Borasi and her curatorial team considered how our physical surroundings are incessantly subjected to exchange pro­cesses occurring across architectural, en­vironmental, and geo-political planes, triggering material changes which ultimately feed back into shaping the realities of the people affected. In order to invite visitors to navigate this assemblage, the exhibition was organized as a compilation of 15 thematic narrative zones visually distinguished by a colour scheme and mapped out according to a glossary of 15 concepts serving as frames for the case studies. The exhibits themselves included a diverse array of archival documents, museological and mundane objects, antique books, maquettes, maps, plans, videos, illustrations, art photography and, faithful to its title, even a coconut drifting through ocean currents. It was through this diversity and unconventional composition that the exhibition could provoke discoveries based on tensions, correlations, and curiosities.
   
While Deleuze and Guattari were developing their innovative spatio-philosophical concepts of smooth and striated space in A Thousand Plateaus, the difference between the ideology of the modernist White Cube (as articulated by Brian O’Doherty) and the decentring strategies of Lucy Lippard (based on the work of Dan Graham and Robert Smithson, among others) was being argued in the realms of art theory and scholarship. Echoing the critique of the illusionary construction of settlers’ maps, O’Doherty argued in a series of essays published in Artforum that the White Cube of the modernist gallery space is built upon an illusion of neutrality: “The white wall’s apparent neutrality is an illusion. It stands for a community with common ideas and assumptions. [...] The development of the pristine, placeless white cube is one of modernism’s triumphs—a development commercial, esthetic, and technological.”¹⁹ Accordingly, the art displayed in the context of this “void” is set apart from the world and can seemingly take on its own life, existing independently from social, historical, or political contingencies. What really is the case, however, is that the architecture of the cube becomes a frame—a grid structure—that signifies the affirmation and unification of certain ideas and values by excluding a great number of others. This exclusionary aspect is something the feminist thinker and curator Lucy Lippard has confronted in her curatorial work. Reminiscent of the “vibrant geography” acknowledged and produced through Indigenous mapping techniques, Lippard’s practice sees sites and places as crucial elements of meaning ful art practice. In her words, “Art that illuminates its location rather than just occupying it is place-specific [...], incorporating people and economic and historical forces as well as topography. It usually ‘takes place’ outside of conventional venues that entice audiences through publicity and fashion. It is not closeted in ‘white cubes,’ accessible only when admission is paid or boundaries are breached. It is not readable only to those in the know. [...] It makes places mean more to those who live or spend time in them.”²⁰ Like in the two types of mapping described by Neufeld, or the concepts of smooth and striated space in Deleuze and Guattari, the difference for Lippard is signalled by her emphatic refusal of the alleged objectivity or neutrality of the gallery space.

In comparing the roles of the cartographer and the curator, we might now ask more directly: what does Antillean philosopher Édouard Glissant mean when he says, “I imagine the museum as an archipelago”? Essential to Glissant’s notion of the archipelago is the idea of a fragmented territory that cannot be reconciled under a collective identity but which instead must accept individual identities as the diverse multiplicities which they always are. Like a Dymaxion Map, a “moving islands” story map, or a Polynesian stick chart, the curator operates on the institution to make it leak; curatorial practice, as a cartography of thefluid,works to create a decentred space that does not operate according to absoluteness, objectivity, or synthesis, but rather invites a multiplicity of interconnections brought about by conjecture, memory, sensation, excess, and reflexivity. In moving toward this curatorial invitation, we could do worse than to appropriate James Corner’s description of mapping as our own cartographic guide:

As both analogue and abstraction, then, the surface of the map functions like an operating table, a staging ground or a theatre of operations upon which the mapper collects, combines, connects, marks, masks, relates and generally explores. These surfaces are massive collection, sorting and transfer sites, great fields upon which real material conditions are isolated, indexed and
placed within an assortment of relational struc­tures.²¹

If the curator acts as a cartographer, then mapping becomes her technique, and the map can be understood as the product of her work. This would not be limited to floor plans, didactics, or curatorial statements; such a method is inclusive of the curatorial practice as a mode of knowledge pro­duction. In other words, the curator as cartographer establishes an attitude towards the world that partakes in making the world. Like a voyage through interminably moving islands, curatorial practice, to be effective as a navigational practice, would necessarily become vulnerable to physical contact, improbable exchange, and collaborative experimentation; such vulnerabilities would undoubtedly lead the curator far from the safety of the illusory horizons of representation, which is all the better for her construction of fictions, both real and imagined.