Where are we?: August 2011

Friday, August 26, 2011

Some favorite books on wayfinding, place, and mapping

E.V. Walter, Placeways

Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

Alan Morantz, Where Is Here?

Hugh Brody, Maps and Dreams

Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden

Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Katharine Harmon, You are Here. Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination

Caroline and Marine Laffon, Mapping the World: Stories of Geography

Add your own in the Comments box

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Stop Canada's export of asbestos to India

Asbesto kills. If you are a Canadian, your tax dollars support the work of this killer in countries like India.

Listen to this CBC radio interview. Then tell Canadian Prime Minister Harper to stop Canada's export of asbestos.

The interview is with Michaela Kaiserlingk, a 72-year-old widow whose life changed forever when her husband got sick with mesothelioma, a terminal cancer caused by asbestos exposure. His death turned her into a fervent activist, and she now spends her retirement trying to convince the Canadian government to ban the export of asbestos overseas. She argues that if the mineral is too dangerous to use in Canada, we shouldn't be exporting it to developing countries such as India.

Go to Ms. Kaiserlingk's website and speak out.

Where is here?

The title banner includes a detail from “Targets” (2000) by the U.S. artist Joyce Kozloff. “Targets” is a walk-in globe within which are painted panels of every country bombed by the U.S. since 1945. One panel on wheels acts as a door to the globe.

In the detail here, the door is ajar and we look out into the dark uncertain. I want maps (and any official representation of place), notorious for concealing their own human making and values, to have something like this doorway into their made life, an entering place where we can stand and ask questions of all those place names, images and other marks made familiar-seeming and coherent by being caught within the administrative-scientific grid-space of straight lines and co-ordinates. I recommend Kazloff’s creative wonderings about maps, places and empire, including her “Imperial Cities,” “Silk Routes” and “Voyages” projects.

Canadian painter Landon Mackenzie combines her expertise in cartography, her interest in neuroscience, and her curiosity about the experiential dimensions of place, its human ‘mapping’, and the contending personal and cultural memories and their stories (“the ghostly bits”) that inhabit places and maps. Mackenzie’s work is discussed widely but most interestingly from the perspective of this blog by Alan Morantz, Where is Here? Canada’s Maps and the Stories They Tell.

The traveller's way

The traveller’s way, as experienced here, offers up blind corners and wonders. It branches and digresses. It leads to places that excavate memories, to others that invite dialogue and questions. The traveller’s way humbles with what is not known or understood. Beyond the coordinates of empire, the traveller’s way invites the toes to stretch and curl down into those singular places where the peculiar energies of the ghosts of others’ creaturely lives seem to whisper words like ‘longing’, ‘delight’, ‘care’. The traveller’s way cheers on a more open life.