The Funambulist Issue 18 "Cartography & Power"

THE FUNAMBULIST Politics of Space and Bodies

OPEN MAP PALESTINE AHMAD BARCLAY

COLONIAL BORDERS IN THE LIBYAN SAHARA MOAD MUSBAHI

MAPS & BLACKBOARDS FROM ALGIERS TO ATHENS BOUCHRA KHALILI

AN ATLAS OF TSUNAMI STONES IN JAPAN ELISE MISAO HUNCHUCK

AERIAL SURVEY IN MANDATE IRAQ CAREN KAPLAN

THE DECOLONIAL MAPPING TOOLKIT PATRICK JAOJOCO

OF MAPS PERCEIVED BUT NOT DRAWN LUCÍA JALÓN OYARZUN

DISMANTLING THE MASTER’S MAP & CLOCK RASHEEDAH PHILLIPS

STUDENT PROJECTS BY CELESTE WINSTON, ZHIWEN WEI, LONGNING QI, JIAN WANG, & BINGQIAN LIU GUEST COLUMNS ABOUT BRAZIL (FABIANA EX-SOUZA), SOUTH AFRICA (LEBOGANG MOKOENA) GUATEMALA (IRMGARD EMMELHAINZ)

18 /// July-August 2018

CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

THE FUNAMBULIST “BEHIND THE SCENES” Dear subscribers, new readers, and contributors, We’re thrilled to welcome you to the 18th issue of The Funambulist. We hope that, in opening the magazine and browsing through the dense, resonant and thoughtful articles (in our opinion at least), you will become even more invested in the Funambulist community of thinkers, activists, artists, and brilliant humans.

As many of you know, the last issue was devoted to the obvious and not so obvious ways in which the infrastructure that makes up our world impacts politics, landscapes, and human lives. This summer, we’ve decided to focus on the politics and (more or less) veiled power of cartography.

In an era where it might seem inevitable to walk around a city without checking one’s smartphone GPS at least once, cartography is both an unavoidable and intensely studied topic and a field that is still overflowing with loose ends and untold stories. Below are our two personal perspectives on different articles that touched us.

Tomi: Being born in Nigeria, which was colonized by Britain, and as a Black woman who has spent much of my life in the United States, I have seen culture and histories suppressed, white-washed, and erased time after time again through the alternately subtle or glaring motives of white supremacy, capitalism, and power. Patrick Jaojoco presents these colonial ideologies within cartography in “Spatial Histographies: The Decolonial Mapping Toolkit,” and argues for the importance of decolonizing maps in order to connect to more global histories as a form of activism against the obscuration and erasure of peoples seen in colonial maps. This connected with me as I am a minority architecture student who studies on colonized land surrounded by glorified examples of colonial maps...

Ella: Lucía Jalón Oyarzun’s article, “Nightfaring & Invisible Maps,” really resonated for me. As someone who has had one foot on two continents for my whole life, I’ve

learned to create a cartography beyond what I’ve learned at school or from my families; much like Ursula in One Hundred Years of Solitude, I’ve been working on cultivating my body, experiences and architectures as a personal cartography, making a home for myself in the mental and physical maps I create, without fearing the unknown, the ambiguous or the apparently incomprehensible elements I find on the way.

Parallel to our work on this new issue, we’ve been working on other exciting projects. Léopold participated in a few important events such as a round table at La Colonie in Paris for the opening of Samia Henni’s exhibition “Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria,” and a conversation entitled “Resistance in the City” with London’s [204] Design Collective for their Decolonize Architecture series. We’re delighted to say that our student subscriptions are up to 108 and counting. We’ve started working with new bookstores in Beirut, Bologna, Philadelphia and New Orleans, as well as institutions in the U.S. and the U.K. We’re working on a new video series to catch up with our community of contributors and dig in deeper to the articles they’ve written for the magazine. You will be able to watch the videos on social media and our website!

Finally, we are working on mapping and researching for a project with Chayma Drira focused on the Cité des 4000 in La Courneuve (a suburb to the northeast of Paris).

This summer, we (Ella + Tomi) have had the great privilege to have Léopold as our mentor and to assist in the editing and curation of this issue of The Funambulist. We have been directly involved with the daily logistics at the office as well as the editing and production of the magazine.

As this is the only issue where we will be so hands-on, it is quite special to us. We hope you enjoy, and we look forward to witnessing The Funambulist’s evolution with you.

Tomi Laja + Ella Martin-Gachot Paris, June 29, 2018

INDEX

HOW TO (RE)EXIST IN ENEMY | 2 TERRITORY: MARIELLE FRANCO PLANTED SEEDS FOR THE FUTURE Fabiana Ex-Souza

MAPPING POLICE KILLINGS, | 56 POLLUTION, AND PRISONS IN GEORGIA, USA Celeste Winston

6 | ISRAELI-GUATEMALAN RELATIONS: EXPANDING GARDENS OF BROKEN SHADOWS Irmgard Emmelhainz

PLACING TIME, TIMING SPACE: | 44 DISMANTLING THE MASTER’S MAP AND CLOCK Rasheedah Phillips SPATIAL HISTORIOGRAPHIES: | 34 THE DECOLONIAL MAPPING TOOLKIT Patrick Jaojoco (Frontview) NIGHTFARING & INVISIBLE MAPS: OF | 40 MAPS PERCEIVED, BUT NOT DRAWN Lucía Jalón Oyarzun MAPS AND BLACKBOARDS: | 46 REPRESENTING PEOPLE’S LIBERATION STRUGGLES Bouchra Khalili

52 | THE ATLAS OF LEGAL FICTIONS: JEWISH ERUV Piper Bernbaum

22 | AN INCOMPLETE ATLAS OF STONES: A CARTOGRAPHY OF THE TSUNAMI STONES ON THE JAPANESE SHORELINE Elise Misao Hunchuck

INTRODUCTION: | 10 CARTOGRAPHY & POWER Léopold Lambert

COVER | U.S. AIRFORCE SOLDIER USING SURVEY EQUIPMENT IN OCCUPIED IRAQ Andrew Lee (April 2011)

THE SAHARA IS NOT A | 16 DESERT: RE-MAPPING LIBYA, UNRAVELLING THE STATE Moad Musbahi

APARTHEID’S HERITAGE: | 4 CONTINUING STRUGGLES IN SOUTH AFRICA Lebogang Mokoena

12 | AERIAL SURVEYING AS AIR CONTROL: GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE IN MANDATE-ERA IRAQ Caren Kaplan 28 | MAPPING AND “TRUTH” COMMUNICATING THE ERASURE OF PALESTINE Ahmad Barclay 58 | THE GRAND CANAL: ARCHITECTURE OF WATER AND RESISTANCE IN PALESTINE Zhiwen Wei, Longning Qi, Jian Wang, & Bingqian Liu

HOW TO (RE)EXIST IN ENEMY TERRITORY: MARIELLE FRANCO PLANTED SEEDS FOR OUR FUTURE FABIANA EX-SOUZA (translated by Chanelle Adams) Afro-Brazilian artist and researcher, PhD candidate in Visual Arts and Photography at Paris VIII University.

Doors of Return Museum in Ouidah, Benin. / Photograph by Chanelle Adams (2018).

Activists and children placarding the wall of a favela with a portrait of Marielle Franco on March 23, 2018. / Photograph by Fotografías Emergentes.

In a recent interview, influential rapper KL Jay from the Racionais MCs put forward an ominous warning to fellow Afro-Brazilians: “We are in enemy territory.” He continued by advising Black people to increase strategies of resistance and protection such as walking through the streets “like lions and pit bulls.” KL Jay’s unsettling conclusion cautioned readers: “do not try to be accepted by the system, the system does not like you.” Hailing from the outskirts of São Paulo, KL Jay’s voice joins the innumerable voices opposing the long-standing history of Brazilian state terrorism against Afro-descendant populations. The national homicide rate of Black youth (between 15 and 29 years old) is four times higher than that of whites. Every 23 minutes, a young Black person is murdered in Brazil, according to the final Senate report of the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPI) published in 2016. This number corresponds to a death toll of nearly 23,000 Black youth annually.

The rise of extreme state-sanctioned violence has come to a breaking point with the recent assassination of Rio city councilor, Marielle Franco. Franco, a 38-year old elected Black woman from the Maré favela, was attacked on her drive home from an event titled, “Young Black Women Who Are Changing Power Structures.” She was abruptly cut off by another vehicle before being 2

shot four times in the head, along with her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes. Both died instantly. Despite the suspected links between her attackers and militias (active or retired police officers, corrupt firemen, and local politicians), the law of silence reigns and Marielle Franco’s murderers remain unpunished.

Now, four months after the attack, many Brazilians continue to mourn while facing questions of survival in an undeniable, yet nebulous, murderous system.

Facing the Death Machine /// The term “enemy territory” refers to tense situations in which a “we” recognizes itself as an entity sharing common values through which an “other” or a “them” is inversely defined. The “other,” perceived as a foreigner or a stranger, is then defined as the one who seeks to harm “us” — or, a “them” from which “we” must defend “our”-selves. In war, for example, when soldiers enter hostile territory, they take many precautions to protect their physical integrity. Through the protection of their presence and their being, they also safeguard the mission they’ve been THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

It is undeniable that Brazil has always been a country with enormous social inequalities and resultant violence. Brazil is considered to be a Third World country in perpetual development, and accordingly continues to assume the role it has been assigned in the world system dance of global capitalism. Those who subscribe to this logic might assume that the problem lies within the so-called Global South’s “natural” incapacity to become “civilized,” democratic, and modern. But that would be a mistake.

Deeply integral to the Brazilian geopolitical structure is the normalization of insidious violence brought about by the banalization of death in the modern-colonial world. The evidence for this spans from colonial rhetoric to developmental rhetoric.

The atrocious genocidal process being enacted against Black people in Brazil is in direct contradiction to the nation’s emancipatory narrative of modernity. This false narrative fractures when the facts and figures point towards the nation’s violence against Black and Afro-descendent populations. Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe writes of the coloniality of violence and these such places that produce death, “more and more, death itself becomes something spectral through both the way it is lived and by the way it is given.” These political concerns are significant to the project of infiltrating the interior of enemy territory. In a place where up to 160 Black people are murdered per day, we can directly confront the machine which fuels technologies of death is to ask the very question that torments us all: who killed Marielle Franco?

The way in which genocidal proportions of violence against Black population in Brazil have not yet become national scandal is proof enough of the naturalization of Black death. As the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano asserts, the naturalization of the death of racialized people will continue to develop in Latin America as long as it is fed by complexities of race and ethnicity in concurrence with seigniorial relations between the dominant and the dominated; sexism and patriarchy; the familismo (games of influence based on the family networks), the clientelism, the compadrazgo (cronyism), and the patrimonialism in the relations between the public and the private (especially between civil society and political institutions). Present political debates fail to account for this web of power relations. We are repeatedly led into a false debate about democratization and its political configurations instead of confronting issues of the coloniality of power, articulations of authoritarianism, and Brazilian state terrorism against racialized populations.

(Re)existence in the Face of Dehumanization and Injustice /// In the 1970s, Black feminist groups formed to theorize and denounce logics of oppression along the intersecting axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In the United States, the work of Black feminist and sociologist Patricia Hill Collins invites to THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

interrogate how socially constructed dynamics must also be situated within concrete experiences. In Brazil, Black women have also had to build their connections to the territory from the position of being “outsiders within” (a concept coined by Collins) imposing a way to exist and resist in occupied territory while facing the combined violence of oppressions of being both women and Black. Within the violence of the modern-colonial world, Black women’s resistance is a testament to radical daily efforts of re-existence. As political philosopher Frantz Fanon warned, it is necessary to get rid of everything imposed by colonization and undermine colonial structures both individually and collectively, including the internalized self-dehumanization. However, in order to politicize, to open minds, and to awaken the masses, it is necessary to bring spirits into the world, or “to invent souls,” as written by poet and founder of the Negritude movement Aimé Césaire. Now, as ever, envisioning resistance as a reinvention of reality is an essential exercise, especially in the face of racialized dehumanization. To reimagine Brazil’s quilombismo, as Afro-Brazilian theoretician Abdias do Nascimento has offered, means to abolish binaries and borders imposed by the modern-colonial project and to re-imagine ways of feeling, thinking and acting in the world. And Marielle Franco knew exactly how to do that.

In many ways, Marielle’s execution is immersed in the depths of the colonial, racist, sexist, homophobic, and patriarchal matrix of violence established by the modern-colonial project. The symbolism of her death, in particular, is even more politically potent when we consider that it was enacted by the very forces she spent a lifetime struggling against. In order to transform configurations of the coloniality of power and the circumstances it imposes as reality, Marielle dared to transpose territories of death.

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commandeered to carry out. Brazil, however, a nation-state invaded and colonized by a Portuguese fleet 518 years ago, is not officially in a declared war or an armed intervention abroad.

Therefore, who are the “enemies” KL Jay was referencing in his message about “enemy territory”? Under what criteria and what conditions does the violence of the mass murder of Black populations in Brazil become legible as genocide or ethnic cleansing?

Marielle Franco approached the issue of violence across the triad of gender, race and the city, stating “women living in the Maré are not yet participating in dialogues about cisgender, transgender, sexuality, and the binary.” With an intimate understanding of the false debates between those who work in the field and those entrenched in theory, the sociologist once said in an interview: “I think this dialogue [on gender identities], abortion, and women’s autonomy is central to the agenda of the feminist movement, but before addressing those points, we need to talk about child care and violence right here, and the vulnerable position occupied by women from favelas. It is from these points of view that we understand our relationship to the state.” During her lifetime, she used her voice to lift up the realities and causes of favelas, Black and LGBTQ communities, and victims of police and paramilitary violence, interfering with the Brazilian political domain which is otherwise dominated by the white supremacist elite. Her life and her death always recentered and will continue to recenter political struggles related to gender and anti-Blackness. In the face of a fraught national history, her commitments to these causes demand a new orientation.

Chants of the Mexican proverb “they tried to bury us; they did not know we were seeds” became a mainstay during the demonstrations that took place after the murder of Marielle Franco organized by groups ranging from feminists, Black movements, LGBTQ movements and Native peoples, to human rights activists, political parties and artists. Marielle Franco has undoubtedly become an extremely strong symbol of resistance against the Brazilian modern-colonial naturalization of death and erasure of the struggles against racialized discrimination. Her bloodshed in the struggle sows infertile ground in enemy territory, planting seeds for the future. In a country where the seasons are hardly distinct, rain showers are followed by sunshine and meet the conditions under which our seeds begin to sprout.

3

APARTHEID’S HERITAGE: CONTINUING STRUGGLES IN SOUTH AFRICA LEBOGANG MOKOENA Soweto-based Master student in journalism at the University of Johannesburg.

Students March up to guards with riot gear in hand during a Fees Must Fall protest at Wits University. / Photograph by Candice Wagener (2017).

For South Africa, the year 2018 marks 24 years since the end of a brutal and shameful system that aimed at racial segregation, oppression, and disposition, characterized by an authoritative rule based on white supremacy. The overcoming of Apartheid policy, that had designed institutional racism and created inequalities, was one of the most significant political victories for South African people, leading South Africa into a democratic state in 1994 and painting the picture of a “rainbow nation.” This depiction assumes a community in which citizens are living in harmony and unity despite all odds.

Parallel to this, South Africa has internationally and locally become well known as a country with a forward-thinking constitution enshrining many different liberties like same-sex marriage and freedom of expression and movement, and also boasts the exemplary leadership of former-President Nelson Mandela.

But what does that mean for someone like myself, a Black female born in 1991 and raised in less-privileged circumstances in Johannesburg’s South Western Townships? Understanding the country’s political history as a tremendous focal point in exploring its need for structural transformation, I generally think that post-Apartheid South Africa has inherited many of the problems from its past. Although there are many examples of success in the attempts of equalization and the extension of social welfare and services to millions living in the country, South Africa’s economic legacy and racial injustices have not disappeared.

