Maps

The countless languages of maps materialize the countless ways we relate to land. Maps create relations between us and where we are, where we have been, and where we’d like to go. There are maps shared through stories; ephemeral maps drawn on the ground and erased by the wind; tactile maps made to resemble the shapes of coastlines; speculative maps of the future; and, ineluctably, maps of empire. In many cases, the function of a map is not to represent reality, but to imagine something in excess of it, and give form to that.

“[O]ur bodies’ water is the very water that forms and circulates through other human and more-than-human bodies; the Atlantic Ocean at the coast of Santa Catarina, the frosty clouds of the German winter, the snow on Mount Vesuvio’s peak… all of these waters, notwithstanding their varying physical states and qualities—other yet same—circulate literally within and between bodies, in a planetary flow, across space and time.” cristina t. ribas and paul schweizer (the latter of kollektiv orangotango, a network of critical geographers, friends,