filling absences
We’ve been thinking about the stories maps tell, not only about the places they locate, but also about the people who make them. Denis Woods says that maps are as important for what they don’t include as for what they do include.
Michel de Certeau writes that “…the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths…and their trajectories…But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by… These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice…It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.”
Our walking events and
experiences refill these absences and reclaim forgotten actions from
the past, in the present. We explore the paths made by people who walk
across vacant lots in Detroit and across fields in South Africa -- and
what connects them. We look at how people make their own paths; how and
why people’s paths cross; how they are formed through culture,
geography, language, economics and love; and how changing patterns of
movement alter perceptions, attitudes and lives. The stories of these
walkers and these communities inhabit the paths of the project –
through performance, conversation, installation and mapping, literally
and figuratively connecting people who live 8,700 miles apart. The Walking Project is akin to an archaeological excavation in reverse.
____________________________
These networks of desire lines are personal, often intimate, maps that tell stories about these shifting communities. They demonstrate differences, and they also illuminate similarities.
There is something worth capturing here – beyond the ephemera of our performances and the shifting geographies of KwaZulu-Natal and Detroit. As Denis Woods maintains, maps offer “…a reality that exceeds our vision, our reach, the span of our days, a reality we achieve no other way. We are always mapping the invisible or the unattainable or the erasable, the future or the past, the whatever-is-not-here-present-to-our-senses-now and, through the gift that the map gives us, transmuting it into everything it is not … into the real.”