4

Since 1994, economic indicators such as poverty, inequality and unemployment have been on the rampage. An exceptionally high amount of poverty remains, especially among Black people, with South Africa being the most unequal economy in the world. An approximated 95% of the country’s wealth is in the hands of 10% of the minority white population. These continuing conditions manifest themselves in thousands of localized struggles.

From various townships like Alexander in Johannesburg, which neighbors the expensive “economic hub” in Sandton, and as far as rural regions in Mpumalanga, Limpopo, and KwaZulu-Natal, many people of color are unemployed. Some to this day still have to deal with limited sanitation, such as the lack of running water and indoor toilets. A number of people of color can’t escape living in corrugated steel shacks, which often house families of six or more.

On top of this, they have to face mediocre public services in clinics and schools. The other part of our society, however, is financially privileged and has access to institutions with high-quality services.

Hence, there are daily demonstrations in different parts of the country. Citizens are frustrated with the slow economic and social change. Subsequently, they go out into the streets to demand basic services. These daily protests mirror the many problems we have; the country is defined by and known for them.

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Another prominent issue is the land reform debacle. Land reform in South Africa is a similar issue to that in neighboring countries like Namibia and Zimbabwe: it is a central, emotional topic. My grandmother has shared with me many stories about land. Despite the persistent assumptions that Black people in South Africa do not have any agricultural knowledge, she has explained to me how her family used to live on crops they planted themselves. They had space for well-managed livestock- and didn’t have any shortages. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case today. Now she is bothered by the lack of room we have, given that we are a family of seven crammed into a four-room house.

As with other problems, property ownership has not been dealt with well, neither in 1994 nor since. More than two decades after the end of Apartheid, white citizens still own most of South Africa’s land. In the effort to reduce inequality, the Left opposition party, called the Economic Freedom Fighters, has been advocating for redistribution. In the current rhetoric of a “radical economic transformation,” there is much discourse on the demand for a re-transfer of land from white to Black people. Black owners were forcibly dispossessed under the rule of European colonists via the Natives Land Act of 1913. Then, through policies created by the National Party, they lost the right to own property.

In the last few weeks, the parliament has supported changes in the constitution to allow expropriation without compensation.

Against this national outcry, the right-wing organization Afriforum is arguing that South African property rights are under threat.

This is despite the fact that the majority of us are landless, and call our home country “Azania,” which inherently belongs to our forefathers. A state land audit released in February of this year indicates that farms and agricultural holdings comprise 97% of the 121.9 million hectares of the nation’s area, and whites own 72% of the 37 million hectares held by individuals. This coincides with the results of a separate audit by AGRI Development Solutions and the farm lobby group AGRI SA, which found that non-whites now own 27% of the country’s farmland — it was 14% in 1994.

One would expect that the ruling African National Congress, which Mandela was a part of, would continue its successes by distinguishing itself from other African states like Namibia and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe over many years of authoritative rule and suppression of fundamental freedoms under Robert Mugabe has been cash-strapped and impoverished. The seizure of THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

commercial white farmers led to a substantial drop in tobacco export and production affecting the economy. In Namibia, approximately 60% of white citizens own agricultural and ancestral land. This struggle dates back from when the German country invaded and killed the Nama and Herero ethnic groups which are currently demanding reparations.

Similar to these struggles, the ANC has become an organization synonymous with corruption and maladministration. The Jacob Zuma presidency that ended on February 14, 2018 was marred by a massive corruption scandal involving state capture and private interests influencing the government’s decisions. The Gupta brothers are Indian born entrepreneurs in the mining, air travel, technology, and media sector who relocated to South Africa in 1993 and have engaged in a systematic looting of state assets to an astonishing scale, by using their relationship with Zuma to influence political appointments and win lucrative government contracts.

Instead of being dominated by the past, whites and Blacks who call South Africa their home should be willing to confront the structural discrimination in our country. Inclusive discussions on various social institutions can lead to a better understanding of the interest in eradicating prevailing shortcomings. I do not know the thoughts of white South Africans, as varied as they might be, on the issues at stake. Right now, I only hear the loudest and angriest voices on social media, which might hardly be representative of all white citizens.

Civil society in South Africa can play a huge role in addressing political struggles. As a participant in social movements and a member of civic organizations, I think that these can enable people from different backgrounds to collaboratively confront many of our political problems.

Furthermore, I believe it is crucial that the division between private and public services comes to an end. Currently, there is a huge difference in the quality of services provided by institutions, like schools and clinics, depending on whether they are private or public. This continues to perpetuate the societal division created by the Apartheid regime.

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In the past few years, protests like #FeesMustFall made it to our streets. The youth of the country demanded an accessible educational system that stops sidelining those who cannot afford tuition, and which includes and assists those from disadvantaged backgrounds to further their studies. The struggle for education is nothing new, given that the youth in 1976 broke out into protests against the poor curriculum designed for Black schools, called Bantu education. Today, each academic year, many students, including myself, queue at student funding offices hoping our debts and fees can be paid. However the struggle goes beyond this, as there is also a need for money towards meals and commuting to campus.

Those of us who cannot afford local transportation and additional meals can’t just go on and focus on academic tasks, not until these problems are solved and the costs are covered.

Yet many white citizens seem to be reluctant to think about the implications of colonialism and Apartheid on contemporary South Africa. I also get the impression that both whites and Blacks think the related political problems will magically evaporate. Frankly, South Africans need to first acknowledge the political history that has subsequently led to embedded societal divisions.

Denial of having benefited from the Apartheid regime in white communities can create a fear of the unknown in terms of the future and a lack of a sense of guilt with regard to the past, which is a great cause of resentment for people of color. However, admitting that one has “benefitted from the Apartheid system” is only a first step in escaping the cycle of blame and entitlement. Those who are privileged must contribute to the lives of the less privileged by not simply “helping” but sharing their wealth. Helping alone would not amount to changing inequality, but would create gaps and paths for minorities within society. However, we need legal measures to regulate tax paying so that inequality gaps can be closed to bring all people toward similar living standards. On the other hand, people of color need to start reconsidering generational patterns of voting for the ANC based on the narrative told by the party itself and society in general.

Voting patterns in South Africa suggest that Black voters do not visualize being lead by a different political party and that they are not keen to change. Our country has approximately 500 political parties from where change could begin.

To question the ANC’s progress is significant and can assist in understanding that liberation did not (and will also not in the future) come from only one party and its leaders, but from many different actors.

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ISRAELI-GUATEMALAN RELATIONS: EXPANDING GARDENS OF BROKEN SHADOWS IRMGARD EMMELHAINZ Mexico City-based independent translator, writer and researcher, author of three books.

Plaza Israel in Guatemala City. / Photograph by Irmgard Emmelhainz (2010).

In December 2017, Guatemala became the second country of the world after the United States to announce the transfer of their embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This polemic measure — and the beginning of the end of the age of international diplomacy — was deemed illegal by the United Nations and condemned by 128 countries across the world. This is because the establishment of foreign representation in Jerusalem to Israel (for which Israel had started lobbying in Central America in the mid 1980s), implies hammering the last the nail in the coffin of the peace process with Palestine by overstepping on one of their conditions for peace: Jerusalem as a multi-confessional capital of two states or of a possible bi-national state. Guatemala was also the second nation — always behind the US — to have recognized the existence of the Jewish State on what in 1948 was known as Palestine. Jorge García Granados, the Guatemalan Ambassador to the United Nations helped lobby votes on behalf of the Jewish state, becoming the first Guatemalan ambassador 6

to Israel. This allegiance between a Central American country and “the only democracy” of the Middle East not only manifests itself in the international arena of diplomacy but is also palpable on the everyday life of Guatemalans.

During a year I spent there (2010-2011), I would often drive through the cluttered Hincapié Avenue and see a puzzling and gigantic billboard demanding to “Free Gilad Shalit” showing the image of the young Israeli soldier that was being kept by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, shackled, holding a newspaper looking gaunt and pale. Gilad was a soldier of the Israeli Defense Forces captured on June 2005 by Hamas militants in a cross-border raid via underground tunnels near the Israeli border. He was held hostage for over five years until his release in October 2011, as part of an exchange with 1,027 mainly Palestinian prisoners.

The billboard in Guatemala was part of a massive media campaign for Shalit’s release launched by his parents and a public relations firm. The campaign included public protests held weekly, text messaging, a flood of posters and billboards, Israeli citizens’ letters to Gilad, a Facebook campaign, etc. Gilad’s family even chained themselves to the fence outside of Netanyahu’s home to assure THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

I also saw the Israeli presence in Guatemala illustrated in the ubiquity of the logo of Grupo Golán which now protects — as before did Catholic shrines with saints adorned with flowers — the entrances of middle and upper class homes as well as offices and corporate sieges, shopping centers, restaurants, etc. in affluent areas in Guatemala. Grupo Golán is an Israeli home surveillance and security company, established in Guatemala in 1987, and the main tool civilians have to shield themselves against crime and violence. The corporate siege of Grupo Golán is in Boca del Monte, a village swallowed long ago by the urban sprawl of Guatemala City, where the company established in 2012, as part of its social responsibility agenda, the “I Protect My Community” program, focused on preventing violence on the neighborhood. Grupo Golán not only sells surveillance technology but also has as a goal to strengthen democracy and social development in the area, by coordinating efforts between community and corporate leaders to prevent violence. They do so by facilitating the experience and concepts they have acquired in other parts of the world to “eliminate the problem from the root,” getting all the community leaders to participate promoting a “culture that favors education, as opposed to crime.” Why did an Israeli company feel such an ethical, historical and economic obligation to help Guatemala resolve its day-to-day challenges?

“Promised Land” was “a land without a people for a people without a land,” a clichéd sentence (often attributed to Zionist discourses) that disassociates and renders Palestinians absent from their own territory.

As a consequence, the Palestinians have been powerless as a nation due to the dissolution of territorial borders and to the physical expulsion accompanied by the discursive and visual programming of their absence. However, Granados’ vision is not surprising, since in Guatemala, the Indigenous Mayan population is invisible, as are the Palestinians, and appears only as the country’s ‘ethnic component’ that needs to be assimilated into the State or as a criminal threat (“communist guerrillas” in the 1960s-1980s, more recently as “drug cartels” and “criminals”).

In this regard, Guatemala and Israel have in common the fact that the majoritarian sectors of their populations (Criollos and ladinos and Israeli Jews) feel that their way of life is permanently under threat due to the hostile peoples that surround them. Interestingly enough, Israel and Guatemala also have a similar demography: the approximate ratio of Israelis to Palestinians is 9-6 in the area that comprises Israel, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while 40% of the Guatemalan population is Indigenous and lives in rural areas.

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that the Israeli government would secure his release. But aside from the questionable asymmetrical value bestowed to Israeli and Palestinian lives by the deal, and from Guatemala’s historical backup of Israel in the international arena, why was Guatemala City functioning as an extension of Israeli soil where the “Free Gilad Shalit” campaign had reached? I had been also puzzled by Mayan girls performing “Hebrew dances” in the main square of Antigua within the context of a “Festival of Cultural Tourism” sponsored by “AmIsrael,” an NGO devoted to “peace” in the region.

Since the 1960s, Israel has provided Guatemala with civil infrastructure, water purification solutions, and modern medical and agricultural technology. It is well known that Israeli doctors often come as volunteers to perform surgeries to children in poor neighborhoods in the city; the Amatitlán Geothermal Power Plant, at the base of the Pacaya volcano, is run by the Israeli company Ormat, and Jimmy Morales’ administration is proposing to negotiate a Free Trade Agreement with Israel. We should also consider the well-spread Evangelical Zionist support in the favor of Israel: Guatemala is full of gas stations and convenience stores named “Adonai” and “Shalom” and, since 1967, Guatemala City is the siege of the “Instituto Guatemalteco Israelí”, an evangelical Zionist academy where children are trained to love Israel.

Yet, do these facts explain the fact that Guatemala’s jungles are populated by hoards of Israeli post-army hikers after they finished their military service? In 1954 Jacobo Arabenz’s leftist regime was overthrown; backed by the CIA, a succession of right-wing governments has since taken power and, for many observers, this historical process cannot be divorced from Israel’s presence in the Central American country. After the coup against Arabenz, insurgent guerrilla groups emerged in the Guatemalan heights in the 1960s seeking to find a solution to the extreme maldistribution of land, exacerbated by the invasion of Indigenous land. The most prominent group was the FAR (Rebel Armed Forces in English), which was largely crushed by a counter-insurgency campaign carried out by the government with the help of the United States. In 1978, the CUC (or Committee for Peasant Unity) was launched and was conceived as a convergence of leftist insurgency with Indigenous peoples’ movements. At a moment in which Israeli presence was palpable in Guatemala, the Guatemalan State turned to Israeli advisers for help to formulate and implement a counterinsurgency strategy. In 1977, Jimmy Carter’s government had pulled away military aid to Guatemala as a consequence of human-rights abuses accusations, and Israel came to fill the vacuum: not only as proxy of the US to work against the Soviet Union’s advances in Latin America, but to create a market for Israeli military technology and training. With Israeli guidance, the Guatemalan army succeeded in “suppressing” the Indigenous “drive” for territorial and political liberation. Overall, an estimated 200,000 Guatemalan civilians were massacred, forcibly disappeared, tortured or executed during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996).

They were mostly Mayan Indigenous peoples accused of collaborating with the communist insurgency. It has been labeled a “silent genocide” by the Guatemalan State against them.

While Jorge García Granados’ early support of Israel was premised on what Guatemalans perceived as anti-colonial struggle against the British, and García Granados truly believed that the Jewish State symbolized the recognition and materialized the reparation that the world owed to a prosecuted people during 2000 years, Granados’ belief in the possibility of the Jewish state on Palestinian land was based on the Zionist premise that the

In parallel, newly declassified documents reveal that already in 1967 Israel had in mind for the Palestinians a genocidal policy; that year, Israel came to occupy the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and began to consider Palestinians as an “alien population” and “demographic problem” to be dealt with. Strategies for “emptying out,” “suffocating,” and depriving these redundant populations of water and other vital resources began to be considered (now actualized in the Gaza Strip under siege since 2005). In the 1970s,

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guerrilla movements both in Palestine and Guatemala were given a blow, but in both regions new forms of resistance emerged (like the CUC in Guatemala). Thus, the Israeli government’s efforts to “pacify” the territories captured in 1967 were parallel to the implementation of strategies to “pacify” Guatemala’s rural areas through an agricultural resettlement scheme and Civilian Self-defense Patrols directly implemented by the army with the aid of Israeli advisers and ammunition.

That is to say that, as a strategy to counter the alleged Indigenous support to Guatemala’s communist movement, as well as to cover up the Guatemalan State’s genocidal policy, the State put in place an “Integral Plan of Rural Communities,” which implied transferring Indigenous communities displaced by the army to Model Villages. The Model Villages were directly inspired by the Israeli “Nahal” program, for which soldiers trained in agricultural techniques were set out to expand settlements in Galilee, the Negev and the West Bank (which are still thriving today).

Across Guatemala, the army had bombed and burned villages and an estimated 100,000 peasants had been displaced either across the border to Mexico or to the Guatemalan highlands. The Model Villages were meant to be part of a Pacification Program, which included relocation of the Indigenous communities to the Model Villages. In reality, however, it meant the establishment of a new social and economic order; combined with the “Fusiles y frijoles” (Ammunition and Beans) plan, the civil action program encompassed slaughter, torture and forced disappearance together with the provision of life’s necessities by international humanitarian aid. This means that those who cooperated with the military and agreed to grow non-traditional crops — with the implementation of Israeli agricultural techniques — meant to be exported, such as broccoli, Chinese cabbage or watermelons, were assured a home, humanitarian assistance and safety. This “development” program of Guatemalan rural areas was based on the complete subjugation of Mayan peoples for whom being forced to grow alien crops meant cultural destruction, and for whom confinement in a Model Village was sometimes preceded by a stay in a reeducation camp.

