This exhibition is generously supported by H-E-B with support from the Texas Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Donors, and Members like You!
The following is excerpted from TERRA FORMA : A Book of Speculative Maps by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arénes, and Axelle Grégoire, Forward: How To Fight About Space by Bruno Latour:
“This is a strange moment when people are beginning to wonder where, when, and who they are. There is a new uncertainty about the shape of the land, about this moment in history, about the role we humans should play. No wonder we suddenly need tools to orient ourselves, to envision how to cope and where to settle. At a time of ecological mutations, a new map of the Earth seems indispensable. But what sort of map?
The word ‘map’ quickly brings to mind the idea of a grid that defines the base map (what in French we call le fond de carte) for everything that will be added later, layer upon layer. But ‘map’ originally described something resembling nothing more grandiose than a marked-up paper towel or napkin. When you scribble doodles on a napkin, you have produced a map—according to the word's Latin etymology. And you have provided a pretty good example of its most useful function: in the course of a conversation, someone grabs a flat piece of paper and draws symbols and features that make sense to those engaged in the dis-cussion, even though those scribbles, figures, and notations might not be at all legible to an outsider.
Just who are those outsiders who claim to be able to read all maps as if they were designed for them? Why should they enjoy an undisputed hegemony regarding the definition of the activity of mapping?
In a beautiful show a few years ago titled When Artists Drew Maps, French archivists presented to the public a beautifully painted set of maps—flat pieces of parchment—that utilized none of the conventions that were imposed in the seventeenth century to define the grid-limited base map. Far from being meant for outsiders, those marvelous drawings, painted by artists and not by surveyors, were intended for a very particular audience, and they were checked and certified by the parties in conflict who had commissioned them in order to enlighten arbiters as to the disputes. Those documents, sometimes able to superimpose conflicting views of the same piece of land, would be signed by both parties after protracted and contradictory visits to the site; they were magnificently called figures accordées, ‘agreed-upon figurations.’
A few decades later, artists were kicked out of the trade and replaced by surveyors and geometers under the firm hand of the monarchy. At that point maps were devised to help complete outsiders ease their way through unknown places they might wish to dominate and control without having to agree, discuss, or negotiate in any way with the locals. Maps and the colonial imaginary were now well and jointly ensured.
When geographers, rather late in the twentieth century, enthusiastically embraced the spatial turn, or rather the easy access to GIS data structures, they lost space and were largely lost ‘in space.’ The hard, complicated, boots-on-the-ground, con-tradictory, specific, tailor-made attention to the ‘geo-’ that the suffix ‘-graphy’ underlined was jettisoned in the name of a more ‘scientific,’ data-driven management to help outsiders drive through a land in which they had no real interest-except for locating resources to be exploited. Geographers lost the Earth in the process.
How can we inhabit this world made up of lives other than ours, this reactive Earth? Maps as we know them bespeak a relationship to a space emptied of life, an available space that can be conquered or colonized. We had to begin by trying to repopulate maps. To do so, we have shifted the object of nota-tion, trying to delineate not the soil without living things, but the living things in the ground, the living of the soil, as they constitute it. This cartography of the living attempts to document the living as well as their traces, to generate maps based on bodies, rather than on topography, frontiers, and territorial borders.
Humans have long considered themselves to be directors of the theater of nature: builders, shapers of mountains, the sole organizers of space. Without denying this demiurgic aspect (after all, we are creators of space, like all living beings) or this tendency to stage the world, it is clear that the role of humanity has changed: humankind is no longer solely in control, it creates together with many other actors, it makes way for what we call animate entities: human and nonhuman, living and nonliving agents who shape space. The desire to reconceive our poietic and demi-urgic relationship to space is what brought us, the authors, together. Repopulating maps amounts to accepting the idea that we humans are not alone in making them.”
