UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI PALERMO Dottorato di Ricerca Internazionale in STUDI CULTURALI EUROPEI – EUROPÄISCHE KULTURSTUDIEN XXIX CICLO Dipartimento di Culture e Società (Settore Scientifico-disciplinare M-GGR/01) (UN)EXHAUSTED CARTOGRAPHIES Re-living the visuality, aesthetics and politics in contemporary mapping theories and practices TUTOR Prof.ssa Giulia de Spuches TESI DI CO-TUTOR Dott.ssa Laura Lo Presti Prof. Francesco Fiorentino COORDINATORE Prof. Michele Cometa A.A. 2016-2017 (UN)EXHAUSTED CARTOGRAPHIES Re-living the visuality, aesthetics and politics in contemporary mapping theories and practices By Laura Lo Presti Cover image: Ruth Watson (2014). The world today, today, today… INDEX Table of Illustrations 6 INTRODUCTION Mapping Forwards, Seeing Backwards 7 PART I THE CARTOGRAPHIC EXHAUSTION On the life and death of representations 22 CHAPTER ONE CHARTING REPRESENTATION 24 Representing Geography 24 The event of representation 28 Primacy and limits of geographical representations 31 A semiology of space 33 Staying on top of the trees while changing the life on earth: cultural turn(s) and the new wage of representationalism 37 Nothing outside representation 42 After the postmodern ‘hangover’: the return to the real 44 The dead geographies of representation 48 Desiring the Outside: the paradoxical philosophy of non-representational geographies 52 Practising the Outside: non-representational toolkit and cultural re-socialization 57 CHAPTER TWO DISFIGURING THE MAP 61 Cartographic anxieties 61 Drilling holes into the cartographic language 67 The silent arbiter of power 73 3 In the beginning was the Map 79 Haunted cartographies 85 Gynesis of mapmaking 87 Postcolonial cartographies 95 And fell, even as a dead body map falls 103 CHAPTER THREE POST(MORTEM) CARTOGRAPHIES 109 Exhausted cartography or inattentive geographies? 109 Leaving or rescuing the map? 115 Rescuing the map: a threefold trajectory toward a post-representational cartography 118 After cartography: changing the skin or the bones of the map? 121 Maps, malgré tout... 127 Behind the digital turn: the turbulences and viscosities of autonomous/ automated human geographies 131 1993. The Hot Autumn of Friday Harbour 132 1993. The incubation of Cultural GIS in Italy 134 2014. Leaves fall again. Re-visiting Friday Harbour 136 Reclaiming the skin: epidermic GIS and feminist epistemologies 138 Inside Critical Cartography: a re-articulation of reflexivity, reflection and criticality 142 Beyond cartography: destabilizing and troubling representations 145 The first movement: oscillating between map-making and mapping 147 The second movement: performative mapping 151 The third movement: the mediat(iz)ed object 154 PART II THE CARTOGRAPHIC UNEXHAUSTION Re-living mapping through visuality and aesthetics 157 CHAPTER FOUR DISPLA(Y)CING MAPS Mapping contemporary modes of seeing and sensing 159 A map caught in the net of the living 159 Redrawing lines of engagement between map studies and cultural geography 164 4 Setting the plot: Visual culture, Aesthetics and Geography 166 The grammatology and graphology of vision 169 For a visual geography 176 …or for geographic visualities? 183 Everybody watches but nobody feels 188 Geo-artistic entanglements 192 Geo-Aesthetical cartographies 196 Artistic cartographies 201 Intermittences. The Coming and Going of maps 206 Interferences: toward a twisted methodology to explore contemporary mapping practices 211 CHAPTER FIVE WET NECROCARTOGRAPHIES From the death of cartography to the (in)calculability of death 217 Mediterranean cartographies: the slippery mapping of migratory events 217 Drowning on a wet earth: scratching the surficial deathscape of the Sea 223 On the Mediterranean necro-cartographic territory 234 Operational cartographies: the visual regime of spatial numericality 239 Ap/prehensive spaces: mapactivism and the re-assemblage of (in)visibilities regimes 248 Bleeding maps. The forensic turn in cartography 255 Affective/effective cartopolitics 264 CONCLUSION Mapping Backwards, Seeing Forwards 270 BIBLIOGRAPHY 277 5 Table of Illustrations Table 1. Timeline of non-representational theories (In Cadman 2009: 2). 56 Figure 1. Vernon Fisher, 1995. “Men cutting the globe”. 23 Figure 2. Ana Mendes, 2015. “Map Series” (installation/performance), pt.1. 62 Figure 3. Ana Mendes, 2015. “Map Series” (installation/performance), pt. 2. 62 Figure 4. Batoul S’himi, 2010. “World Under Pressure”. Personal picture. 88 Figure 5. Emma Lee Adherlot with her assistants, 1958. “Bird's eye view of the campus of the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina”. 95 Figure 6. Shanawdithit, 1829. «The taking of Mary March on the north side of the lake» 98 Figure 7. James Cook, 1775. “The map of Newfoundland”. 