The Museum as Archipelago

I imagine the museum as an archipelago.

—Édouard Glissant

 

In 1948, the geography department at Harvard University was shut  down for being “hopelessly amorphous” and for failing to produce “a clear definition of the subject” or to “determine its boundaries  with other disciplines.”¹ This essay emerges from a much newer  discipline, one that, in contrast to geography, has only just begun  to exist as a proper academic field, but that is nevertheless enjoy ing its precocious status and attracting increasing theoretical inter­ est. Within the upstart discipline of “Curatorial Studies,” curatorial practice departs from the idea that curating historically entails car ing for artifacts within the institution, enabling the current dis course to turn its attention toward investigating and contouring forms of creative and critical agency, thus resulting in the production  of knowledge with a performative element that has been called “the curatorial.” Like geography’s struggle for a convincing self-defini tion in the 1940s, curatorial practice today struggles with its own  fluid boundaries. This fluidity, however, is the field’s strength; in what follows, I argue that far from being conceived of as a weakness, the openness of contemporary curatorial practice finds a retroactive and productive affirmation in the geographic and spatial theories  that distinguish between settler and indigenous cartographies.²

Machining Knowledge

The island was spread out under their eyes
like a map, and they had only to give names
to all its angles and points.

—Jules Verne


Most fundamentally, a map is an eidetic—visual, but also mental—representation of an area. Such a form of representation is connected to an activity of production, including navigational devices and models of surroundings, that is nearly as old as recorded history.³ But maps, whether we look at Roman, Greek, Chinese, or early European explorers, have also been important “weapons of imperialism”⁴ and “tools for projecting power-knowledge,”⁵enabling and expanding the scope and violence of countless colonial endeavours. In fact, it was during the colonial scramble of the nineteenth century that “a pen across a map could determine the lives and deaths of millions of people.”⁶ In this instance, the map both anticipated and actualized processes of human cultural intervention, rendering them conceivable and actionable. Despite this material actualization, however, it is important to stress that maps are, in a large part, fictions of factual conditions; as human-made interpretations of the world, they foreground certain elements while leaving out others. What this means is that a map is not simply a mirror image of the world but a creation with “sem­antic, symbolic and instrumental” content.⁷ Therefore, maps do not represent anything; instead, they produce effects by organizing knowledge and constructing perspectives. They are performative tools that can both frame and undo territories; read optimistically, every map has the potential to produce a new and different world.
   
One such example is R. Buckminster Fuller’s “Dymaxion Map” of 1943. While our common Mercator projection privileges Europe and North America through orientation and distortion, Fuller’s projection unfolds the earth into a poly-directional icosahedron, depicting the seven continents as a chain of islands (“one island earth”) and the oceans as a connected, fluid mass. The triangles of the map can be rotated towards each other in differ ent ways, each time offering a radically different but always valid configuration, making the Dymaxion Map a rare specimen of a world map that does not depend on a predetermined perspectival centre.⁸

It is exactly this kind of approach to mapping that Deleuze and Guattari encourage in their ground-breaking text “Rhizome,” in which they use the concepts of map and rhizome almost interchangeably over several passages:

Make a map not a tracing! [...] What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. [...] The map is open and connect able in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, re versible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. [...] The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged “competence.” ⁹

According to Deleuze and Guattari, a tracing is nothing more than a reductive reproduction of given assumptions. Making a map, on the other hand, becomes a productive and often physical engagement with a territory that conditions the rhythmic relations of time and space.
   
Deleuze and Guattari’s laudatory estimation of the practice of mapping finds ample support within the history of cartography. The Polynesian stick chart, for example, emphasizes subjectivity, embo­diment, direct experience, and connectivity. Used at least until the end of World War II to canoe from atoll to atoll and island to island in the Marshall Islands region of the Pacific Ocean, these maps were constructed as open frameworks from coconut fronds and tiny seashells to symbolize ocean swells, and the wave and crest patterns of the ocean surface. Made by the navigators themselves, these maps reflected their individual, physical experience in the open sea, varying so much in interpretation and form that they were readable solely to the author-cartographer. Contrary to many other navigation techniques, the charts were not taken along on the trips but studied and memorized prior to departure, and the navigator would lie down in the canoe during the voyage tofeel how the boat was moved about by the underlying ebb and flow. While this practice makes the map a bio-geographical tool, rendering it personal and idiosyncratic, it nevertheless suggests that these personal cartographies were crucial devices for creating a network of inter-island communication.¹⁰

Voyages and Charts

Perhaps there never was a very first voyage that scattered the seeds of human habitation in the world’s space. But we do know of the last of them, of poles conquered, deserts crossed, wild erness invaded. This is the end of all voyages. All possible encounters have been accomplished, undertaken, ended, foreclosed. The cycle is completed, the map of the earth has covered the earth. Space is inscribed upon the charts. The globe is perceived as a ball in a net of latitudes and longitudes.

—Michel Serres


The tension between “voyages” and “charts” is well documented by David Neufeld, a historian of the Western Arctic and Yukon Territory. His text “Learning to Drive the Yukon River: Western Cartography and Athapaskan Story Maps” examines how artifacts and landscapes necessarily embody different, possibly conflicting, cultural narratives, and questions how to deal with these differences productively. Through his estimation of cartographic difference, the practice of the curator finds especially valuable clues. By remaining particularly sensitive to the idea that different peoples’ stories and histories “have shaped the way they experience, understand, and respond to the physical world,”¹¹ curators can unfold new relations to previously discounted modes of knowledge production and dissemination, and the values that attend to them. Neufeld uses a comparison between set­tler and native mapping techniques from the Dawson City region as a means to discuss issues of identity and cultural and environmental coexistence in the area of the Yukon River. The quintessential experience that he recounts from his field work revolves around the oral instructions given to him from an Indigenous elder on how to navigate the site of his historical and anthropological research. When consulted, the man uses a stick to scribble a pattern of a crucial part of the Yukon River—a conglomeration of sandbars  and islands—into the ground.