Archivo de la categoría: Radical Cartography

Projects, Radical Cartography

The Zone

The Zone is a project about the Anthropocene/Capitalocene landscapes of our damaged planet. It takes its name from a real physical space, the exclusion zone established as a consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. The Zone is also a metaphor that constructs the mythology of the present, warning us against dreams of technological progress turned into nightmares. The project explores the possibilities of art & cartography displays in understanding contemporary environmental disasters.

The Zone. Photo by Marcos Morilla, courtesy of LABoral.

The project consists of four main parts: 1/ an outdoors installation, 2/ an interactive map, 3/ a workers area, 4/ a documentation area.

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Outdoors installation. Photo by Marcos Morilla, courtesy of LABoral.

An outdoors installation occupy the public space at the entrance of LABoral Art Center. It consists of a deposit of radioactive bags evoking the storage facilities for contaminated soil from the nuclear crisis spread over all the ridges of Fukushima prefecture.

Interactive Map. Photo by Marcos Morilla, courtesy of LABoral.

The main piece is a 78 square metres interactive map. The map is projected on the floor allowing the visitors to walk on the top of it. Five digitally fabricated objects on its surface, when approached by the visitor, activate a specific story. These stories include 1/ the earthquake and tsunami, 2/ the multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns, 3/ the evacuation of the population, 4/ the first journalist to get into the Exclusion Zone, and 5/ the citizen science as a response to the radiological disaster.

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Workers area. Photo by Marcos Morilla, courtesy of LABoral.

The workers’ area is a tribute to the thousands of workers, mostly subcontract ones, who enter Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant everyday or work in the decontamination brigades. It includes a Geiger Counter developed by Safecast, a citizen science community established in Japan as a response to the nuclear disaster.

Documentation area
Documentation area. Photo by Román Torre.

The documentation area includes books, reports, photos and academic papers on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. It additionally includes resources from primary sources collected in Japan between November 2011 and February 2012. Selected Academic Papers are organised into six main categories: Social Movements, Citizen Science, Philosophy, Ecosystems, Activism, Workers and Public Health.

Projects, Radical Cartography

Tentacular Lexicon

With a meteoric rise in recent years as one of the academic terms that define our contemporaneity, the Anthropocene is today a mega-concept whose hegemony is difficult to escape. The Holocene was left behind, current geological epoch is defined by the effects of human activity from the bedrock to the limits of the stratosphere. Overwhelming global data evidences that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other Earth system processes are now altered by humans. Capturing public imagination in the natural sciences, the humanities and the arts, the Anthropocene has moved quickly from a proposal on the geological periodization of the planet to a multidisciplinary conversation of wide range generating new research projects, books, academic journals, doctoral theses, seminars, art exhibitions and cultural programs worldwide.

Diving into that emerging interdisciplinary framework, “Tentacular Lexicon” addresses the Anthropocene both as a geological concept and a popular one by exploring propositions that critically inquire the term beyond stratigraphy and Earth system sciences. It visualises the lexicon from three books: Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene; Deborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the Worlds; and Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason M. Moore. From different situated practices and disciplines, these contributions contest the way of naming of the Anthropocene, pointing out the need to open up the conversation to other narratives and ways of knowing.

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Pablo DeSoto’s Tentacular Lexicon
Projects, Radical Cartography, Workshop

The Global Street

The Global Street is an online video-cartography linking the streets and squares the streets and squares across Tunis, Cairo, Madrid, New York, Tokyo, Istanbul, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro.

From the Arab revolutions to the 15M movement in Spain, from Occupy Wall Street in the USA to the Hydrangea revolt in Japan, from #direngezi in Turkey to the June Journeys in Brazil, music has played an essential role to sustain and in some ways synchronize protestors hearts, political agendas and imaginations.

The Global Street assembles a selection of affective songs and disruptive beats which were part of already historical atmospheres of democratic change: from the chanting crowds in Tahrir Square and Puerta del Sol to the Taksim Gezi Park barricade drums, from the Gospel band in Zuccotti Park to the Brazilian protest funk.

Go to site.