Furthermore, the “Plan Victoria” implemented in 1982, consisted in establishing Civilian Self-defense Patrols (or PAC in Spanish) whose ranks were filled in by coercion, threats, rape, torture, disappearance, and massacres; clandestine cemeteries prevailed across the country.

By 1983 there were a million men incorporated into the PAC armed with Israeli assistance, forced to provide a quota of accused men for being communists. At the time, food was only obtainable from military stores, and the inhabitants of Model Villages were also forced to work without wages to repair roads, clear fields, build new villages, etc.

This situation is comparable to the one experienced by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli State has wrecked their local economy and transformed the population into a captive market and cheap labor source. Similarly, the Guatemalan military invasion has made economic activity in the occupied highlands impossible, aside from the fact that the PAC destroyed traditional forms of indigenous government and was meant to control the Mayan communities.

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The Guatemalan Model Villages, moreover, began to materialize in Israel in 2011 under the Begin-Prawer Plan. This policy has been designed to offer the Bedouin populations inhabiting the Naqab desert in Southern Israel a permanent home and jobs in factories. In reality, the plan is designed to relocate them and to modify their nomadic lives, to impoverish them culturally and materially, and to place them under the administration of the State that controls and oppresses them. The Begin-Prawer Plan is the largest displacement of Palestinian citizens of Israel since the 1950s, perceived as invaders to their own lands who will be confined to an urban environment removed from their traditional forms of life. The Plan has the purpose of expanding housing for Jews by establishing new communities of settlers — many of whom were evacuated from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

It has been said that traces of the PAC are still manifest today in Mayan communities across Guatemala, as are the Kaibiles — an elite army force trained in Guatemala by Israeli military — present as they have been employed by Drug Cartels in Latin America, although the Peace Accord between insurgent factions and the Guatemalan State was signed in 1996. This was only three years after the Camp David Accords were signed between Palestine and Israel. The mid-1990s, however, inaugurate an era of new tactics for cultural suppression, political repression and historical disconnection, now invisible to Human Rights Violations accusations, and under the aegis of the celebration of the multicultural and ethnic tissue of the globe, in a context of freedom of expression, movement and association. New forms of exploitation and dispossession are being furthered under the discourses and practices of democracy and development, as the “Palestinian Reform and Development Plan” (PRDP), an effort by the Palestinian Authority in collaboration with the World Bank and the British Department for International Development to implement a private sector-driven economic strategy to attract foreign investment and reduce public spending to a minimum.

In this context, it is difficult not to see the shadow of the PAC in Grupo Golán’s urban “I Protect My Community” program described above, which evidences how, just as tensions prevail in Israel-Palestine, the coexistence of the descendants of the original Spanish colonizers with the Mayans in Guatemala is soaked with normalized violence, as I was able to feel and attest in my daily walks around the Zona 14 in Guatemala City. I was usually the only white person on foot alongside Mayan men armed as private security employees — mostly their only opportunity for upward social and economic mobility — guarding upper middle class homes where Mayan women would come to sell warm handmade tortillas that they would carry in huge baskets above their heads. The analogies that can be drawn between patterns of privilege, dispossession, control and repression in Israel-Palestine and White-Indigenous Guatemala are enabled by common uses of counterinsurgency strategies grounded on histories colonial subjection. The only difference is the time frame: 500 years versus 70 years. Clearly an urgent political task is to enable Mayans and Palestinians to share and exchange strategies of autonomy, resistance and survival.

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CARTOGRAPHY & POWER THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE Nº18 Léopold Lambert, Caren Kaplan, Moad Musbahi, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Ahmad Barclay, Patrick Jaojoco, Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, Rasheedah Phillips, Bouchra Khalili, Piper Bernbaum, Celeste Winston, Zhiwen Wei, Longning Qi, Jian Wang, & Bingqian Liu..

Map of the world by Ottoman admiral Piri Reis, drawn in 1513. / Topkapi Museum, Istanbul.

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INTRODUCTION CARTOGRAPHY & POWER LÉOPOLD LAMBERT

A U.S. Airforce A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft lands on the autobahn A29 near city of Ahlhorn (West Germany) during NATO-exercise in March 1984. / Photograph by Sra Glenda Pellum.

“Plan-relief” of Grenoble, France in 1848. / Collections du Musée des Plans-Reliefs de Paris, photograph by Martin Leveneur (2012).

“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”

“About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yard to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.” (Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893.)

Welcome to the eighteenth issue of The Funambulist, Cartography & Power. Associating these two words together will come as no surprise for most readers. Just like architecture (which 10

requires plans, i.e. cartography, to be designed), cartography does not constitute a neutral discipline that can be equally used to implement either state violence or resistive endeavors.

Cartography is inherently an instrument of power and, as such, it has the propensity to facilitate the violence of military and administrative operations. All contributors to this issue begin (whether explicitly or not) with this axiom and seek for methods of mapping that can serve political struggles mobilizing against the dominant order. I personally take issue in the notion of “counter-mapping,” as some call these methods, as using the term “counter-“ as a label gives a comforting certitude to their authors that they are not reproducing the violent effects of regular mapping. There is not a discipline fundamentally dissociated from cartography (or architecture, for that matter) whose practice could guarantee us of “doing good.” As we argued in issue 16 (March-April 2018), Proletarian Fortresses, architects’ current common practice of mapping self-built urbanities of all kinds — organized neighborhoods or temporary political encampments — should be questioned as to whether they serve these THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

urbanities’ residents or the various forces of policing mobilized against them, regardless of the architects’ intention. We should instead accept that the discipline of cartography does not come without violence. But an important question remains: against what is the violence that the circumvoluting knowledge produced by the act of mapping oriented?

In Mirages de la carte: L’invention de l’Algérie coloniale (Mirages of the Map: The Invention of Colonial Algeria, 2014), Hélène Blais describes how the cartographic endeavors of the French colonial troops in the 19th century did not solely produce a knowledge of the territory with the aims of better controlling it; they also constructed the territory itself. As she shows, this is how the borders between Algeria and its neighbors (five of which were also under French colonial administration) were simultaneously mapped and established, including in the Sahara Desert, which presented almost no natural cues as to where this border ought to have been. Such colonial cartographic production of territories is discussed in the articles by Moad Musbahi (on the other side of the Algerian border in Libya) and Caren Kaplan (in Iraq).

One of the key features of colonialism the creation of strict boundaries, since the ambiguous, liminal areas that usually characterized the blurry edges of territories before their colonial takeover were not amenable to the control of resources and people. One can see how the very idea of borders without thickness (i.e. without ambiguity) is fundamentally a cartographic one. Only cartographers can conceptualize such borders, through the tracing of lines on their maps — not realizing that lines are only without thickness in the perfect world of geometry. In reality, border lines have thicknesses, and even on maps, they appear in the ink they are traced in, creating paradoxically a zone of ambiguity, where colonial powers usually want to exercise the highest degree of control.

This is what we can see in the crucial tracing of the so-called Green Line that split Palestine into three areas (the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel and West Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip) in 1949. As architect Orit Theuer examines in her thesis research “Atlas of No Man’s Land” (2014), the “three to four millimeter wide” grease pencils used by Israeli and Transjordanian commanders of Jerusalem Moshe Dayan and Adbullah el-Tell to trace this line on a map draped over a military jeep’s hood corresponds roughly to an 80-meter-wide ambiguous zone all along the line. The map used for the ceasefire agreement was drawn at a 1:250,000 scale. Theuer’s atlas shows simultaneously the blurry thickness of the Green Line, as well as the many buildings, towns and fields that it engulfs. Her cartographic work can be placed in dialogue with the one produced by Open Map Palestine, described in this issue by one of its members, THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

Ahmad Barclay. This cartographic project retraces the existence of Palestinian villages evicted and destroyed during the massive ethnic cleansing that was integral to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

Going back to the thickness of the line/border, it is important not romanticize the ambiguity it constitutes by too hastily considering it as a space of emancipation. More often than not, this thickness is the space of absolute rightlessness, as we saw in September 2012, when a group of 20 Eritrean refugees found themselves trapped for more than a week within the few yards of thickness of the border that separates Egypt from Israel. During that time, Israeli authorities offered these refugees only the bare minimum of water to stay alive, before finally arresting and deporting them. Remarkably, one of the cartographic projects presented in this issue shows that borders can also be virtually without thickness, as when their mapped lines materialize only through the discrete materiality of a wire: the Jewish Eruv, which determines the neighborhoods in which objects otherwise prohibited on the Sabbath are allowed to be carried, is mapped in several contexts by Piper Bernbaum.

To the exception of its presence in Palestine, which reinforces the colonial logics of the Israeli State, use of the Eruv is purely semiotic and, as such, does not impose its set of rules on bodies that do not associate any particular signifier with it.

The goal of this issue is also to feature maps that are not strictly geographical. Rasheedah Phillips and Bouchra Khalili help us to also think of cartography as a temporal discipline. Just like with geography, temporal mapping has the propensity to enforce a linear and compartmentalized reading of that which is mapped. Phillips therefore helps us to “dismantle the master’s clock” and reappropriate our relation to time through a topological cartography that deconstructs such compartmentalization and linearity.

This issue concludes the third year of this magazine’s publication. In eighteen issues, we have tried to cover a range of topics in relation to “the politics of space and bodies,” and we hope that you will return to read the exciting future issues of The Funambulist magazine in its fourth year of life. In the meantime, for this current one, I wish you an excellent read.

Léopold Lambert is the founding editor of The Funambulist. He is a trained architect, as well as the author of three books that examine the inherent violence of architecture on bodies, and its political instrumentalization at various scales and in various geographical contexts (Palestine, Paris banlieues, etc.). His current research consists in a spatial history of the French states of emergency.

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AERIAL SURVEYING AS AIR CONTROL GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE IN MANDATE-ERA IRAQ CAREN KAPLAN

Excavators were among the roadbuilding equipment that arrived in Turkey with U.S. funds (ca. 1950). / Courtesy of the Archives of the General Directorate of Highways in Ankara.

Photographs by Royal Air Force Sgt. Grant over Iraq (early 1920s).

Over two terrible days in late November and early December 1923, the British Royal Air Force dropped 25 tons of bombs and 8,600 incendiary bombs on Samawah, a small Iraqi city that lay mid-way between Baghdad and Basra. The firebombing of Samawah was one of the most notable examples of “exemplary punishment” dealt by the British who were infuriated by a tax revolt in the region. A cadre of military strategists from the Mesopotamia Campaign of World War I, who were now tasked with colonial governance in Iraq under the terms of the League of Nations Mandate, approached the challenges of a tight budget and the requirements of managing a large territory by intensifying their advocacy of “air control” — the doctrine of replacing extensive colonial administration with policing from the air. Throughout the Mandate era, 12

the Royal Air Force conducted aerial patrols and bombed any community, large or small, that resisted British authority. As Priya Satia has put it, “what was permissible only in wartime in advanced countries turned out to be always permissible in Iraq” (“The Defense of Inhumanity: British Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia,” 2006). With indiscriminate targeting of noncombatants as well as combatants, the attacks from the air terrorized the population and destroyed communities, homes, industries and infrastructure. Comprehensive British air control of Iraq required the building of air bases and the development of geographical tools for effective navigation and targeting. The British could neither bomb nor strafe effectively without another key component of air control: accurately detailed maps made through aerial surveying.

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Aerial surveying was a new science in the period immediately following WWI. The incorporation of airplanes into warfare had begun with Italian aerial observation and attacks on Ottoman forces in Libya in 1911 and evolved into full-scale air units for all of the major militaries by the first year of the world war. Given the challenges of navigation in this early phase of air war, the contributions of aerial surveying to topographical mapping struck military strategists as especially noteworthy. While many military topographers clung to more traditional methods and materials, the advocates of aviation pushed energetically to bring the latest advances in aerial photography and surveying into the production of updated maps.

There was an urgent need for them because the British and their allies had created such a wide arena for war, stretching across not only the Western and Eastern fronts but also the sites of engagement in North Africa and the Middle East. While the Western front offered a deep archive of cartographic material, maps of North Africa and the Middle East were less available to Europeans or believed to be inadequate. Accordingly, the British air divisions deployed to Iraq from 1916 on were tasked with developing a standardized aerial survey to assist in the production of much improved detailed maps. At the close of the war, with Winston Churchill assuming the position of Secretary of State for Air and the consolidation of the fledgling Royal Flying Corp into the Royal Air Force, advocates for air power pushed successfully for the continued integration of aviation into the production of “peacetime” geographical knowledge.

Yet, in Mandate-era Iraq there was no true “peacetime”; post-war mapping took place during a period of persistent and undeclared war. The aerial campaign in Iraq at the close of WWI and throughout the years of the Mandate period operated on multiple levels, from “soft” control to “terror.” The new strategy involved unprecedented levels of violence in metropolitan as well as rural sites. During WWI, the advocates of air war had argued that it was more humane in the long run to conduct massive bombing raids on cities because the scale of violence would force an early surrender, potentially saving large numbers of lives. Although greatly feared during the war, this level of aerial bombardment remained at the level of theory. However, while pundits debated the ethics of so-called area bombing in the West, there was no “moral or legal taboo” to prevent the bombing of largely civilian populations in colonized or Mandate zones (Beau Grosscup, Strategic Terror: The Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment, 2006). Indeed, the “peacetime” that followed the Armistice in 1918 saw British bombing raids in India, Egypt, Afghanistan, Somaliland, Iraq, and South West Africa; Spain bombing Morocco; France fighting anti-colonial groups from the air in Syria; and Italy continuing its air war in North Africa — a wartime aftermath of particularly violent intensity.

Air control was advocated by a new generation of politicians like Winston Churchill, who argued that the British empire could no longer be maintained effectively by expensive investments in ground forces and extensive tiers of administrators. While the policy of “control without occupation” following the end of WWI promised to relieve the drained coffers of the British treasury, under Churchill’s supervision it also THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

structured colonial spaces as laboratories for practicing air war before the next, seemingly inevitable world war. Under Churchill’s aegis, RAF strategies and tactics throughout the colonies and former colonies contributed directly to the British doctrine of “terror bombing” civilians during WWII. Post-WWI aerial bombardment in Iraq began early in the summer of 1920 when angry responses to the new British tax policy led swiftly to a general insurrection of not insignificant numbers — the rebellion was estimated to involve approximately 131,000 at the height of the unrest. Seeking to subdue those who refused to submit to British authority, the RAF devised a variety of practices including nighttime bombing raids on sleeping populations and the use of incendiary bombs which reduced many of the reed villages of southern Iraq to cinders. This kind of retributive aerial strafing and bombardment had a huge impact on the emotional as well as the physical state of the population on the ground. Prefiguring the effect of drones on civilian populations today, the threat of aerial attack produced an atmosphere of terror and a violent disruption of daily life that permeated Iraqi society.

Air control, officially inaugurated in Iraq in the fall of 1922 with the establishment of bases for eight squadrons of aircraft, not only produced new models of military policing, surveillance, and bombardment but also firmly and definitively linked the practices of aerial photography and topographical survey to cartographic weaponization. Aerial observation offered a technological solution to the challenge of the landbased surveying of a terrain that had been regarded by Westerners as a barren and even hostile wasteland. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the landscape of “Mesopotamia,” as Westerners came to refer to this large area, appeared to those outsiders to contain only scattered settlements and ancient ruins — a region that was poorly represented in European map collections, and, therefore, despite centuries of maps produced by Islamic empires, deemed to be inherently empty.

As information about locations mentioned in the Judeo-Christian Bible began to circulate in Europe and North America, religious pilgrims and antiquity scholars organized expeditions to “discover” and excavate sites, removing their contents to be displayed in metropolitan museums and universities. Although these activities generated more travel guides and maps in English and Western European languages, large areas continued to be represented as blank space, further underscoring orientalist descriptions of arid regions as devoid of life or biological diversity. Proponents of aerial surveying in Mandate-governed regions easily revived the “blank” map and “empty” space discourses to advocate for both new techniques of producing geographical knowledge and controlling populations via air war.

