Page 99 - Beberemos El Vino Nuevo, Juntos! Let Us Drink the New Wine, Together!

The geopolitical activism of collaborative artistic counter-mapping in Mapeo de bordes porosos / Mapping porous borders
Linda Knight
Communities across the globe use counter-mapping as a geopolitical practice for recording - and asserting their relationships to land. For some communities this means re-establishing the boundary lines of their cultural lands previously erased or reinscribed through colonisation. For others, it is a way to settle disputes over ceremonial spaces, areas of spiritual significance, or hunting grounds. In many of these contexts mapping is a social and collaborative affair, with cartographers using diverse schematics, oral histories and stories, corporeal practices, and many different kinds of technologies, materials, and ephemera to create the mappings. The emphasis can be on the practice of the mapping over the end result: the map, and permanent map documents may be produced or not. What the different practices and contexts indicate, is that counter-mapping is entirely different to western and colonial cartographies that were produced with a key purpose to convey information about land to others unfamiliar with that place. In this context, western maps, produced on paper and more recently in digital format, utilise universal schema and symbols and use particular geospatial projections to portray land as a resource. The universalising imagery and schemata of western maps has been one of the key methodological tools of colonisation, along with the design of seacraft.
The modest counter-mapping and its preference for use of artistic practices is a significant activist response to the aims, purposes, and impacts of western cartography.
Recognising the activist power of artistic counter-mapping, the artistic experiment project Mapeo de bordes porosos / Mapping porous borders brought people together across the globe as they endured conditions of isolation during the global pandemic as it took hold in 2020. The global actions and reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic created immense and rapid changes in our lives. We were suddenly forced to limit our everyday movements, stop our social gatherings, and cancel our plans to see friends and family. Using artistic counter-mapping practices, each project within the experiment enabled globally-dispersed artists to process the pandemic experience and its impact on their lives and futures. The satellite projects, discussed below, counter-mapped the mainstream separation and isolation narratives taking place by creatively finding ways to generatively maintain connections between global artist communities separated by closed borders. The impacts of these sudden restrictions are beautifully explored in Let Us Drink the New Wine, Together!
Beberemos el vino nueve, juntos! / Let us drink the new wine, together!
What processes of connection were still possible when so many closures were in place? The usual ways for collaborating on artistic projects, visiting and participating in art, making new projects, networking; all suddenly ceased. Let us drink the new wine, together! is an experiment into border crossing at a time of extraordinary border control.
Borderlines are critically explored physically and digitally through the travelling of documents rather than people across borders, using the postal service and digital file transference. An identical image of a world map, drawn with a simple outline, was distributed to artists on all continents of the world. As long as we stayed in place in our different parts of the world, the only document we could all relate to/locate to was a map of our globe.
Each artist was invited to counter-map the image, to contest the highly familiar borderlines of this global map. The artists were then invited to return the altered image via digital file transfer,
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