There are many intriguing maps around that don’t involve mind or altitude. There are the ones believed to have been made by people living in the stone age, there are socio-geographic maps acknowledging the traces left by different groups through time, there are dream maps, maps about and sometimes on skin, there are the near perfect maps such as Lewis Carroll’s Ocean Chart or the surveillance maps generated through the tracking traces left by our mobile phones. Do I like maps? I think I do, and this is definitely not because I share a house with a geographer. Yet what are maps? What do they record, what can they contain and what might be spared out?
Last week I asked the kids at the children’s project to draw me their favourite place. The result was simply a surprise as I expecting pictures from the park, from houses, street corners, shops, playgrounds, maybe from places unknown to me. Yet what they drew was more what they did or what they liked and loved. They drew hearts, intriguingly coloured rainbows the shape of sliced melons, their family home. They drew swings and slides they are wishing for. There is currently little to none play equipment at the local park. Only few of them focused on a concrete location and drew spatial maps. X-church came up a lot, not to please me or anyone volunteering but simply meant as fact.
Whereas when talking with the adults it was another experience altogether. They seemed to have little difficulty to name a location that had a particular meaning to them. These locations seemed to be personal to them and I confess that I also have my specific spots in my own neighbourhood in Bristol. And like Clive MacLennan, a great photographer and visual record keeper of Gainsborough, I take photographs of the locations that resonate with me.
Yet coming back to my encounter with the kids at x-church and what place might mean to them. Because effectively, this is what I am talking about in more than one way. Maybe, when we are little, it counts most what we do and with whom. It matters less where we go to, as long as our favourite persons are there and maybe some beloved toy. Place means being within an activity, geography might be the tracks we do that are somewhat oddly linked to the maps at school. As with one of my boys, Bristol, for example, was for a long time synonymous with Britain. Why there was an England, a United Kingdom or Great Britain only added to his confusion.
Piaget claimed that spatial conception evolves over time and he put quite a rigid timeline on it. But what he didn’t articulate is how the way we feel about a place evolves and how this might inform our expanding spatial awareness. Overall, relatively little thought seems to have been given to how most internalised maps are drawn and why they have little resemblance with the one made up by cartographers. These maps that claim to give equal weight to every centimetre do not take into account the way we move through a place. They omit that every locality has a timeline attached and that the usage might significantly change whether it is mid afternoon or 5 in the morning. Whereas within a map that is drawn by what we actually do, some areas are likely to be left completely blank and routes like the school run might only be there when we need them. Some areas might be rendered in varying colours depending on our moods. There are likely to be large and small places depending on their significance, there could be loose terrain open for grabs and curious spots we wanted to revisit. Every map would be unique as different as we are but somehow they might still overlap. At least most of the time when we feel sociable. These are the kinds of maps that intrigue me, the ones that make the geographer’s hair raise in horror. Bring it on!
(taken by Savanna, a lovely personal mapper in Gainsborough)
Next week I hope to learn more about the geographies surrounding x-church and I will try to fill a large piece paper with what the kids think should be on it. Also I hope that I will be taken to some of the places that really matter and can not necessarily be found on the ever correct OS map.
I couldn’t come this week as life became more important than art. But there are two photos from the swings in use from last week!
This blog was first published under https://loosespace.wordpress.com/2018/02/02/mapping-a-mission-impossible/
