︎


1 See Trevor Paglen, “Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space,” in Experimental Geography, ed. Nato Thompson (New York: iCi, 2009), 28–30.︎︎︎

2 See, for example, Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling: An Embodied Criticality,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2006, https://xenopraxis.net/readings/rogoff_smuggling.pdf; and Maria Lind, “On the Curatorial,” in Selected Maria Lind Writing, ed. Brian Kuan Wood (Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, 2010), 63–66. For positions that specifically address the relationship to artistic practice, see Beatrice von Bismarck, “Curatorial Criticality: On the Role of Freelance Curators in the Field of Contemporary Art,” Oncurating 9 (2007): 19–23; and Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 43–52.︎︎︎

3 The oldest preserved world map originates from Babylonia, ninthcentury BC.︎︎︎

4 J.B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 282.︎︎︎

5 James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion, 1999), 213.︎︎︎

6 Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” 283.︎︎︎

7 Corner, “The Agency of Mapping,” 216.︎︎︎

8 See R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martins Press, 1981). A predecessor of the Dymaxion Map is the Butterfly Map developed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Bernard J.S. Cahill.︎︎︎

9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987), 12.︎︎︎

10 See Dirk H.R. Spennemann, “Traditional and Nineteenth Century Communication Patterns in the Marshall Islands,” Micronesian Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 4, no. 1, (2005): 25–52; a less academic treatment of the stick charts can be found in a section about mental maps in Ken Jennings, Maphead (New York: Scribner, 2012), 20–21.︎︎︎

11 David Neufeld, “Learning to Drive the Yukon River: Western Cartography and Athapaskan Story Maps,” Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 4 (2011): 22. Here I also want to express my gratitude to the artist Charles Stankievech, not only for introducing me to part-time life in the Yukon, and to David Neufeld, but also for the many inspiring discussions we had while I was writing this essay. ︎︎︎

12 Ibid., 26.︎︎︎

13 Ibid., 36.︎︎︎

14 Ibid., 35.︎︎︎

15 Ibid. See also Harley, “Maps, Knowledge and Power,” 303: “Maps as an impersonal type of knowledge tend to ‘desocialise’ the territory they represent.”︎︎︎

16 Groys, Art Power, 43.︎︎︎

17 See, for instance, Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex”, in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (London: Routledge, 1996), 58–79, for a seminal text that critiques the traditional museum institution as a bourgeois tool for producing certain desired social values and ideals within its viewing public. Bennett shows not only how the arrangement of objects but also their display architecture and viewing rituals are directly connected to a rationalist approach and identitarian and territorial politics of representation.︎︎︎

18 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 476.︎︎︎

19 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1986), 79.︎︎︎

20 Lucy Lippard, Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby (Santa Fe: SITE Santa Fe, 1995), 114.︎︎︎

21 Corner, “The Agency of Mapping,” 215.︎︎︎

Bio
Anna-Sophie Springer co-directs K. Verlag, an independent press exploring the book as a site for exhibitions, in Berlin. She has an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College London and is currently completing the programme “Cultures of the Curatorial,” Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. She has worked for several years as an editor at the pioneering German theory publisher Merve Verlag, where she is editing a forthcoming collection of texts on art by Hélène Cixous. She also works as an independent curator and is a 2013 member of SYNAPSE, the International Curators’ Network at
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Besides many contracts as editor and translator in the art field, her essays and interviews have appeared in C Magazine, Fillip, Rheinsprung11, and Scapegoat.