Hydrocartography: Mapping with Waters

“Nothing in the world is as soft, as weak, as water; nothing else can wear away the hard, the strong, and remain unaltered. Soft overcomes hard, weak overcomes strong. Everybody knows it, nobody uses the knowledge.”
—Lao Tzu¹

Traditional, arid cartography—say, a typical school world map—could be belittingly described as the science of imposing continents and demarcated grounds onto the irrelevant in-betweenness of the world’s oceans. Waters are depicted as adverse obstacles when moving between relevant solid territories, or as mere voids, and are thus often invisibilized in traditional cartography which seems to be obsessed with the dry and static, rocks and metals. Arid cartography tends to depict water as a knowable separate element, enclosed in its rightful domains—rivers, lakes, oceans—visualized with graphic elements such as static points, lines, and demarcated surfaces. And then there’s the material fact that water, for centuries, constituted a major threat for paper maps, its mere presence posing the menace of maceration and dissolution of cartography’s sacrosanct product.

With Lao Tzu’s words in mind—“as soft, as weak, as water; / nothing else can wear away / the hard, the strong”—why not engage this watery threat, suppose: “By drawing upon the reservoir of unknowability carried within all waters, we may situate ourselves in ways that challenge land-based preconceptions of fixity.” Taking any map to a walk alongside, with, and through watery bodies allows us to experiment with the liberating potential of hydrocartography—our sweating bodies, sudden rain showers, and our water-loving daughters potential accomplices in this endeavour. Understanding ethics as an enabling alternative to morality, as “becoming attuned to the complexity of the world and our immersion in it,” and thus as “actively working on and reshaping relationships,” we feel engaging an ethics of water can help us think through how we relate to each other, and the generative unpredictability of any cartographic encounter.