The boom in the production of maps and manuals based on aerial surveying in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East during WWI and the Mandate period seemingly ignored both previous official and unofficial local and regional geographic knowledge. For example, as Sara Pursley argues, British maps like the one usually presented as accompanying the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement — the infamous plan between Britain and France that allocated areas in the Middle East to European interests — were based almost exactly on Ottoman maps.

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Map of the Sykes–Picot Agreement between the U.K. (B) and France (A) carving up the Middle East in two colonial areas (May 1916).

Furthermore, none of these maps (British or Ottoman) represented “empty” space. As Pursley writes: “They took many things into account: mountains, deserts, rivers, and ports; known and suspected oil deposits; population densities; existing Ottoman borders [...] previous treaty agreements and current diplomatic relations and balances of power; military strategies, gains, and losses [...] and perceived local desires, demands, and conflicts as well as perceived ethnicities, languages, and religious sects” (“‘Lines Drawn on an Empty Map’: Iraq’s Borders and the Legend of the Artificial State,” 2015). Despite these details, British topographers during and after WWI continued to argue that Iraq and other arid regions were historically illegible to cartography and challenging to even the most intrepid land-based surveyors. The only solution, according to many post-war pundits, was aerial surveying.

In post-WWI Britain, an influential group of current and former military officers that included archeologists, classicists, geologists, geographers, engineers, and religious scholars, among experts in other fields, viewed desert terrain as the ideal space for experimenting with

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state-of-the art aerial surveying techniques such as strip-mapping and working with both oblique and vertical aerial imagery. Building on older mythologies of the exceptionalism of desert terrain, British pilots like Lt. Col. J.E. Tennant, the commander of Air Squadron 30 in Iraq during WWI, stressed in their notes and memoirs published after the war that conditions in arid regions enabled pilots and observers to see details on the ground “plain as draughts on a board” (In the Clouds Above Baghdad, 1920). Drawing on such testimonies, Mandate-era strategists argued that an area with no enemy air force and many months of clear skies offered almost perfect conditions for aerial surveying. As Captain H. Hamshaw Thomas explained in a paper delivered to the Royal Geographical Society in 1920, aerial surveying of the Western Front during WWI had been exceedingly difficult due to concentrations of ground fire and the frequency of inclement weather: “Straight flying and the production of long series of photographs were virtually impossible.” In Palestine, on the other hand, where Thomas flew reconnaissance flights, the “airman” could fly “unhampered” (“Geographical Reconnaissance by Aeroplane Photography, with Special Reference to the Work Done on the Palestine Front,” 1920).

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The entire rationale for aerial surveying in this time period depended on an emerging realist argument that linked geographical “ground truth” to political domination. Rather than admit that maps supported ideological projects such as British imperialism and territorialization, the advocates of the aerial surveying of Iraq during the Mandate era asserted a one-to-one correlation between “lines drawn on a map” and fact. As the British worked to influence and control nation-building in an Iraq heading for “independence,” cartographic identification and verification of otherwise malleable elements such as ethnic differences, religious sites, locations of communities, and national borders became an exacting and selfjustifying “science.” As British planes conducted reconnaissance and aerial surveys, delivered communications rapidly over large distances, and conducted punishing aerial attacks on targeted cities and towns, the coordination of geographical information, military intelligence, and warfare achieved a new standard of efficiency. The detailed maps produced throughout the Mandate period with the energetic cooperation of the RAF Photographic Section and the Survey Department worked to transform Iraq into “one of the most extensively mapped and imaged areas on the face of the planet” (Rashad Salim, “Ur’s Echo: Cosmopolitans and Radical Loss,” 2013).

Beyond the technical triumphalism of any narrative of Mandateera cartography lies a more complicated history. Although air control of regions like Iraq promised perfection of performance, the results were uneven: despite the much-vaunted advantages of the weather in Iraq, visibility was often a problem, and pilots would become disoriented. Many targets were completely missed, and, with enough warning, the rebels had little trouble evading the supposedly omniscient powers of the aerial observers. Resentment and hostility towards the British became a constant reminder that bombing a population into compliance has lasting political implications. Nevertheless, since only the British forces had aircraft, the aerial strafing and bombardment had a huge impact on the emotional as well as the physical state of the population on the ground. The British had been terrorizing populations that rebelled against their occupation for several hundred years. The instrumental advantage offered by aviation shifted public perception on the homefront from debates about “strong arm” tactics to celebrations of technological development and scientific achievement. If aerial surveying in areas like Iraq produced uneven results politically and militarily, the benefit of such experimentation for the evolution of modern surveying methods for urban planning, academic fields such as archaeology, and other purposes cannot be underestimated.

In many ways, the history of aerial surveying in Mandate-era Iraq supports Bruno Latour’s contention that the technologies that endure, at least for a time, are those that not only operate satisfactorily but also help their advocates win their arguments or, I would add, secure financial as well as political advantages (“Drawing Things Together,” 1990). No map is neutral, and the THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

cartographic representation of Iraq became layered with the territorial interests of governments and corporations. The rise of British Petroleum and other oil companies during the Mandate period cannot be understood as separate from the production of geographical knowledge of the region (in particular, the inclusion of Mosul within the boundaries of the nation state and control of the oil fields). As the US joined and even replaced the British as the foreign power most “interested” in Iraq, the air wars have persisted along with the proliferation of mapping technologies. Iraq provided the “perfect laboratory” once again for air power during “Operation Desert Shield” in 1990-91, as the US used the satellites of the global positioning system for the first time to direct air to ground missiles to targets. The ferocity of the US and allies’ air campaign during that conflict led to thousands of civilian casualties and widespread devastation of communities and infrastructure. “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” which began in 2003 and continues indefinitely, has featured the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) not only for air strikes but for observation and aerial imaging.

The mapping continues, relentlessly, in the era of the “war on terror,” aiding contemporary air forces in their bombing runs while signaling the high stakes in determining which geographical information technologies will prevail.

Although declared and undeclared air wars have wrought devastation and claimed countless lives, the resilience of towns and cities like those attacked by the RAF in Iraq during the Mandate period is undeniable. Today Samawah is described as an agricultural market center, located on the Baghdad-Basra rail line. Built on both sides of the Euphrates and boasting numerous palm groves, the city has been continuously settled since the 3rd century AD. In addition to cement plants and a small oil refinery, the city produces salt from a nearby salt lake and is also known for bricks baked in the sun (a traditional craft) and a small carpet industry. Violence and trouble has not been absent since the creation of the nation-state in 1932 — the city has seen deportations and removals of citizens based on religious and political affiliation throughout the 20th century. Some neighborhoods of Samawah are known for rebellions against authorities ranging from Ottoman to British administrators and from Sunni to US rulers and occupiers. A satellite map of the city clearly shows the curving path of the Euphrates and the deep green of the celebrated palm groves. Main thoroughfares and primary buildings are easily identified. Less clear from the map is the historical contribution of communities like Samawah to the cartographic technologies that we take for granted today. The operations maps produced

by RAF aerial surveying enabled the firebombing of Samawah in 1923 just as satellite and drone imagery made possible occupation of the city by the US 82nd Airborne Division in 2003. Every map is linked historically to the weaponized cartography inaugurated in the era of air control in places like Iraq. Once we recognize this history, the question that remains open is whether or not geographical knowledge production can be disarticulated from war.

This text is an adaptation for The Funambulist from Aerial Aftermaths published by Duke University Press, 2018.

Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies at the University of California at Davis. Her research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military history to explore the ways in which undeclared as well as declared wars produce representational practices of atmospheric politics. Recent publications include Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Duke 2018) and Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (co-edited with Lisa Parks, Duke 2017).

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THE SAHARA IS NOT A DESERT RE-MAPPING LIBYA, UNRAVELLING THE STATE MOAD MUSBAHI

Wadi Megenin, 0 kilometer from the coast (December 26, 2017). / Photograph by Moad Musbahi.

“You have here the presidents of institutions that do not recognize each other [...]. Each and every one denied the existence of the institutions that the others represented and their legitimacy. That is the difficulty of Libya’s current situation.” (“Libyan Factions Agree to Elections Despite Deep Divisions,” New York Times, May 29, 2018, quoting French President Emmanuel Macron.)

During a press briefing following a meeting hosted by the French President, he reflected on the defining characteristic of the contemporary Libyan condition. It has been almost seven years since the end of the February 17, 2011 Revolution. It was a revolution that was marked with a single-minded drive, in which the character of its now disposed dictator provided a strong bond and focus, a common enemy against which the population rallied. This would subsequently give reason for many to arrive at the logical explanation that there was optimism, a fertile ground from which a democratic state would take hold and flourish. This could not have been further from the case. With something close to national nihilism, there has been a nationwide unravelling of everything with even a semblance of unity.

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Today, Libya is governed by a wide variety of institutions. It hosts different competing governments, militia groups, and tribal leaders.

There are no state institutions, there is no national unity that anyone can convincingly speak of. With even its flag serving as a contested object, the only remaining national marker resides in the country’s shape on the map, the representational boundary of its national extents. The map acting as the emblematic tool par excellence of the state as a singular identifiable whole.

The borders contained in this map have come to acquire a renewed significance. They have become sites of increased traffic for sub-Saharan immigrants destined for Europe. This has lead the European community, driven predominately by Italy and France, into a desperate drive to halt the inflow of migrants to its shores. Various military strategies designed over the past few years have focused on both the Mediterranean coast and the edge of the Sahara in an attempt to physically block the movement of bodies within these two fluid spaces; it has lead to thousands of deaths every year. Delivering little success, the new strategy of Western Europe has been to increase THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

reach extends over the country’s east; and Aguila Saleh Issa, the speaker of the eastern city of Tobruk’s House of Representatives. Before a largely approving international audience, each of these delegates were charged with either reaching a common agreement, to hold nationwide presidential elections before the end of the year or face the threat of individual sanctions. Yet none of these figures have risen to prominence by any process that could be recognized as democratic. In the absence of any alternative, the fate of the Libyan state, as engineered by the international community, has been given over to a group of figures characterized by their highly eccentric personalities and self-interested spheres of influence.

By promoting individuals with no accountability, over trying to more carefully understand the Libyan people and the variety of spaces they inhabit, this diplomatic effort views the state as if it was a homogenous entity awaiting its inevitable unification. I would strongly argue that this comes at the expense of finding the real possibilities of regional stability. To insist on understanding the state through the current map of its territory is to continue to override the unique and heterogenous territorial formations that have constituted the various livelihoods that have resided here since time immemorial.

This map shows Libya in the moment prior to the 1935 Franco-Italian agreement that decided the demarcation of the southern border. / Istituto Geografico Militare (1926), photo by Moad Musbahi.

pressure upon the various influential political factions and actors in Libya to come together and form a stable state — a state that would then be bound to uphold its sovereignty through the policing of its national boundaries. Boundaries, it is important to remember, that was drawn through a series of negotiations by French and Italian imperial forces in the early 20th century as they constructed the map of Libya and the adjacent North African states. An act undertaken without the involvement of a single member of the local populations that it impacted. Boundaries that until this day are only visible on paper.

The meeting that occurred on May 29, 2018 in Paris had this aim of nationbuilding as its goal. At the invitation of President Macron, four Libyan dignitaries, their delegations, and a series of interested states came together at the Élysée Palace to discuss how statehood could be fostered and achieved. In a similar dining room to the one in which the map of Libya was agreed upon a century prior, these figures would come together in the same geographic location for the first time. The invitees included Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj of the United Nations-backed government, whose influence is mainly concentrated in Tripoli; Khalid Mishri, the newly elected head of the High Council of State, a group also influential in western Libya; General Khalifa Hifter, whose THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

Engaging with these formations begins by challenging the Western cartographic method, and the ways in which it does not account for seasonal and cultural specificities. The Saharan wadi is one example of a territorial formation which has made the plethora of non-sedentary modes of living possible. A wadi in Arabic literally translates as “valley” or “dry river bed,” yet its real meaning is more nuanced. The series of photographs accompanying this article capture the moment immediately following the annual flash storm of 2017/2018 which flooded Wadi Megenin. This valley is part of the environmental system which has determined the location of modern day Tripoli. By feeding the water table under the city for millennia, allowing many historical civilisations to flourish, it continues to provide for the current inhabitants of the city. Its name “Megenin” derives from the Arabic “the crazed,” and refers to the unpredictability of its movements each year. Within these photographs we see the traces it has left behind, and their precise reading unlock the possibilities it has for sustaining life. It is these varied traces that are not so easily subsumed within the cartographic method. The Wadi is one example among many I would argue that require a more careful revisiting if the territory of Libya is to achieve any form of stability today.

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Wadi Megenin, 6 kilometers from the coast (December 26, 2017). / Photograph by Moad Musbahi.

The State as a Map /// It can be understood without much explanation that all states are abstract entities. As political forms, they have risen from the various (though exclusively Western) treaties and agreements. These treaties forming the foundations for modern international law and the institutions that enforce and cement this law. Yet, to better understand the May 2018 meeting, we need to be more critical and unpack the current situation through looking at the specifics of how Libya came to be in the first place.

In what Hélène Blais refers to as the “colonial library,” (in Mirages de la carte: L’invention de l’Algérie coloniale), the Italian colonial project in Libya arrived with a set of atavistic preconceptions and subsequently attempted to construct a colonial space based on them. Through research into the Ancient Empire of Rome and to a lesser degree Greece, which Western Imperial European powers laid claim their lineage from, and alongside a skewed form of scientific ideals and information gained from individual European explorers, they build the colonial library as a toolset. A toolset of ideas and understandings that they amass before utilizing abroad without any consideration for the actualities of the region and the people they colonize.

The colony that preceded the modern state of Libya was a portion of the African continent collaged from remains of the Ottoman empire and adjacent regions inhabited by non-sedentary tribes of the Sahara. The Italian colonial project started in 1911 on the coast, the Quatro Sponda. This coast was first understood as an island caught between the Mediterranean and the great sand seas of the Sahara. The sea border had already been codified by international law. It stems from, an even then outdated measurement, the distance covered by a cannon ball fired from the coastline. Rounded up to five kilometers, 18

this logic gives a universal condition to sovereign maritime space, which, applied everywhere, overrides the specificities and localized characteristics of the sea in favour of generalized cartographic abstraction. A similar tactic was applied by the Ottomans to the desert.

They had defined mawat (dead) land as beginning at the point at which a sound made at the edge of a cultivated area could no longer be heard. Taking a similar logic, the Italians began to resurface the Sahara, attempting to alter this “dead” land on a territorial scale and “make the desert bloom again.”

“The far-seeing eyes of Mussolini looked way beyond the waste-lands that had been abandoned for more than a thousand years by all but fighting Arabs when he made a triumphal journey through the colony [...] the frontier of cultivation moved 35 miles from the coast [...] acreage of barley has been quadrupled, hundreds of thousands of new olives trees have been set out.” (Fazal Sheikh and Eyal Weizman, The Conflict Shoreline, 2015, quoting J.R.W, “Will the Libyan Desert Bloom Again?”)

A key characteristic of colonial projects has been making “unknown” territories more knowable. Colonizers would chart and map lands, using their repertoire of notations, to make them comprehensible to them. This double move not only provided practical information for planning the means through which expansion could occur, but also legitimated the expansionist sentiment itself. One of the key elements of the Italian colonial project was its various academic and scientific bodies. The three most important of these were the Institute of Military Geography, the Institute of Colonial Agriculture, and the Geographical Society of Italy, which worked in tandem surveying, mapping, and cultivating land, with a drive that formed an integral policy objective of the Fascist regime once it took power in 1922.

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Wadi Megenin, 15 kilometers from the coast (December 26, 2017). / Photograph by Moad Musbahi.

Fundamentally the method employed by these three institutes understood the territory and its spatial/social formations only by the tools explicitly foreign to local and indigenous knowledges and their local understanding of the territory.