Projects, Radical Cartography, Workshop

Metropolitan Videocartography Medellín

Taller de videocartografía metropolitana, Medellín

“Los suburbios de las ciudades del tercer mundo son el nuevo escenario geopolítico decisivo” Mike Davis (Planet of Slums)

“Sea arte, sea deporte, sea de la manera que sea, queremos seguir arrebatando jóvenes a la violencia. Medellín no está lleno de sicarios, esto está lleno de talento urbano.” Falco (artista hip hop, Comuna de Moravia)

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Projects, Radical Cartography, Workshop

Citizen Cartography International Symposium

El I Encuentro Internacional de Cartografía Ciudadana tuvo lugar en el Paraninfo de la Ciudad de la Cultura y en LABoral Centro de Arte de Gijón entre el 30 de julio y el 1 de agosto de 2009. El encuentro reunió por primera vez bajo esa temática a un amplio grupo de investigadores y activistas de diferentes ámbitos: arquitectura, periodismo, antoprología, urbanismo, prácticas artísticas, geografía, biología, psicología, trabajo social y desarrollo de software. La metodología consistió en presentaciones teóricas y sesiones de trabajo que tuvieron como objetivo el tejer red y combinar esfuerzos y recursos para el desarrollo de un proyectos convergentes de software libre de cartografía ciudadana. Como actividad paralela, llevamos a cabo una deriva por las zonas en transformación de Xixón con la Asociación a Pie de Barrio.
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Projects, Radical Cartography

Gaza cartography

Este trabajo recoge un catálogo de mapas, software y vídeos coordinados de forma narrativa usando tecnologías avanzadas de descripción del espacio (GIS, Software, Modelado 3D) mostrando aspectos que no serían evidentes en una primera lectura. Pueden ser extrapolados a territorios y contextos de paz sujetos a tensiones y transformaciones en que la arquitectura y el urbanismo tengan una importancia relevante.

See atlas https://issuu.com/filoatlas/docs/cartografiando_gaza

Cartografiando Gaza es una prolongación del Taller de Invierno de 2009 del Área de Proyectos Arquitectónicos en la Escuela Politécnica Superior de la Universidad de Alicante y que en la presente edición contó con el comisariado de Régine Debatty, José Pérez de Lama y Pablo de Soto, y la coordinación del catedrático José María Torres Nadal y los profesores Miguel Mesa del Castillo y Juan Carlos Castro.

Projects, Radical Cartography

From Cairo to Gaza

Road movie documental que recorre los 330km que separan El Cairo de la frontera sur de Gaza durante los días de la Operación Plomo Fundido en enero de 2009, que causó más de 1400 muertos y miles de heridos entre la población palestina. El viaje sigue los intentos de la sociedad civil egipcia de quebrar el bloqueo impuesto por su propio gobierno organizando acciones y protestas para mostrar su solidaridad.

TITLE: De El Cairo a Gaza
INTERNATIONAL TITLE: From Cairo to Gaza
LENGHT: 13 min
FORMAT: video PAL 16/9
LANGUAGE: english / arabic
SUBTITLES: spanish
COUNTRY-DATE OF PRODUCTION: Spain / december 2010

Projects, Radical Cartography

Critical Cartography of the Straits of Gibraltar

Hackitectura’s map Cartografía Crítica del Estrecho (Cartography of the Straits of Gibraltar) creates an alternative understanding of the Spanish-Moroccan border region. The border is not an abstract geopolitical line but an increasingly complicated, contested space. The inversely oriented (north at the bottom) map highlights connections between southern Spain and northern Morocco to show a single region. A multitude of migrants enters Europe in flows, past motion sensors, semi-military repression and expulsion. The idea of the map is to follow the flows that already traverse the border, such as migrants, Internet data and cell phone calls, as well as capital and police. The flows reshape the very border into a border region. In this mapping project, Hackitectura and their collaborators map the border region to contest and transcend it.

Projects, Radical Cartography

Seville Global Map

In Seville, on the eve of a large EU summit and concomitant protests in 2002, a collaborative mapping project was carried out with different community organizations to try to represent different effects of globalization on the city. The project drew on Zapatista frameworks of understanding, particularly those from the communiqués on “Seven Loose Pieces of the Global Jigsaw Puzzle” (Marcos 1997) and the “Fourth World War” (Marcos 2001). In this case, the map is part of a broader collective project of revisioning the city, a project that lasted much longer than the action itself.

This early mapping projects resembled street maps, although our goal was to chart the diversity of protest actions and events at one of the large anti-globalization protests. Individual groups could plot their different actions on a larger master copy and it could be used as an infopoint at a protest convergence center or reprinted for handheld use. From these efforts at showing where protests were happening, later efforts focused on how to translate discussions of the effects of “globalization” on a city-wide scale.