99 Figure 8. Joyce Kozloff, 2000. “Targets”. 158 Figure 9. Urban Performance, 2015. “Die Weltgrosste Wienkarte”. 160 Figure 10. Laura Canali, 2016. “L’Isola che non c’è”. 203 Figure 11. Laura Canali, 2016. “Il filo del tempo 1”. 203 Figure 12. Laura Canali, 2015. «Il Mediterraneo non è più liquido. E non è più poetico». 224 Figure 13. Laura Canali, 2015. «Il Mediterraneo è pietra». 224 Figure 14. Laura Canali, 2015. «Il Mediterraneo non è più liquido (preparatory draft)». 230 Figure 15. Vessels’ tracking on the Mediterranean Sea. 240 Figure 16. Palermo’s Coast Guard control room, 2016. Personal picture. 240 Figure 17. Coast Guard’s Central Office. 240 Figure 18. Frontex’s Migratory routes map. 246 Figure 19. The location of Roszke camp. Tweet from 6 sept 2015. 248 Figure 20. The Migrants’ File, 2016. Bleeding map of people dying in the attempt to reach Europe. 257 Figura 21. Zach Lihatsh, 2016. “Iron Cartography”. 259 6 INTRODUCTION Mapping Forwards, Seeing Backwards Du lebst und tust mir nichts. [You are alive but will not hurt me!] (Warburg in Gombrich, 1997 [1970]:70) Visual theorist W. J. T Mitchell asserts that the “birth of an image cannot be separated from its deadness” (2005: 55). And it is rightly from the presumed death of an image, an inanimate object of desire and apprehension which has seduced, tormented, haunted and felt as exhausting the work of human geographers, that the present research has been nurtured by and simultaneously claims to move on. The critical image to which I direct attention is the geographic representation par excellence, the map. After the dismantle of the positivist paradigm and in the aftermath of the cultural turn, cartography has been treated by critical and cultural geographers as an exhausted discipline, model, language, and form mostly informed by technocrat and ideological discourses. Even if is common-sensical accepted that “maps and cartography comprise a primary part of the geographer’s technology, methodology and language” (Bradshaw and Williams 1999: 250), to tell the truth, nowadays, we are on the cusp of an uncomfortable situation where scholars, especially belonging to the radical niches of human geography, become visibly in unease if it is noted by outsiders that their activity is linked to the production and teaching of the cartographic knowledge. In the midst of the postmodern hangover, cartography has been more likely deconstructed as the master narrative of the geopolitical, colonial, and imperialist modernity and, in its digital transposition, perceived as a ubiquitous and pervasive medium sustaining a new totalizing and violent synoptical vision. In this turbulent atmosphere, geographers—instead of crafting their own maps—have started to metaphorically and furiously cut and ripped them in order to unmask the hidden and tremendous secret of their tacit and abstract powerfulness. The map has indeed become in more than one sense: “dead, a concept in ruins, carpet bombed by the formidable arsenals of contemporary critical theory” (Prendergast 2000: IX). 7 Yet, the disfiguration of the map as the evil side of geography, the demonic force that must inevitably bring about the geography’s fall, has shown simultaneously a libidinal attachment on the part of geographers to that icon. Such figural approach is suspended between what Mitchell (2005) and Latour (2010) attribute to the iconoclastic attitude (a type of exorcism in the wish to destroy images) and idolatry (the belief in their magical or divine ‘presence’). In short, for a great part of human geographers the prosopopoeial nature of the map as it were alive and able to speak for itself the language of power has consequently caused the desire to dismiss and bury the mapping tool once and for all in their own research. Yet, this cartophobic attitude has certainly been positive in the sense it allowed new and others ways to conceive and relate space, places and bodies to spread out in geographic circles. Those are some of the reasons among others that led many geographers to snub maps as a source of analysis, preferring at most a deconstructivist approach to them. For real, the majority of human geographers, especially cultural geographers, seems not to have (anymore) professional technical skills in order to participate into the cartographic knowledge production. Yet, now more than ever, mapping continues exerting a massive influence in the contemporary age. Whether it is a “desire” (Pickles 2004), an “impulse” (Alpers 1983), a “problem-solving practice” (Kitchin and Dodge 2007), a “story-telling device” (Caquard 2014), a “spatialisation without temporality” (Massey 2005), the “affect of geography” (Rogoff 2010), mapping still remains ‘a’ well-acknowledged way to be interested in the spatial configurations of the world. Despite the metaphoric