The “far-seeing eyes” of Mussolini perceived this land as a deserted wasteland by colonial standards, and he attempted to expand the coastline Italy had captured. The intention was to engineer a change of the very regime of representation of the ‘empty space’ of the desert and to construct the colony as a recognizable territory through the image of its map — the “accurate” cartographic map as both a marker of Western progress (legitimizing the colonization) and a colonial canvas for violent domination.

Fezzan is the region to the south of the Libyan coast. It waged the longest resistance against the colonial power, and its subjugation came about only through a massive detention of bodies in one singular and easily locatable position. These Italian concentration camps were tools that overcame the logistical problem of access into this Saharan region and the migratory modes of living practiced by its inhabitants — a type of forced urbanization for a people who did not conceive of Fezzan through its current boundary, but through a more nuanced and ever-evolving testimonial geography. An indigenous geography that would place it, approximately, between the Sudan in the east and the River Niger to the west. Its southern limit is defined by the seasonal and varied agricultural production of the Sahel region, with the shores of Lake Chad acting as a quasi-border to the region.

Pragmatically, to draw a national line through such a seemingly formless body of land, whose shifting volumes of sand and migratory population have never witnessed the fixity of a Westphalian system of division, the Italian regime had to alter the region’s essential characteristics. This was achieved through the establishment of small agricultural properties, which were also called by the Institute of Colonial Agriculture in the 1920/1930s THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

“colonial farm property.” Though no conclusive number has been publicly compiled, the figures attached to some of the documents I have found in the Institute’s archives indicate that the properties numbered in the hundreds.

These “agricultural properties” provided essential points of triangulation, from which the Institute of Military Geography generated the necessary maps the colonial project required. The colonial project set up a cycle in which, through agricultural cultivation, greater cartographic accuracy was attained. The agricultural land features gave rise to seemingly greater accuracy in the plan through their visibility as fixed points in the landscape. This cartography in turn opened the possibility of greater agricultural activity, in addition to the rendering of colonized space legible through Western notation. The visibility of this triangulating vegetation was two-fold: these plants were not only an intervention which necessitated the presence of workers tasked with their continual maintenance, but they could also, due to their root systems, move in relation to the wind-blown sand, meaning that instead of being covered by the dunes like a concrete wall or fence, they would remain visible. By replicating these systems, the Italian colonizers attempted to resurface the desert, to make it a non-desert.

The idea of the desert is one of the most essential tools in the colonial library, and one of the most problematic of tropes. I would argue that it is a crucial lever in understanding the problems of modern Libya as a nation-state. It is fundamentally a problem of cartography, a place which has yet to be successfully 19

translated into the repertoire of legible signs that can be consumed by the West, and so is literally lost in translation. “Desert” from the Latin deserere refers to desertion, it has come to denote the wasteland, colonial appropriation, and a literal emptying of indigenous rights, while the equivalent term in modern Arabic, “Sahara,” finds it root in an aesthetic and observational logic, its semantic root, stemming from the Ancient Egyptian, shr as “to make yellowish red” or the Ancient Syrian, ashar “to blush.” The “Desert” and the “Sahara” are competing terms.

The method in which indigenous population of the Sahara have inhabited this land, making it viable and amenable for different forms of habitation, defies the common understanding of it as a waterless region, what science categorises as “hyper-arid.” This seemingly objective narrative of a scientific environmental determinism disregards the cultural specificities that are present, specificities in which: “The adaptive strategies of contemporary pastoralists are underwritten not so much by a sense of the ‘harshness’ of the environment (as it appears to Western eyes) as by a culturally inflected mode of perception that is attuned to local variations and to the possibilities they afford.” (Stefano Biagetti and Jasper M. Chalcraft, “Imagining Aridity: Human-Environment Interactions in the Acacus Mountains, South-West Libya,” 2012).

Of course, water matters, but this homogenous and undifferentiated concept of aridity, of the desert, applied across vast tracts of land does not account for local topography, hydrography, and unique cultural forms. The respective adaptations of these forms, which show in the simplest terms that water matters differently, heterogeneously, and is varied across place and according to individual values. It is this variety that can be read by the local population, giving insights to the territory that act as an alternative to reading the landscape through the cartographic maps introduced by the colonial powers.

Cartography is only successful if it can articulate the qualities of the territory it represents. The map of the state is operative only in being able to define its border with clarity and precision. A border’s legibility depends on its integrity, its continuity, its ability to effectively encircle and demarcate one land from another. Its power only exists in the absence of opening; any 20

Villaggio Breveglieri was one of the Italian Colonial Properties that were introduced to the Libyan Colony designed by the architect Umberto Di Segni. / Istituto Agricolo Coloniale (1934)

leakage of the map’s regions undoes the notion of the territory as a singular entity, unravels the concept of the state. From 1926, we see a map which remains disturbing to this day. The spillage of this map’s regions into one another highlights the problematic role of the Sahara, in which by lacking any geographic features that could historically have been conceived of as borders, and because its matter is constantly shifting, it resists the easy demarcation and the practical form of policing that a map attempts to provide. This was resolved through the 1935 Mussolini-Laval Treaty by using the straight, geometric lines that still currently denote the country’s borders.

Re-Mapping the State /// “[...] the rushing waters abated and the thirsty wadis began to absorb them.

Thousands of years of thirst had caused the land to do away with the rivers [...].

It was as though the seeds strewn in nothingness, in the folds of the sands, among the massive rocks, had been waiting for that moment, eager for the sky to meet the earth. And when that consummation came, the seed buried in nothingness quivered and breathed out its relief.” (Ibrahim Al-Koni, The Bleeding of the Stone, 2013).

One tool that can begin to deconstruct the map, an example of a unique cultural form or territorial formation, is the Saharan wadi. A wadi in Arabic literally translates as “valley” or “dry river bed,” yet its real meaning is more nuanced. Through annual flash floods that last only a few days per year, rainfall flows down the numerous plateaus of the Sahara. Water rushes across the sand and floods the regions it encounters. This phenomenon does not follow any simple mechanics; it is a highly complex combination of an intense period THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

(left page) Wadi Megenin, 35 kilometers from the coast (December 27, 2017). (right page) Wadi Megenin, 65 and 70 kilometers from the coast (December 28, 2017). / All photographs by Moad Musbahi.

of rainfall, over a short period of time, onto very dry and loose sand. This water then either filters to a body of water or sinks down into ancient artisanal aquifers in which water is stored in the deep impermeable strata.

The path this flood water takes is radically altered every year, as the wind constantly changes the distribution of the sand. The Wadi is then defined by what it leaves behind, as the varied and multi-layered trace of its passage that can be read for a moment before the phenomenon happens anew.

Made visible by these signs, encoded and only legible to those who are able to read them. It is then utilized by those who have over time acquired an intimate knowledge of its behavior, and have made what is read

by Westerners as an inhospitable landscape into one which is both accommodating and rewarding.

To look at these images contained in this article requires a perception attuned to the territory. The direction of the trees, the way their roots are exposed or not, the sand formations on the surface, and the tell-tale dashes of green all tell a story about what was present and what is yet to come. A story about a way of life that has existed as long as the Sahara itself. These images of Wadi Megenin follow its path from the coast line, almost vertical and totalling 75 kilometers in length along a South-North axis. Originating in the Sahara it travels to the sea.

The wadi challenges the common understanding of non-Western, post-colonial regions. In the diplomatic event Macron organized to discuss the future of Libya, its sovereign borders and their traversal by sub-Saharan African was adTHE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

dressed without any input from the various groups that reside in the south. It was neighboring states that were charged with containing Libya within the arbitrary map of the globe as enforced by the European and the international community’s world-view.

For a future state to exist in this place based on fair and equitable principles, the territory of this entire region needs to be evaluated anew and its logics and formations reconsidered in careful detail and afforded their due significance. Only when there are new markers and revitalized social and spatial knowledges will it be possible to more reasonably understand and map the unity of Libya outside of forms of colonial geography. Otherwise, to confuse the reinforcing of colonial borders as a form of sovereignty, as the country is currently mapped, does not affirm a sense of independence or self-determination, but rather gives legitimacy to the ongoing colonial violence witnessed today. A violence that began by the ill-founded mapping of the state, and the criminalizing of their contemporary traversal.

Moad Musbahi is one half of MorningIndustries.org and has recently completed the project “West of the Nile” at the Architectural Association’s Diploma 14. His work engages with architecture, video, and writing to investigate the post-colonial contexts of the Arab world. He has contributed to newspapers in Tripoli and has worked as a translator in the region since 2011.

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AN INCOMPLETE ATLAS OF STONES

A CARTOGRAPHY OF THE TSUNAMI STONES ON THE JAPANESE SHORELINE ELISE MISAO HUNCHUCK

Material practices are deeply political practices. In the early history of landscape architecture in North America — where I was trained in philosophy and landscape architecture — Frederick Law Olmsted and some of his contemporaries worked as designers and, crucially, as advocates for public literacy, awareness, and ultimately the protection of landscapes that they considered essential to the overall well-being of the public sphere. In so doing, they explicitly acted to expand the field of possibilities for landscape architecture, moving back and forth between designing discrete sites and designing political dialogues.This movement not only extended the influence of landscape architecture beyond the boundaries of the site, but it empowered a profession in its early stages to consider its agency at scales beyond the site, endowing it with the responsibility to consider the forces that shape landscape outside of design, including politics, economy, and material processes.

The problem of moving shorelines, of transgressions and regressions, remains a fundamental question to disciplines from geology to landscape architecture, and to the safety (or risk) of those who live along coastlines. An Incomplete Atlas investigates a type of stone set into a coastal landscape, the tsunami stones of Japan, in order to carry those aims forward, in order to think collectively about how we design and conduct research, in order to develop a greater fluency about the relations involved in making landscapes.

Landscape Agency /// It is, after all, “landscape’s genius, landscape’s own agency, is that it is forever masking the work that makes it” (Don Mitchell, “Landscape’s Agency,” 22

2017). For the most part, Mitchell goes on, the illusion suits us fine — those who the landscapes are for — until it’s not, when the material labor of the landscape is revealed, usually in disaster or in conflict but also through scientific enquiry. How, then, can we reveal landscape’s agency before the event? Or, how might we recover the critical capacity of landscape architecture, assuming it ever had it to begin with? “[...] not only is landscape the medium of naturally existing forces, flows and processes, but the very matter that constitutes landscape itself — the rocks, the soils, the fossils it produces — all add temporal, ecological and geological dimensionality to its vitality — its non-human agency. On the other hand, this agency, if well-documented in its materiality, can play a more interpretive role in constituting a kind of historical narrative of human culture — a means to prove the recent and deep past of the human condition in relation to objects extracted from or placed within the landscape. Taken together, these various discursive tendencies instigate a practice in which the rigorous documentation of materials, plants and their unique ecologies can be curated to reveal a kind of social and cultural agency that passes through the material fragments of landscape, entangling the human and non-human worlds in a complex, more-than-human ecology. Landscape, we could say, appears today as a kind of as-found archive of social and cultural history.” (Ross Exo Adams, “Landscapes of Post-History,” 2017).

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Landscape is a place where we project political and social orders.

And, landscape can also be the source of truth that vindicates or substantiates those orders — because they are necessary. And when things become necessary (or are presumed to be), they can lose their agency. If we agree with Adams’ contention that landscape is a found-archive, it follows that it is also almost incomprehensible in its complexity and political status in the present. When landscape architects speak of landscapes, we speak of “making visible” — this is the agency and language we ascribe to ourselves as landscape architects. And we tend towards doing this by making site inventories and analyses and maps.

Everyday Life/// How and where might we reconcile landscape’s status as dynamic, susceptible, and prone to agency? Once we do this, can we then develop a practice — an ethical practice or method — by which to respond to any given landscape?

In Japanese traditions, there exists a continuity between nature and culture, insofar as the sense of a place speaks directly to the intricate interplay between human and natural forces. This continuity is most clear in the practice of naming utamakura. Storied places shared through literature and art, they are imbued with geologic history, human history and cultural meaning.

In 1689, a poet named Matsuo Basho left Edo (present day Tokyo) on foot for a six-month journey along the shores and into the mountainous forests of northern Japan. Along the way, he wrote what would become the most well-known and treasured Japanese travel diary, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi). Basho’s journey from Edo to the edges of the Tohoku region would amplify his already acute awareness of the impermanence of nature, developed through his practice of closely observing, recording and reflecting upon his immediate environment. As he journeyed north, from utamakura to utamakura, Basho was writing and drawing, weaving fragments of literature and history, in a rigorous way. Using prose, he would share geographic context and using haikun poetry, he responded to those great poets and artists who had, before him, written of each utamakura and their views. He traveled north to Hiraizumi before turning west, toward the Sea of Japan, and later still, returned to Edo. Five years later, after leaving home for another journey, Basho fell ill. He never recovered, but a lifetime of traveling and writing about his wanderings would engender future generations of writers, poets, and travelers with the value of seeing and documenting; that to name a place is to know a place, and that to do so in a place such as Japan is to call attention to the realities of everyday life in the face of knowable but unpredictable geologic forces.

Erratic Exuberance /// Honshu is an island that feels alive in the most sensual of ways; temperate summers encourage exuberant flora — here, the city of Tomioka in the nuclear exclusion zone shows what can happen when the flora is unchecked — the ocean moves, desired and undesired, up and over the island, into the air; the earth shudders, from below. These movements, sometimes discernible and sometimes not, together define a precarious existence, an indelible part of Japanese life and cultural identity.

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A stratovolcanic land form, the island of Honshu is the largest island in the Japanese archipelago, with almost seventy percent of the island formed by steep, forested mountains and the remaining thirty percent tending toward deltaic or ria coastal landscapes. The geomorphology of the deltaic and coastal sites — that which makes them desirable for human settlement — also makes them vulnerable to geologic events and their attendant effects. If one takes the long view, the recorded history of seismicity in Japan from the 6th century to 2011 shows a high incidence of large, shallow earthquakes along the riatic coastline. Earthquakes of this kind are more likely to trigger tsunamis, which are then amplified by the geomorphology of the Sanriku coast and its large, low bays and steep mountainsides.

On the eleventh day of March in 2011, at 14:45 local time, the Earthquake Early Warning system of Japan activated more than a thousand seismometers throughout the island nation, sending a warning to millions of people. Sixty seconds later, a 9.0 magnitude undersea megathrust earthquake hit Japan, the most powerful earthquake to have hit the island in recorded history. A second warning was issued by the Japanese Meteorological Agency; a major tsunami event was likely, but not certain. As the earth moved near the convergence of the overriding North American plate and the subducting Pacific Plate, an undersea landslide was triggered, and the immense body of water that we know of as the Pacific Ocean was displaced. Between ten to thirty minutes later — the times vary along the coastline — an earthquaketsunami event occurred. The ocean began to rise slowly, and then rapidly, into the hollowed out riatic sawtooth formations along the coast.

In many locations, the swelling of the ocean was exacerbated by toohigh or too-wide seawalls and, rather than dispelling incoming energy traveling in the water, the seawalls trapped the tsunami waves, intensifying the swells and currents. The surges of water moving inland ranged from 5.0 meters to 40.5 meters, inundating an estimated total of 561 square kilometers of land. The tsunami would be named the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake Tsunami and, as it swept into ports along the coast, surging inland before retreating back into the sea, it would result in the death of 15,890 people, injuring 6,152, with 2,576 people still missing and presumed lost.

The catastrophic loss of human life was not the result of warning systems that did not work; seismometers and tsunami warnings worked as they had been designed to. Instead, the loss of life was the predictable result of a series of choices that were made about where to build, what to build, where to work, where to live. And, in cases of emergency, when and where to evacuate. But, as the days progressed, between disaster, came stories of small groups, of villages, of school children who had escaped significant loss of life. Seaside villages with bustling ports claimed few to no lives lost despite 32 meter surges moving in, up and over schools, homes, villages. How was this possible?

