Maryam Fanni, Elof Hellström and Klara Meijer write about how South Districts Institute for Other Visions, as an undisciplinary group based in Stockholm, was investigating spatial justice through artistic methods such as collective writing, publishing, local radio, city walks and reading groups. 

Some Notes invites guest contributors to write additional texts to be part of  the Urgent Pedagogies (UP) archive, or to contribute with brief responses consisting of notes and reflections to already existing pieces in the archive or to the project itself.

Cut-up Workshop, 2015. Image courtesy of SIFAV 

The Makings of a Counter-Map: Collective methods for creating place and position

Maryam Fanni, Elof Hellström, Klara Meijer 

Söderorts Institut För Andra Visioner (abbreviated SIFAV and roughly translated to South Districts Institute for Other Visions) was an undisciplinary group based in Stockholm, investigating spatial justice through artistic methods and a variety of formats such as collective writing, publishing, local radio broadcasting, city walks, ready mades, reading groups, film screenings and more. They were mainly active between 2012–2017 and formed as a response to massive privatizations and the municipal government’s official “Vision 2030”. In this tex, they revisit their work and reflect back on their practice of renegotiating geographies through a framework of counter-mapping, with particular attention to mapping as embodied and shared experience.

               
               Place is inevitable

               —Édouard Glissant

A counter-map cannot be reduced to a visual artefact but is preceded by experiences, activities and doings. Theorists Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle believe that a risk in working with maps is that the fetishes of scale and precision can captivate one to the point that they "smooth over the world's contradictions"[1] and thus constitute an obstacle to the mapping itself.1 Based on such assumption, this text focuses therefore on mapping as process rather than the map as outcome. With examples taken from our work in the collective SIFAV Söderorts[2] Institut För Andra Visioner (Southern District’s Institute for Other Visions), we want to show methods that, in retrospect, can be considered as parts of a critical cartography or counter-cartography.

During the years we operated as SIFAV, we were dedicated to the self-imposed mission of exploring methods and languages ​​for thinking life, place and city beyond four-year policy cycles and its dominant economies and discourses. We tried a variety of working methods and expressions with the aim of jointly (re-)learning about the city and the commons. Among other things, we wanted to let Stockholm's city sell-offs and privatisations, packaged in a story of brilliant future prospects, meet the experiences of living in the city under the policies pursued. The bringing together of these poles became important, not to dissolve the conflicts but rather to measure out a territory that made the conflicts visible. When money flows, language and values ​​were drawn into our bodies, homes and streetscapes on a level both visible and invisible to the eye, we strove to try to understand the geography and make it legible. Two of the methods in our varied repertoire became cut-up workshops and city walks. In this retrospective text, we will situate them in a tradition of critical cartography which not only gives our practice a history but also a yet undetermined future. The fact that in this text we use the map - or rather the mapping - as a tool to highlight the practices, can be further justified by how our work originated in a combination of images of and stories about places, and that these were presented as 'objectively' desirable and true even though they were entirely ideological—in the same way that maps have an inherent claim to objectivity even though they are always ideological products. Our interest in counter-cartography can also be motivated by the fact that we sought to find other ways to navigate in an unwanted world order in unwanted change. This text thus becomes a way to test the idea of ​​mapping as a tool for creating and thinking otherwise.


Critical cartography as process and mobilisation 

Critical cartography, counter-cartography or counter-mapping are terms for mapping practices that are based on the basic assumption that maps and mapping both reflect and create social power relations. The starting point is that the creation of maps, both geographical and other, can be consciously used to study power and propose new power arrangements, and thus also challenge ways of thinking and action patterns. Maps not only help us navigate but also create discursive, mental and political spaces. While the hegemonic map reproduces bird's-eye views and Eurocentric approaches to the world, counter-cartographies can be summarily said to insist on both situated knowledge and more egalitarian spatial relations. It can therefore be about looking for visual representations beyond what Donna Haraway called “the god trick” - that is, the idea of ​​the disembodied gaze - by showing, in different ways, how the mapping was made and where it departs from. Cartographic strategies can be used to question and challenge dominant ways of understanding place and spatial relations. Such an exploration of the possibilities of representing a place also raises questions about what can actually be called a map.

If a map often represents something and aims to be analogous to specific conditions in a specific place, its being, then the project of counter-cartography is often to follow networks of events and relations, how the place is made. The sociologist W.E.B. Dubois's hand-painted data visualisations of living conditions for blacks in the United States around the turn of the last century, and geographer William Bunge's cartographic practices in 1960s Detroit, are both examples of successful attempts to create context by connecting events, places, economies and discourses that are otherwise kept separate. Today, critical cartography has developed into a well-established artistic and activist research method and spans from MIT architect Laura Kurgan's data-saturated mapping of the American prison industry, to artists Marianne Lindberg de Geer's or Minna L. Henriksson's personal mapping of social relations in local art worlds and mapping projects of a participant-based, collective nature such as Nermin Elsherif's project "The Other Maps of Egypt", where residents of Port Said in Cairo are invited to jointly redraw the history of their neighbourhood.

Counter-cartography as a method and tradition of doing comes largely from post-colonial practices of "mapping back". The concept of counter-cartography was coined by the sociologist Nancy Lee Peluso in 1995 when she worked with mapping, together with the indigenous Dayak people in Indonesia, to recover land that had been stolen.

The counter-cartography collective Orangotango highlights in its foreword to their impressive anthology This is Not an Atlas that the mapping struggles of indigenous people shed light on a paradox that often arises in counter-cartography: to be heard and recognized in their claim to land, a holistic understanding of place must be translated into dominant cartographic tools. A counter-cartographic practice therefore means nothing in itself, the risk of instrumentalization is always there, and every attempt must question the relations to the prevailing cartography and examine the possibilities of going beyond and/or positioning oneself in relation to more clichéd and violent visual representations.

As a possible response to these, counter-cartography is often process-oriented and focused on mobilizing specific groups and conducting joint investigations. While counter-cartography thereby breaks with a scientifically specialized view of cartography, both the collection of data and the collective decisions regarding selection become an integral part of the work. Regardless of whether it is about creating open-source coded websites or working out a new iconography by hand, the joint work is a way to democratize cartography's repertoire of techniques. By emphasizing the creation of place in this way, joint mapping can, at best, reproduce places and cities in their historical contexts and at the same time, through a collective and cognitive process, point to new realities and other ways of organizing space and resources.