curating and mapping

curating and mapping...
Recently, I’ve been reading and thinking about the themes of curating and mapping. It all started with an attempt to understand the research approaches of visual anthropologists and ethnographists. The researcher as participant-observer is a core concept in these fields, and I reflected on my own position – what am I participating in? What does it mean to be an outsider and a non-native speaker from the US? At this stage, I am simply a participant-observer in navigating the city’s neighborhoods. Eventually, I will get more involved in some neighborhood activities, but for now, I’m really just another person walking around. As an outsider, I don’t see things habitually yet, but what stands out to me is different from what others would notice. This is where the concept of curating comes in. Here is a quote that describes how navigating a city is a curating process...

“Our individual experience of the city is innately fragmented, episodic and partial. In order to navigate the city a path must be traced. This path may consist of a sequence of known streets or a series of views to distant landmarks, but it could equally be framed by the determination to find something less tangible; warmth, fresh air, adventure or solace. Along this path individual moments are later singled out as significant milestones or as distinct, and sometimes treasured, memories. In between these moments, the rest is blurred or lost. This is why an individual’s experience of the city is fragmentary. The mind makes sense of these moments by placing them in a historical sequence or by sorting them into a range of possible groupings and then by representing or reframing them, in diaries, conversations and reminiscences. In this way, we each curate our experience of the city.”

SOURCE: Chapman, Michael and Michael Ostwald. 2009. “Curated desires: film photography and the visual transformation of urban space in surrealism” in Chaplin, Sarah and Alexandra Stara. 2009. Curating Architecture and the City. London/New York: Routledge. p.39.

Chapman and Ostwald distinguish curating from cartography, defining curating as a “selective presentation of elements...to infer the existence of a totality.” and cartography as a scientific effort to “construct a whole and identify its constituent parts”. Curating is interpretive whereas cartography attempts to be objective. However, I think of “mapping” as a term that can encompass both of these ideas and is also a common tool for visual anthropologists. I saw an example of this in an exhibit called “Placemaking” at the Schering Stiftung in Berlin. One element of the exhibit used maps made by people who had immigrated to Berlin from other countries. The maps included information about each individual’s routine destinations and paths as well as areas, such as “no-go zones”, that they interpreted as either irrelevant to their life or worth avoiding.

some inspiring examples...

I have been thinking about how this concept of curating and personal mapping can be used in community art projects and found some inspiring examples, which I discuss in this entry...