The Tsunami Stones /// Hundreds of years before, in the wake of the 869 Jogan tsunami along the same coast — so the story goes — communities began to erect stone tablets called tsunami stones. These stones performed a dual function; they are warnings — markers of the edges of inundation, they indicate where to build and where to flee when oceans rise 23

STONE No. 74 39°2’12.84”N 141°43’5.49”E 20 meters above sea level height: 157 cm width: 97 cm depth: 35 cm Inscription: A Memorial Target tsunami: 1896 Meiji Sanriku earthquake tsunami Relation to 1896 Meiji Sanriku earthquake tsunami flood line: above the line Relation to 2011 Great East Japan earthquake tsunami flood line: above the line

— and they are monuments, erected as part of a ritual that memorializes geologic events and those lost. Some stones have no message, as time has worn away the inscription; some record the past and project possible futures; some bear instructions for evacuation and rebuilding, such as Stone no.

31 (in the atlas), who tells its reader that an “earthquake is an omen of a subsequent tsunami. Watch out for at least one hour. When it comes, rush away to higher places. Never reside on submerged land again.”

There exist hundreds of these stones along the Sanriku coast, ranging in height from a few inches to a few meters.

Rising from the earth, many were placed in the landscape to mark either the height of the inundation line or to mark territory above the inundation line. The messages inscribed on the stones vary from stone to stone, with each community utilising stones as a memorial; as recorded, predictive knowledge; and often times, both. In some villages, the messages not to build below the inundation line were heeded. In others, not. In some villages, the messages to evacuate after an earthquake to an elevation above the stones were heeded.

In others, not. This is how some people were able to survive.

And, how some did not.

What is the effect of these markers on the way communities and governments understand the always present risk of an earthquake or tsunami? Or, what can the effect be?

These tablets — the technology of linear marks in stone — have a pressing current and future relevance that is too important to be dismissed as mere marker of a past event, or as memorial to lives lost. These tablets (each like utamakura) are part of a multivalent knowledge exchange through time and space, and with another 500 stones planned for erection in the coming years to commemorate the Great East Japan tsunami, and as Japan decides how and if to continue moving forward with almost 14,000 kilometers of seawalls, they are critical in establishing an understanding that the crisis facing coastal landscapes is an ongoing project.

But, how do we develop this understanding? How can we reveal the material labor of landscape? How, thinking back to Mitchell’s writing, does landscape’s mask drop? Could it be when we (relentlessly) constitute the landscape in the present? Is it possible to constitute a particular kind of landscape all at once? Is there such a device — a tool, perhaps — that does not speak of itself, but of a phenomena that occurs along a type of landscape?

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STONE No. 67 大船渡市 Ofunato-shi [ city] Iwate prefecture Tōhoku region

ocean or bay coastline tsunami innundation: 2011 tsunami stone location

The Incomplete Atlas /// In the summer of 2015, I travelled to known tsunami stones along the Sanriku coast in order to explore the importance of on-site research and of bearing witness. And, through mixed-method research (archival research, field work, interviews, mapping, documenting), I came to compile what would become An Incomplete Atlas of Stones, a visual document as a way to unfold or see the archipelago’s unstable mineral base.

The atlas is organized by tsunami stone, following the coastline of Iwate prefecture from north to south along the Sanriku coast of Honshu. It is also a record of 50 days of travel, of 75 sites along the Coast, a compilation of landscapes that are complex, responsive artefacts of materialized memories and cultures that have shaped the past and will shape futures.

Each tsunami stone is introduced by its geographic coordinates: latitude, longitude, and elevation. Latitude and longitude site each stone on the surface of the earth while elevation situates each in relation to the mean level of the sea. They are further situated, first, by the boundaries of the village, town, or city they are located within; second, by administrative prefecture; and, third, geographic region.

As each stone was erected in response to a major tsunami, the year and name of the tsunami is listed in addition to the stone’s relation to that inundation line (below the line, on the line, or, above the line) of both its tsunami and the tsunami of 2011. Each stone, at the time it was inserted into the landscape, was engraved with a message, and so they may be considered as belonging to one of two categories: as a memorial, commemorating people and places lost to an earthquake tsunami; or as a THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

STONE No. 67 39°2’12.84”N 141°43’5.49”E Google Earth Imagery Date: March 31, 2011 Eye altitude: 1,000 m

STONE No. 67 39°2’12.84”N 141°43’5.49”E Google Earth Imagery Date: May 31, 2015 Eye altitude: 1,000 m

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STONE No. 74 38°56’45.93”N 141°42’21.29”E 30 meters above sea level height: 131 cm width: 49 cm depth: 34 cm Inscription: A Memorial Target tsunami: 1896 Meiji Sanriku earthquake tsunami Relation to 1896 Meiji Sanriku earthquake tsunami flood line: above the line Relation to 2011 Great East Japan earthquake tsunami flood line: above the line

lesson, providing a description of events and directions as to where to build, where to evacuate, and where waters have risen in the past.

The tsunami stone is then mapped, using a combination of primary map data and open access data provided by the Japan Meteorological Agency in relation to the inundation of the Great East Japan tsunami by overlaying the location and elevation of the stone, the coastline, and the 2011 inundation lines. The maps are constrained to a consistent frame with the exception of the inundation, which leaks out, in all directions, to the limits of the page.

Each tsunami stone is then revealed at a scale related to the human body; first as a specimen, removed from its context in a front facing, scaled photograph and on the right, in a view portraying each stone in its surrounding. Each stone is shown unobstructed, in isolation from its context on the left, so that readers may attempt to discern the location of the stone in the view displayed on the right page. Each view is taken from the nearest street or footpath, which, in the aftermath of an earthquake and in anticipation of a tsunami, are used as evacuation routes. And it is along these pathways where people are forced (in moments of extreme danger and fear) to develop an understanding of personal vulnerability and respond accordingly. In addition to contemporary signage systems indicating evacuation routes and safety zones, known tsunami stones are an additional means by which to navigate these landscapes of risk.

In order to record change and constancy in relation to each stone and the reconstruction efforts around them, two aerial images are presented: one taken shortly after the 2011 tsunami and one taken after approximately five years of reconstruction, in and around the same time the field work was conducted. Each stone’s location may be determined by following the longitudinal and latitudinal markers found at the edge of the aerial photographs, and the precise dates of the imagery may be found at the bottom of each page.

Read (Y)our Landscapes /// An Incomplete Atlas is an attempt to illustrate the dynamics of a coastline as a place through the development and articulation of a nuanced, landscape-based atlas that makes technical information available to a wide range of readers.

It uses basic tools — texts and drawings that borrow from 26

STONE No. 74 陸前高田市 Rizukentakata-shi [ city] Iwate prefecture Tōhoku region

ocean or bay coastline tsunami innundation: 2011 tsunami stone location

representational conventions familiar to many — and deploys a consistent strategy and method at the site of each stone, proposing a type of visual and verbal language that is simultaneously simple and sophisticated, that is of a place and yet articulates a way of reading landscapes to help people recognize ambiguous, complex, and varied landscapes.

Establishing a shared legibility of landscapes is not only an opportunity to extend the agency of design for landscape architects and the discipline, but perhaps, most importantly, it offers the opportunity to extend knowledge and agency to citizens. It is only then, when everyone has access to and is equipped with the information necessary to engage in conversations about immediate choices and long-term possibilities that landscape’s agency is revealed. Landscapes’ neutrality lost and no longer detached or abstracted, it becomes clear that they are complex, contested, and subject to the pressures of life — both slow and fast. These pressures, from sea level rise to climate change to tsunamis, are critical in establishing the understanding that the crisis facing coastal landscapes is an ongoing one, far from being limited to the aftermath of emergency.

Elise Misao Hunchuck is an independent researcher, writer, designer, and editor based in Berlin. Trained in landscape architecture, philosophy, and geography, her work focuses on bringing together fieldwork, research, design, and writing through collaborative practices of observation, care, and coordination. Her research in Canada, Japan, northern Europe, and most recently, Ukraine, develops cartographic, photographic, and text-based practices to explore and communicate the agency of landscapes. She is also a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal.

THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

STONE No. 74 38°56’45.93”N 141°42’21.29”E Google Earth Imagery Date: March 31, 2011 Eye altitude: 1,000 m

STONE No. 74 38°56’45.93”N 141°42’21.29”E Google Earth Imagery Date: May 31, 2015 Eye altitude: 1,000 m

THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

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MAPPING AND “TRUTH” COMMUNICATING THE ERASURE OF PALESTINE AHMAD BARCLAY

Detail of 1:20,000 scale Haifa map sheet, 1942.

“[...] Salmon emphasised the human aspect of carto-topography. No matter how accurate the map, Salmon wrote, people would never trust it if it were not pleasant and attractive to the eye, for it was impossible not to be affected by its external appearance.” (Dov Gavish, in A Survey of Palestine Under the British Mandate, 1920-1948, describing the writings of F. J. Salmon, Director of the British “Palestine Survey” from 1933-38)

of cultivation. And each plot and every prominent feature had its Arabic name marked on the map, so poetic and so apt [...] that my heart ached.” (Meron Benvenisti, in Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, 2000. He describes his efforts to uncover the Palestinian landscape “wiped off the map” by Israeli cartographers.)

“I couldn’t have done anything without the marvelous detailed maps (scale 1:20,000) compiled by the Mandatory authorities and updated just before the 1948 War. I would spread the relevant map on the ground, and suddenly the old landscape arose like an apparition: village houses, mosques, school buildings, paths, stone hedges marking plot boundaries, limekilns, threshing floors, holy tombs, sacred oak trees, springs and cisterns, caves, fruit trees, patches

This article offers some thoughts on the relationship between mapping, power and “truth” — a term which I use slightly flippantly here, but will expand upon. It focuses in particular on a set of historical maps of Palestine which I was recently involved in making accessible and searchable online through a project named Palestine Open Maps (palopenmaps.org).

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THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

My first introduction to the maps in question — a 1:20,000 series of British maps from the 1930s and 1940s, covering much of historic Palestine — came in the summer of 2010. At the time I was working with Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) in Bethlehem, a studio that uses the tools of architectural research and design as a means to think beyond the suffocating constraints of the present condition of colonization, occupation and apartheid in Palestine/Israel. In our work, we were making use of two beautifully detailed map sheets drawn from the Israeli national archives — Qalqilya 14-17 and Et Tira 14-18 — as part of a project in partnership with the Israeli organisation Zochrot looking at the practical dimensions of return of Palestinian refugees. Zochrot (Hebrew for “remembering”) is an organisation doggedly working to educate the Jewish Israeli public about the Palestinian Nakba (“catastrophe”), and to advocate for the return of Palestinian refugees.

It crossed my mind at the time of the project that these map sheets were clearly drawn from a huge series. In fact there are around 155 numbered sheets in total — many with multiple revisions over time — and if you were to lay them all out side-by-side, they would cover the floor of a large exhibition room. However, it also seemed that the process of digitizing and combining the maps in any such project would require serious resources, assuming that the relevant British or Israeli archives would even facilitate such an endeavor. It would be another eight years before the opportunity to do something with these maps would arise.

Visual Communication and Languages of “Neutrality” /// “I define the Neutral as that which outplays [dejoue] the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm.” (Roland Barthes, in The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978, 2002) In the interceding years I became involved with Visualizing Palestine, a project where we use visual communication tools — foremost data visualization and infographics — to communicate a data-driven narrative of Palestine/Israel, and of the many historic and ongoing injustices and inequities facing Palestinians. Our work was founded on the premise that visual storytelling through infographics is an especially effective means to communicate complex ideas to a mass audience, and that the views of people can be swayed through exposure to “hard facts” and data.

The latter idea — that people accept the “facts” — appears to have been soundly disproven in the present post-truth era, where we realize that many of us (or even most of us) seem happy to choose our facts to suit our world view. In retrospect, this development seems an obvious extension of the mainstream media logic that in “contentious” issues (politics, race relations, climate change, Palestine) one should simply seek to offer “balance” among dominant narratives rather than attempt to uncover the truth of an issue. Choose your side, choose your facts.

This basically leaves us with the realization that facts and data are simply tools in a broader arsenal. In the rawest sense, we are trying to influence opinions by producing a visual language of numbers, maps, icons, glorified bar charts and other visual paraphernalia that engages interest, conveys a compelling narrative and elicits the trust of the reader. What you accept as “truth” is ultimately a matter of faith in the messenger.

THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

This, in turn, invites the question of what might be the most effective visual language (or languages) for convincing people who remain open-minded on an issue, or even to instill doubt (or “cognitive dissonance”) in more hardened minds. It should be pointed out that our work also takes place in the context of a well-funded and organized Israeli campaign of hasbara (Hebrew for “explaining”, or essentially “propaganda”) that above all seeks to instill the idea that the conflict is too complicated for outsiders to understand, let alone to form an actionable opinion on.

One approach I have personally toyed with for some time is the possibility of harnessing the “neutral” visual language of the news editorial graphic, or to borrow from other such visual languages of authority. The polemic intent of the editorial graphic is typically shrouded in a carefully measured non-design of facts, figures, charts and illustrations, and in a similarly measured written tone and vocabulary.

However, it is the choice of the story, the angle from which to cover it, the source of the “facts” and a myriad of other conscious and unconscious choices that its biases are manifested. Which brings us back to the British maps.

A Prelude to Catastrophe /// “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don’t even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don’t blame you, because these geography books no longer exist [...] Nahalal arose in the place of Mahlul, Gvat in the place of Jibta, Sarid in the place of Haneifa, and Kfar-Yehoshua in the place of Tel-Shaman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” (Moshe Dayan, writing in Ha’aretz newspaper, 1969) The two map sheets that I described in the opening paragraphs included four Palestinian villages that would be depopulated just a few years later during the 1948 Nakba and its aftermath. These villages, Miska, Kufr Saba, Jaljulye, and Byar ‘Adas — all falling within five kilometers to the west of the Green Line — were among more than 500 Palestinian communities depopulated by Zionist militias as the State of Israel was founded over the remains of Palestine, on the lands of more than 750,000 Palestinians who became displaced as refugees.

It is also worth noting that — contrary to the received historical canon — almost half of these communities had been depopulated before the State of Israel had been declared, and before any soldiers from neighboring Arab countries had entered into the conflict.

While the physical remains of these communities continued to be present in the physical landscape for years and sometimes decades after the Nakba, they disappeared almost in a single stroke from official maps. A 1:250,000 scale map from 1951, titled “Israel” is identical in almost every detail to a British 1946 map titled “Palestine,” but for the disappearance of hundreds of Palestinian localities, and their replacement with the names of almost as many Jewish-Israeli settlements newly established on their lands. Within a decade, tens of thousands of landscape features would be systematically renamed in Hebrew as part of a conscious effort to overwrite the Arabic Palestinian landscape with a new Eretz Israel — or “oldnew,” to borrow from the title of Theodor Herzl’s “Altneuland,” one of Zionism’s early establishing texts.

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“Palestine” map sheet at 1:250,000 scale, 1946.

As such, the British maps hold a huge historical significance.

The 1:20,000 scale series, in particular, charts in incredible details a Palestinian landscape on the eve of its erasure. The maps are dense with natural and human-made features.

Alongside the hundreds of towns and villages, every individual parcel of land is demarcated, and thousands of landscape features — mountains, rivers, valleys, plains, orchards — are shown, each with its transliterated Arabic name. Furthermore, these maps are infused with the authority of the British as a “neutral” party in the conflict; with the authority of being a primary source from the time; and the authority of the sheer precision and beauty of their cartography. Yet, as historical artefacts, these maps are anything but neutral.

Maps as Colonization /// “There are few countries in the world in which surveying and mapping played so much important role in its history. Palestine, the Holy Land, was long coveted by foreigners, primarily 30

the Crusades and European colonists. They wanted to know its physical and historical characteristics as a prelude to conquering the land.” (Salman Abu Sitta in The Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966, 2004) “[...] the roots of the modern survey system of Palestine set up by the military government are to be sought in the Balfour Declaration and its implications regarding land. The system was formally established in July 1920 with only one objective: to survey and map the lands of the country as demanded by the Zionist Organisation, in order to implement legally binding land settlement and registration of tenure rights.” (Dov Gavish, in A Survey of Palestine Under the British Mandate, 1920-1948, 2005) The maps are not simply an innocent artefact of the British administration of Palestine, but were in fact created as a tool in the processes of conquering and controlling Palestine militarily, and in the Zionist colonization of the land.

As a counterpart to the mapping efforts, a series of British laws and ordinances were devised to systematically register the ownership of every parcel of land in Palestine in order that it could be sold or otherwise transferred to THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

“Israel” map sheet produced by Survey of Israel based on British Survey of Palestine layers, 1951.

Zionist organizations such as the Jewish National Fund or the aptly named Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.

Even the map projection and coordinate reference system by which the maps are drawn — the 1923 Palestine Grid — is a product of the British colonial administration, and remains (with some slight modification) the basis for modern maps of the territory. However, the 1:20,000 maps also represent an incomplete process of colonization. The land registration was never completed — in fact only around 20% of land was formally registered by the end of the British mandate period, and less than 5% transferred to Zionist organisations or individuals — and of the maps themselves 20 out of the series of 175 were never completed.

Despite their colonial origins, the mere existence of the maps offers an undeniable testament to the historic injustice of the Nakba and, by extension, to the legal and moral rights of THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

Palestinians to return and to restitution. In archival theory, this act of reading of the “subaltern” Palestinian narrative through such documents is referred to as “reading against the archival grain.” In fact, it is perhaps an awareness of their colonial origin — and that they had both the power and the reason to distort geography against the Palestinian historical narrative — that makes these maps all the more compelling. The maps also represent a beautiful collection of objects in their own right, recording layer upon layer of information compiled over decades of surveying work by individuals at the forefront of the craft of cartography and mapmaking during the 1930s and 1940s. Bringing these maps to an audience as wide as possible seems to naturally serve a purpose that is, at the same time, academic, political and nostalgic.

Maps as Resistance /// “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” (Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 1995) 31

Detail of 1:20,000 scale Nablus map sheet, 1942.

“Archive fever is spreading among Palestinians everywhere. Whether in Ramallah or London, Haifa or San Francisco, Beirut or Riyad, someone or some group is busy interviewing old people and compiling genealogies, searching for photographs and letters, collecting textiles and folksongs, visiting and renovating graveyards, scanning and repairing manuscripts, and compiling information on old houses and destroyed villages, and this is but the tip of an iceberg whose full dimensions can hardly be imagined.” (Beshara Doumani in Jerusalem Quarterly Issue 36, 2009) Around a year and a half ago, I made the surprising discovery — at least to me — that the Israeli national library had digitized the 1:20,000 32

map series along with many others, and had made them available to an online viewer. Although it was possible to zoom in and view the maps in high resolution, their utility — and therefore their value or meaning to the average person — was constrained by the fact that there was no narrative information to explain the maps; that the maps could only be viewed as individual sheets (which could not be downloaded), and (crucially) there was no way to search, navigate or otherwise comprehend the maps as a whole.

Despite the knowledge that it would represent yet another Palestinian archival project, the urge to do something with these maps was irresistible. The time consuming work of collecting and scanning the THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

maps had been done for us, and it was not necessarily a given that they would be available online indefinitely. So, together with the Visualizing Palestine team — and with support in the early stages from Columbia University Studio-X Amman and various individuals including Majd Al-shihabi who himself was supported by a Creative Commons Fellowship — we embarked on the task of “open sourcing” (or “liberating”) these maps and trying to make them accessible to an audience as wide as possible.

I should note here that the sheer volume of Palestinian digital archiving projects that are happening — and the ephemerality of so many of them — is certainly not a reason to dismiss the importance of such work, and there are the notable few project which have the necessary clarity of vision and institutional support to sustain them in the medium to long term. Some more hopeful examples that I have been personally exposed to — in all of their various complexities — are the Palestinian Oral History Archive at the American University of Beirut, the Palestinian Journeys platform of the Palestinian Museum (in which Visualizing Palestine is a partner), and the efforts of the Institute for Palestine Studies to digitize the meticulous records of Palestinian land ownership in present day Israel held by the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP).

In our own project, over the course of a few months, we figured out a series of processes using various mostly open-source tools and technologies to download the maps in high resolution: to crop and color-correct them, to georeference them into navigable Google Maps-style tile sets, and to make them searchable by embedding geographic and demographic data on localities (towns, villages, cities) from historic and contemporary sources — namely the British “Village Statistics” from 1945, and present day data from the Palestinian Authority and Israeli government statistical authorities.

The early response to the platform — even in its initial limited form — has been encouraging. We have seen Palestinian refugees sharing screenshots of their villages of origin across social media, we have been reached out to by academics and activists, and the platform has had media write-ups in languages including Arabic, Italian and Spanish despite being only available in English. Meanwhile, googling “Palestine Open Maps” already yields hundreds of search results. We hope that, with time and support, we can build the platform into a much richer and more multi-faceted resource where its content — and usefulness — can be extended by its community of users.

Beyond Mapping /// “ [...] the urgency to archive Palestine and the Palestinians is driven by a deep and widespread pessimism about the future. The more remote that freedom, justice, repatriation, and self-determination seem to be, THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

the greater the desire to preserve and record for posterity not only what was then, but what is now. I mention the attraction of archiving the present, not just the past, because Palestinians are still incapable of stopping the continued and accelerating erasure of the two greatest archives of all: the physical landscape, and the bonds of daily life that constitute an organic social formation.” (Beshara Doumani in Jerusalem Quarterly Issue 36, 2009.)

“The best antidote to the claustrophobia we Palestinians feel while attempting to cross the many borders Israel has created is to focus our attention on the physical expanse of the land. Israel is attempting to define the terrain, to claim and fragment it with wire fences, signposts, gates, and roadblocks staffed by armed soldiers backed up by tanks.

I am but one of the millions of travellers who have passed through over the ages. I lifted my eyes and beheld the wonderful valley created eons ago as it stretches far and long north to the Lebanon and south to the Red Sea and into Africa utterly oblivious of the man-made borders that come and go.” (Raja Shehadeh, A Rift in Time, 2010.)

So, where does this leave us? However vividly and convincingly Palestinians and others can render the historical “truth” of their Nakba, it does not change the fact that their dispossession and marginalization continues to this today in the broad daylight of international media attention. From the ongoing destruction of Palestinian communities in the West Bank and southern Israel, to the collective punishment of Gaza, to the denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return home.

The words of Raja Shehadeh offer one channel to refocus our minds in this context. They remind us that maps, and even the physical cutting up and control of territories are temporary human exercises.

They remind us that these things — maps, and the power that they represent — can be subverted within any given moment, and that a century of Zionist colonization is just a blink of an eye in the entirety of human history, let alone in the life of the planet itself. In a similar way, visual storytelling is just one form of advocacy in a much wider justice/equality/liberation movement and, for those that it seeks to influence, recognising injustice is only the first small step towards becoming an active agent in political transformation.

Ahmad Barclay is an architect and visual communicator based in Beirut. He is a partner with Visualizing Palestine and an Al-Shabaka policy member. Over the past decade, he has led award winning infographics projects, and facilitated information design workshops in London, Bangalore, Beirut, Barcelona and Amman. In 2016, he co-curated “Sea of Stories,” an exhibition on the lost archives of the Palestinian revolutionary period for the 3rd Qalandia International. He spends his spare time designing and marketing MyToyTown, a custom made wooden play system.

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SPATIAL HISTORIOGRAPHIES THE DECOLONIAL MAPPING TOOLKIT PATRICK JAOJOCO (FRONTVIEW)

The original city map of New Amsterdam, called the Castello Plan (circa 1660).

Much of the world’s land mass has, at this point, been mapped.

Over the centuries, cartography has been a discipline applied by the corporate and government entities that have the power and technology to do so. From the economic import of European world maps of the 15th century to the racist introduction of redlining to American urban plans throughout the 20th century; to the evolution of those plans in zoning, real estate redefinitions of neighborhoods, and displacement through gentrification, maps have been used to perpetuate power or to grow it. There has historically been a politics inherent to mapping: maps are drawn from very specific viewpoints and principles, and are typically literal visualizations of the worldviews of those in power.

The colonial histories of the Americas are telling of these worldviews: from the so-called “discovery” of the so-called “New World” to the usage of cartography to plan European settlements atop forests and the communities that inhabit them, mapping 34

since the 1400s has become a tool used by very specific entities in the process of landscape development and cultural displacement. For hundreds of years, cartography has been a literally topdown way of building the world that translates landscapes into blank slates to be built upon in the name of modernist progress.

Put differently, mapping has been fundamental to the project of Western exploitation, erasure, and ownership.

As Google maps and other wayfinding applications have become more and more ubiquitous, our reliance on corporations has transformed maps into a visual apparatus of landscape interpretation structured for the public by drones and satellites and controlled from and corporate offices. This relationship between maps and power is one glaring constant in colonial practices that can, perhaps, be reclaimed by the fringes to force more democratic social evolution. From this ambition arises the questions: what would a decolonized map look like? How would radically THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

to us that broad landscape timelines must always be involved in decolonial histories, as decolonization is an active project that works to acknowledge past alterations in landscape (cultural and ecological), present experiences, and decolonized futures.

Detail from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map of Manhattan in 1939. / Mapping Inequality.

altering the mapping process benefit the project of decolonization? Is there a basic set of standards and questions that can be activated collectively to create a decolonized map?

Such questions require a radical shift in norms and standards of operation. The curatorial collective Frontview, of which I am a part, is pursuing this line of inquiry to deconstruct the dominant structures of mapmaking in our recent project, the Decolonial Mapping Toolkit. In this project, we have looked to a longue durée history of landscape as a legend, with subjective experiences as points of interest. Through interviews with decolonial thinkers, architects, and theorists; a series of citizen workshops; and, ultimately, a mapping research and design process; we are currently producing a first iteration of such a map.

Our first public program and core component of the process, “Faultlining New York,” took place on May 20, in which a small group of participants were led by an artist and historian in walking through Lower Manhattan to collectively restructure its history. It has become clear THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

Pasts: Erasure and Supremacy /// In both our initial research and collective workshops, we have come to understand that the power of maps is, essentially, as a medium between the map’s user and “official” knowledge. We trust that Google will guide us to our destination; colonization required pre-mapped routes to the Americas for economic profit; zoning laws are sanctioned by city offices for the supposed public good. Maps are used for specific purposes, and those purposes rely on a relationship of trust between the public and the mapmaker (whether they be federal or corporate). We uncritically use these maps to interpret the landscapes we inhabit, labor in, and otherwise move through. At the same time, the very entities responsible for making and disseminating maps typically benefit from obscuring histories of injustice and economic conquest, as these processes often form their very foundations. Knowledge comes from power, and if these maps are our only sources of spatial history, then, as a society, we remain quite powerless in the face of colonial information structures. This is, of course, tied to the highly professionalized discourses around architecture and urban planning, which are almost always intertwined with capital, government, and neo-colonial projects of development and “urban renewal.”

Take, for example, the proto-urbanism of Dutch New Amsterdam in what once was Mannahatta. The Lenni-Lenape Indigenous Americans, whose relationships to both land and property were profoundly different from Western tradition, had a distinct relationship to the landscape, shaping it just as it shaped them. While they did indeed alter the landscape, leaving oyster shells in masses on the island’s East side and clearing pathways for collective use, they were a part of an organic, meandering, sustainable ecology. In 1626, the Dutch “purchased” the land from the Lenape, eventually coming to eradicate this ecology and overlay European architectures and grid-like streets onto the clear-cut land. This history relied on maps, made solely in Western terms, that deemed the territory a part of the 35

“New World.” Cartography here is a nexus of erasure: to deem something “new” is a refusal of any former presence in the land, and its mapping from this point of view functions as its officially-sanctioned manifestation.

Maps and physical landscape alterations further helped delineate “cultured” Europeans from the wild “Other”: it has been speculated that the wall built by the Dutch in the 1600s (transformed through the years into what is now New York’s famed Wall Street) was built in order to defend the colony from either Lenape or British attacks from the north. In both cases, the wall still functioned to reify the enlightened European against the supposed primitiveness of forest inhabitants. Even as the colony grew, Black slaves were relegated to the other side of the wall, working on farms to provide for the colony; this is an unmistakable example of segregation and capital accumulation that defines the Western colonial project. The wall, the gridded colony, and the colony’s infrastructures of accumulation worked as manifestations of racist colonial thought, starting American development down such a destructive path that it is difficult to imagine alternative architectures or ways of moving through the space.

Colonialist occupation and development — reliant on mapping as a preliminary act of erasure — has since become a major tool of urban policy and community displacement. Throughout New York City and the nation, the process of redlining has had the catastrophic effect of relegating communities of color to the fringes in federallysanctioned ghettoes. The New Deal-era policy, based purely on culture-flattening maps, deemed certain parts of U.S. cities desirable to investors and developers and left neighborhoods of color to rot in neglect. These lines are more subtle manifestations of the Dutch wall, and have had the effect of patterning a slow violence of poverty, lack of education, and increased crime rates over the years. This racist process of urban “renewal” has since evolved into the renaming of neighborhoods on Google Maps for real estate usage, coating displacement with absurd branded terms like East Williamsburg and Bedwick (which, fortunately, has not stuck). This new colonial cartography, put into practice more than 300 years after the original map of New Amsterdam, has an evolutionary lineage directly tied to the white supremacist social structures of the 17th century.

Present: Decolonial Mapping /// Yet the cartographic imagination is not unique to urban planners, politicians, or development companies that (much like the Dutch West India Company) have used maps to racist and capitalist ends. Mapping can also be 36

Map of Lenape infrastructure with contemporary counterparts in Mannahatta to Manhattan: Native Americans in Lower Manhattan. / Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian (2010).

used to inquire, remember, and decolonize these relationships and can very easily be placed in the hands of colonized communities. It has functioned well as a tool of white supremacy, capital accumulation, and control; and yet the power of mapping is not inextricable from this legacy. Rather, as a tool of accessing and establishing power, it has been and can continue to be used for justice. In this alternative methodology, there are several options that we have established in our collective research.

The Underground Railroad was one such anti-map. Used to guide slaves North to freedom in the US in the early 19th century, the map was disseminated only through coded messages and wasn’t visualized until later as a point of historical study. It remained accessible only to fleeing slaves and a trusted network of Native American, freed Black, and white ally “Conductors.” At the time, it functioned to undo white suprematist landscapes, and instead trace paths for active Black liberation. More recent projects such as Mapping Inequality, which disseminates redlining policy maps to the public for activist research; and the University of Washington’s Segregated Seattle project, which unveiled still-active remnants of redlining, are instances of mapping histories of injustice to political ends. From these and other examples, we have found that mapping hidden or even forgotten power structures is a route in decolonization, while a more positivist action is to map a landscape’s cultural histories in remembrance, potentially leading to public recognition of injustices that define our landscape today. A broader goal of decolonial cartography is to undo dominant frameworks of land use, instead THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

Map of various Underground Railroad escape routes in the Northern United States and Canada.

Compiled from The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom by Willbur H. Siebert Wilbur H. Siebert, The Macmillan Company, 1898.

working to proliferate and highlight the histories, contemporary experiences, and ultimate goals of communities that have suffered from the colonial project and in many cases, remain obscured.

Frontview aims to redistribute cartographic power and activate such modes of collective, participatory mapping through our Decolonial Mapping Toolkit project. Over a series of three workshops in January and February 2018, we, along with visual activist and writer Nicholas Mirzoeff and activist collective Decolonize This Place, began discussions around the relationship between decolonization and maps with the goal of determining what a decolonial map might look like. These workshops became a broader collective of artists, activists, scholars, and students, now called the Decolonial Mapping Front.

