To the historian, these signs are as cryptic as the advice he is sent on his way with: “Just watch [the island in front of you], when it starts to move, turn and head towards the next island. [...] And when that island starts to move, turn away and you’re through.”¹² When Neufeld and his team reach the area by boat the sandbars do indeed appear, shift, and disappear in the water. But by following the instructions the boat actually makes it through the tricky area without running aground. In retrospect, Neufeld tries in vain to find a rational explanation for the encountered phenomena and states instead that the elder’s experiential description is less about objective investigation than “about journeys and the relationships exercised during travel.”¹³ While the First Nations river man’s story-map of “moving islands” conveys his knowledge as conditioned by a participatory relationship with the land (in the sense of a “co-production of a shared world”), the settler approach is historically grounded in scientific, mathematical data collection and guided by the endeavour to master the surrounding world; it is detached through an aerial perspective and oriented toward future outcomes such as “settlement, development, and production.”¹⁴ While the Indigenous map is based on an engagement with a particular place in a specific time, creating a sense of vibrant geography actualised through the act of travelling, settler cartography assumes that the objects in the world are real when they are objective and independent from the cartographer, leading to maps that are “ethnocentric images [...producing] an empty land [...] of unexploited resources and opportunity.”¹⁵This notion of neutrality is, of course, an illusion that relies on a colonial ideology. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the longitudes and latitudes of the common, abstract grid have been modelled according to physical space/time synchronization with the chronometer on the Greenwich prime meridian at the Royal Observatory in London. The grid is thus a direct historical outcome of colonial British maritime power; instead of territorial neutrality, the settlers’ maps ultimately bear within them an emblem of violent colonial conquest.
  
Like maps, curatorial projects are social constructions—“narrative spaces”—that shape our understanding of place and space. In Boris Groys’ estimation, “Every exhibition tells a story by directing the viewer through the exhibition in a particular order; the exhibition space is always a narrative space.”¹⁶ From this perspective, we can see how Neufeld’s description of the two histories of map-making also suggest two approaches to curatorial practice. If traditional museums have organized artifacts according to a particular history—in fact, using the artifacts to support and represent that very history and construct a particular identity¹⁷—contemporary curatorial practice can work to become more vulnerable and attentive to radically different, and differentiated, decisions and actions that create meaning and place. This trajectory finds a compelling resonance with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a “smooth” space, particularly when curatorial projects are designed as “an amorphous collection of juxtaposed pieces that can be joined together in an infinite number of ways.”¹⁸ Operating from within the tentative territory of a smooth space, a curator cartographer can partake in making palpable worlds moved by fluxes and intensities more than by clear-cut, easy-to-grasp subject-object relations.

Moving Islands

The matter at hand is: things that resist discourse, things that cut our tongues, and for which we have no words—things whose only spectator is savage.

—Vincent Normand


The exhibition Journeys: How Travelling Fruit, Ideas and Buildings Rearrange Our Environment, held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2010–2011, is an exemplary case of a curatorial approach that amorphously juxtaposed a number of different spaces—a thematic exhibition with different rooms and sub-topics, a book composed of theory disguised as short stories, a web platform and a series of live events—while fostering a sense of both navigational openness and conceptual connectedness. Curated by Giovanna Borasi and designed by Martin Beck, Journeys confronted the phenomenon of global transformation and hybridization precisely by examining the production of space through displacement, dislocation, and movement.