Mutar el mapa

Mutar el mapa is a continuous performative workshop and research, exploring possibilities and alternative narratives in opposition to cartographies that perpetuate extractivist-colonial-patriarchal relations between the Global South and the Global North. The aim throughout the workshops- laboratories is to open up spaces of movement, exploration, and dialogue: with the understanding that these will be spaces of radical imagination and collective thinking related to the body and everyday life. This space is in constant transformation with regard to its methodologies and questions, thus focusing on processes and experiences.

Mutar el mapa: taller-laboratorio de prácticas performáticas
Performative workshop
La Esmeralda, National School for Painting, Engraving, and Sculpture
Workshop of artist Vicente Razo
Mexico City
5th October, 2022

Workshop for BA Fine Art students, Vicente Razo´s workshop, Esmeralda, Mexico City.

What if we distort a map?
Warm-up / Intervention
Zeppelin university Summer School documenta15
Kassel, Germany
2nd September, 2022.

Performative workshop, documenta15 and Zeppelin University, 2022, Kassel, Germany.

For the intervention, I shared fragments of an ongoing performative research named Mutar el mapa (Mutating the Map). This research deals with questions of cartography in relation to coloniality, the body-territory,1 and everyday life. Through performance, installation, and collective thinking this investigation seeks to open dialogues that explore elements on maps as well as possible reconfigurations of the Mercator projection and its variants.

During the intervention for the summer school, I shared a few different performative exercises that aimed to explore and think together about such elements of cartography as scale, position, perspective, projection, and collective representation. For this intervention the elements were explored by means of observing, sensing, installing, moving, drawing, peeling, and sharing tangerines.

Mutar el mapa: taller-laboratorio de prácticas performáticas
residency / workshop
Museo Diego-Rivera Anahuacalli
Mexico City
February-July, 2022

Performative workshop-residency, Museo Diego-Rivera Anahuacalli, 2022, Mexico City.

In the workshop/laboratory "mutar el mapa" we shared, rehearsed, tested, proposed and thought together. In the workshop, we focused on exploring from our bodies elements of the cartographies as well as the political and power tensions and intensions linked to colonialism that they hold. For this we reviewed the compilation of texts Cartografías del Poder y descolonialidad (2014) comp. Bárbara Aguer where different authors analyze the field of cartography from a decolonial perspective, unveiling why Mercator's projection (1569) is a spatial narrative that perpetuates extractivist-colonial-patriarchal relations between North and Global South. By reviewing these texts, we were able to carry out exercises of bodily and spatial experimentation where we articulated words-drawings-installations as personal cartographies through performance.

For several months, we listened to each other and dialogued with our surroundings: nopales, rocks, hierba, snakes, lava, tepozanes, wind, architecture, concrete, allowing ourselves to be influenced by what was going through us at that moment. Based on conversations about our lives and the cartographic elements we proposed distortions and possible articulations for mapping from our place.

The challenge of this workshop is that it is articulated as it is made, tested, rehearsed and shared, looking for ways to materialize through experience and the everyday. From these questions the workshop-laboratory seeks to continue questioning the imposed representations, understanding where they start from, in order to propose exercises where it is possible to become aware, reconfigure what has been learned and propose gestures for collectively bet on representation for the body-territory. The idea of distorting the world map is intended to raise these questions in order to better understand the systemic violence that crosses us. Performance practices allow us to act, to understand, to generate knowledge from corporealities and movement in a collective way, the bet is from there, the situated corporeality and the exercise of relating from care and listening between us and the lands, territories and places we inhabit.

Performative workshop-residency, Museo Diego-Rivera Anahuacalli, 2022, Mexico City.

Publication with fragments of the process during the workshop-residency, 2022, Mexico City.

In this link you can see a publication harvesting from the process of the workshop:
Da click en el link para ver la publicación del proceso:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aR80COxRJrbyFL_l4BMRACAGS2y7IYgq/view

Distorting maps: Performative scores
performative-workshop
Open Forum, KiHO Oslo National Academy of the Arts
Oslo, Norway.
27th and 28th October, 2021

A curved surface cannot be projected on a flat surface without distortion. Maps have never been neutral representations, they carry meaning, specific positions, and power relations.

Performative workshop on scores for distorting maps, MA Fine Art Stidents,
Open Forum, 2021, Oslo National Academy of the Arts KiHO, Norway.

In this two-days performative workshop we will explored notions of distortion of maps and power relations through body movement, written language and drawing. Day one, weoç move thinking about distortion and reorientation. Day two, following the echoes of movement generated the first day, we experimented with performative scoring, which consist in writing an instruction to try/imagine the chosen movement-image.

Performative workshop on scores for distorting maps, MA Fine Art Stidents,
Open Forum, 2021, Oslo National Academy of the Arts KiHO, Norway.

Michelle Saenz Burrola

Mutar el mapa