Together, we determined a few key aspects of the colonizer’s cartography: these maps are static, embracing immutability as a way of reifying power; they hide, misrepresent, or do not have the proper information structures to present certain types of information (such as landscape histories, community configurations, and change throughout time); and they only concern themselves with either the present (as in wayfinding maps) or future (as in zoning policy and development). In order to undo these understandings of landscape, our visual map must be historically-minded and yet conceived so as to always accommodate changes and additions, guided by the lived THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

experiences of those whose bodies have been historically colonized. Situating cultural histories of Black, Indigenous, Arab, and other communities of color within mapped landscapes is the project’s broad and basic working principle. This is so we can link historical injustice to ongoing, lived experiences predicated by issues in land use and modernist “progress.”

In order to reframe our understandings of space, we aim to establish counternarratives and alternative histories that, rather than remaining anecdotes of a time past, can be seen as essential to the stories of how landscapes and the communities that inhabit them have been territorialized, constructed, displaced, and destroyed through colonial action. It is this type of political longue durée that we view as the essential structure of a decolonial map, which seeks not only to commemorate but also to contextualize contemporary architecture and infrastructure within a broader history of conquest and control. If maps have always been inherently political, this mode of mapping, placed into the hands of the colonized, becomes a grassroots remapping of historical power structures to decolonize our understandings of space.

“Faultlining New York,” a public series of artist- and historianfacilitated walks, was one such experiment in remapping. The day-long program sought to reframe our interactions with contemporary urban environments, connect contemporary colo37

nialism to global histories of displacement and apartheid (as in the aforementioned Dutch wall separating white settlers first from the Lenape, then Black slaves), and remember Lower Manhattan’s oncethriving Arab community of Little Syria. This neighborhood — which housed Arabs from what are now known as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Israel, and Palestine — was eradicated by capitalist development in a story that has conceptual colonialist ties to the violent displacement of Palestinians in 1948, a connection we would highlight during our walk, which was scheduled in the week of the 70th anniversary of what Palestinians call the Nakba.

The first walk of the day, Paradise Glossed, was led by artist Moira Williams, who presented precolonial materialities (such as seaweed and marsh sand) and led us in exercises inspired by indigenous rituals to renew sensory relationships to the landscape. The resulting hour and a half included stomping across a wooden bridge; running our hands along metal fences, flower petals, and trees; and rubbing sand into our hands and clapping them together. Emphasis was placed on the contours of Battery Park, whose map reveals landscaped curves, meandering paths, and plant life, all built on landfill excavated during the construction of the World Trade Center.

The World Trade Center was, in fact, one of the nails in the coffin of Little Syria, which had, by then, been partially displaced by the BrooklynBattery Tunnel. This history, along with the histories of Bowling Green, the Customs House (now the Museum of the American Indian), and histories of the slave trade on Wall Street were all discussed through printed images, architectural histories, and participant-led conversation for historian Rebecca Manski’s Unsettling Wall Street, the second walk of “Faultlining New York.” By bringing to light histories of colonialism on site through visual culture, we collectively reframed the area by making connections between the still-standing buildings and streets of the area and their political implications. Conversations spanned from indigenous lives and their relationships to museums, to the present-day manifestations of Jim Crow laws, to the histories of Arab displacement in both New York and Palestine.

Remapping landscapes are essentially an act of reframing our understandings of them; traces and architectural evidence acted as the nodes for these walks’ new maps. Additionally, participants were encouraged to take video, audio, and notes throughout the day, all of which will be aggregated on a dynamic online map — the project’s framework that will house myriad narratives, histories, and notes. This decolonial map will continue to be built on through other walks in “Faultlining New York” (and, potentially, other cities), as well as through in-depth research of contemporary colonial practices. By mapping and remapping the traces of 38

our decolonial gatherings, we effectively aim to decolonize our relationships with the spaces through which we move, and to create an accessible and living multimedia archive that counters mainstream understandings of space, maps, and urban histories.

Futures: Utopian Cartographies /// In our efforts, we have found that both social justice and decolonization frameworks rely on broader temporalities that these maps must embody, lending a way of envisioning a future geography that reflects utopian principles of community ecology, anti-occupation, and anti-gentrification. What’s more, utopian visions must rely on a radical re-envisioning of the past, beginning with a reorganization of the cartographies on which societies have literally been structured. A new historiographic cartography can focus on recognizing the political implications of infrastructural change over time. Decolonial maps, then, house the potential energy for active decolonial projects, framing information in such ways as to imagine, then enact, alternative social configurations.

One such ongoing process is the decolonization of New York City’s literal and cultural landscapes, which both undoes colonial infrastructures and monuments and introduces participatory design to city governance. Prior to Frontview’s Decolonial Mapping Front, maps of the city’s colonial and racist monuments have been made and disseminated, which help influence public thought and increase access to the NYC Monuments Commission’s recent public discussions. Further, the National Museum of the American Indian (while inhabiting a colonial architecture itself) has released a guide to Mannahatta, the Lenape name for the island on which Manhattan stands. While this guide does not necessarily refuse the regime of modern design and urban planning, we can look to institutes such as the University of New Mexico’s Indigenous Design and Planning Institute (iD+Pi) to activate indigenous ways of life through new technologies, architectures, and urbanisms to progress towards a future with decolonization at its core.

This is to say nothing of the Black, Latinx, and myriad other communities that continuously battle displacement through gentrification. These issues fall under similar discussions of power, architecture, and maps, and participatory mapping can begin to reverse colonial urban processes. The Decolonial Mapping Front, as a layered and dynamic project, is THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

Photographs of the “Faultlining New York� walks in Lower Manhattan (Wall Street and Little Syria). / Photographs by Mohammad Golabi (2018).

able to encompass these multiple stakes, temporalities, and visions for the future in its multimedia and iterative approach.

Utopian progress on colonized land would thus look directly to precolonial narratives for cartographic, infrastructural, and architectural guidance, honoring these living histories while negotiating political, technological, and environmental realities. This does not necessarily imply a 1:1 return to historical maps; such moves are, for the most part, as impossible as reversing time. Rather, utopian cartographies must be radically participatory and progressive to redistribute the power inherent to maps. They must prioritize cultures and infrastructures of the colonized in future-minded redesigns: they must never be complete and must account for both historical transgression and living culture. Histories are made by irreversible events; by mapping these events and remapping their politics, social structures can, perhaps, evolve to accommodate both alternative pasts and radical futures.

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Patrick Jaojoco is a Brooklyn-based independent curator and writer. His current focus is in political ecology and intersections of radically nonlinear histories and temporalities. He is also Curator and Facilitator at Frontview, which is currently working on a project on decolonization and cartography.

Frontview is a team of facilitators, curators, and writers operating to create artistic political encounters on meaningful scales, creating new relationships and intensifying existing ones. We integrate all artistic, political, technological, and otherwise creative mediums in physical and virtual spaces, prioritizing artistic expression and open discourse. Together, we aim to confront collective histories and actively create ideal futures in opposition to modes of living that let our spectacle-ridden contemporary guide (in)action. This mission drives our projects, which in various ways create productive platforms for discussion, community-building, and action.

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NIGHTFARING & INVISIBLE MAPS OF MAPS PERCEIVED, BUT NOT DRAWN LUCÍA JALÓN OYARZUN

Table of the Animal Kingdom (Regnum Animale) from Carolus Linnaeus’s first edition of Systema Naturae (1735). The Paradoxa box appears in the third column, beneath Amphibia.

Cartographies With No Remainder /// Carl Nilsson Linnæus published his Systema Naturae in 1735.

He proposed a system of hierarchical classification of the natural world built upon the division between the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. In the first editions of his work, there was a section within the animal kingdom division called Paradoxa. It held everything that did not fit elsewhere. It was mostly populated with fantastic creatures: the unicorn, the satyr, the mermaid and the phoenix, as well as the pelican. This category disappeared in the sixth edition of the work published in 1748.

The modern era demanded clarity and sharpness in its limits.

While philosophers and scientists alike still treasured the idea of mathesis universalis, (i.e. a universal science of order and measurement modeled on mathematics), the box of paradoxes subjected Linnæus’ edifice to a dangerous kind of tension: it could make it all collapse. Thus, having done away with the uncomfortable “remainder” represented by the Paradoxa (that residue or excess left over while looking for a mathematically precise division of the real), this tension was overshadowed by the illusion of an absolute, stable and apprehensible order.

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Until the end of the 18th century, maps of the African continent appear filled with different kingdoms and monsters. When imperialism implemented the colonial expansion of the 19th century, they were suddenly emptied. Maps such as “Africa, Performed by the Sr. Danville Under the Patronage of the Duke of Orleans,” from 1766, or the 1790s “Sketch of the Northern Part of Africa,” engraved by Joseph Rennell, showed a blank continent. They feel like images that have been overexposed to erase all the differences deemed insignificant; an effacement of all trembling lines in order to highlight only those validated by Western geographic knowledge. Paradoxically, many of these maps emerged out of indigenous knowledge and ephemeral plans drawn by local inhabitants on the ground, deeply effective despite their alleged inaccuracy. Europe’s’ cartographical endeavor was one among many of modernity’s optical apparatuses. In their mission to conquer the real, European cartographers and geographers ended up overexposing reality to erase all possible remainders and eradicate all traces of haziness, by extension, eliminating the Other.

Cartography’s role as an instrument of conquest and its relationship to power has been widely studied in recent years. With this article, I do not seek to expand on that criticism nor to suggest any improvement of said forms of THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

representation in order to reveal hitherto suppressed realities. My interest is, instead, directed towards the latent power of the “remainders” silenced by cartographic overexposure. My intention is not to reinstate them to the regime of the visible through their representation, but rather to understand how they tell us about another kind of orientational system- of maps perceived, but not drawn, capable of making a reality present without necessarily making it visible.

Nebulous Images /// In order to speak of a presence that is felt even while it remains invisible, we need another working concept for the term image.

Could we understand the image as an affection that goes beyond the visual? In his Ethics (1677), Spinoza defined the images of things as “the affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us, though they do not reproduce the figures of things. And when the mind regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines.” In contrast to the well-defined image advanced by cartography, this is a nebulous representation that functions as an affective extension mapped onto the body — the expression and knowledge of a complex spatiality that traverses and weaves the fabric of our experience.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1882) emerges out of a map bearing a red cross signaling the place where a treasure was hidden by a certain Captain Flint. The map, in the possession of an old sailor, passes, at his death, onto the narrator, the young Jim Hawkins. At the beginning of the novel, Jim and a heterogenous crew begin a journey to recover the gold. Once on the island (and after several setbacks), they are confronted with the previously unquestioned accuracy of the mark. Uncertainty engulfs their senses because “the red cross was, of course, far too large to be a guide; and the terms of the note on the back, as you will hear, admitted of some ambiguity. They ran, the reader may remember, thus: Tall tree, Spy-glass shoulder, bearing a point to the N. of N.N.E.; Skeleton Island E.S.E. and by E.; Ten feet. A tall tree was thus the principal mark.” Faced with a lush plateau on which, “every here and there,” emerged a large tree, they understand that only on the spot, and reading the signs of the place, could the treasure be found.

The clash between Flint’s representation and the crew’s direct experience of the place not only reveals the breach that will always exist between these two realms, but also excites these men-senses.

Confronted with the reality of the island, Jim, Long John Silver et al., conjure up a hidden map, invisible, yet absolutely alive in each of their actions. A map drawn out of the careful attention to the signs offered by the island in different perceptive dimensions. There are actual signs to be read, right there in front of them, like the skeleton/ compass they find when looking for a tree — “the man lay perfectly straight — his feet pointing in one direction, his hands, raised above his head like a diver’s, pointing directly in the opposite” — , but there are invisible signs too, virtual signs, as when Jim’s alertness allows THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

him to listen to sounds of the past. Different times survive together on the island and their effect on Jim’s body enhance his image, his map, of the island: “this grove that was now so peaceful must then have rung with cries, I thought; and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still.”

This vigilant attention to the signs, that is, to every material event — i.e. bodies, expressions, accidents, gestures, etc. — , which in turn imply the presence and effects of other past, present or future events, threads the nebulous image of the island, the affective map of its complex spatiality. The fiction driving the principle of representation has often rendered invisible the discontinuity between cartography and experience. Blinded by this fiction, cartography and its apparent precision prevent a free unfolding of our senses. Embedding our perception within a contained image of the world anesthetizes our bodies: as we operate under an illusion of order, we ignore the complex textures of the real with all its remainders. Nevertheless, a certain disquiet remains, for the world does not acquiesce to this fiction; it goes on wavering, the Other is always there even if we reject his presence, and our bodies necessarily feel it. In order to pay attention to this vibration and the nebulous images it produces, a certain rekindling of our senses is necessary. A renewed ability to explore the relations mapped by experience and memory onto our bodies must be reclaimed.

Invisible Maps /// Historically, literature has paid more attention to the affective dimension of the real than geography has- its skills relish in the description of the endless signs that thread any kind of situation to another.

Hence we go back to it, specifically to Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). In this unexplored treaty of minor architecture, we turn to the events that follow Ursula’s loss of vision.

Ursula, the matriarch of the Buendía family, is aware of the “progressive breakdown of time,” though she “resisted growing old even when she had already lost count of her age.” Any accurate measuring or sharp definition dissolves as the cataracts blur her vision and dilute her surroundings: “quite soon she began to realize that she was irrevocably sinking into the darkness, to a point where she never had a clear notion of the invention of the electric light, for when they put in the first bulbs she was only able to perceive the glow.”

Out of reach from electric light, a symbol of modernity’s visibility economy, and without the knowledge of anyone else, for “no one discovered that she was blind,” Ursula builds a kind of clandestine space out of memory and intuition. It grows from the deeply engaged presence of her body at every single moment, perfectly aware that there is power in vulnerability. This care for the invisible signs of reality empowers Ursula to radically reorganize her affective maps. This, in turn, allows her to navigate with a new-found clarity in between the most immediate everyday events as well as the ghosts from the past: 41

“Sketch of the Northern Part of Africa: Exhibiting the Geographical Information Collected by the African Association,” engraved by Joseph Rennell in 1790.

“She concentrated on a silent schooling in the distances of things and people’s voices, so that she would still be able to see with her memory what the shadows of her cataracts no longer al­lowed her to. Later on she was to discover the unforeseen help of odors, which were defined in the shadows with a strength that was much more convincing than that of bulk and color, and which saved her finally from the shame of admitting defeat. […] Quite simply, while the others were going carelessly all about, she watched them with her four senses so that they never took her by surprise, and after some time she discovered that every member of the family, without realizing it, repeated the same path every day, the same actions, and almost repeated the same words at the same hour.”

The surfacing map speaks of space not as a fixed scenario where relations are deployed, but as the threading of these relations; of the different rhythms, repetitions and divergences in place — for instance, when Ursula manages to find Fernanda’s lost ring, it is because she has read her regular behavior against that day’s deviations. The echoes of these rhythms and movements beat with living energy and time as Ursula’s map incorporates, not only the reality of the different inhabitants of the house, but also of the earth. A telluric being above all, when the sun changes, Ursula’s orientation system must also be readjusted: “that day she began to realize some­thing that no one had noticed and it was that with the passage of the year the sun imperceptibly changed position and those who sat on the porch had to change their position little by little without being aware of it. From then on Ursula had only to remember the date in order to know exactly where Amaranta was sitting.”

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Ursula does not feel only the rhythms of the present; the unraveled map condenses different durations and eras. It helps her traverse and read into the territories and echoes of all times past, still alive in her body: “she had such clairvoyance as she examined the most insignificant happenings in the family that for the first time she saw clearly the truths that her busy life in former times had prevented her from seeing.” By discovering a new lucidity in her blindness, Ursula has transformed darkness into an opportunity and given herself the tools to inhabit it. While Ursula’s darkness comes to her unwanted and unexpected, there are many other situations where it is intentionally produced: construction of night in broad daylight to inhabit the remainders and raise our nightfaring bodies.

Nightfaring /// Taking the clandestinity of Ursula’s blindness further might offer us a good framework for considering night production and secrecy as an architectural endeavor — the composition of spaces beyond the reach of the visible that rebel against high-resolution measuring and overexposure. These spaces are produced in the balance and agreement between different bodies, materials, and rhythms. