Mapping and Liminal Spaces

Here at Body Cartography we think of mapping as a “creative enterprise that describes and constructs the space we live in” and cartography, as a practice of diagrammatically representing the physical and social world,

It is important to understand the map as a tool that mediates ones engagement with some unknown or partially known complex (the world, a city, buried infrastructure, social networks). As such it is necessarily selective; information is chosen to communicate a clearer picture of relevant elements that narrow choices and enable actions. As J. B. Harley notes, in traditional cartography, the method for narrowing and re-presenting the world in graphic form is rational and scientific; the goal being to translate as accurately as possible elements of the physical world. He challenges this claim to objectivity by arguing that maps are texts, not objective truths, stating that you must read in between its lines to see clearly the political and historical use of maps as a custodian and weapon of power in the form of knowledge (Harley). To this end, he writes “the freedom of rhetorical manoeuvre in cartography is considerable: the mapmaker merely omits those features of the world that lie outside the purpose of the immediate discourse.” (deconstructing the map) In this spirit, it is important to emphasize the voids in mapping and the map itself in order to reveal its ideological framework: how these ask us to see the world as well as live in it.