplinary fashion?
These are guiding questions we have asked our renowned speakers who will contribute to the symposium with their distinct expertise in the arts, data visualization and geography. In keynote lectures, workshops, panels and an exhibition, we will explore and experiment with unconventional ways of producing maps bringing into concert embodied experiences with data sets of national and global reach.”
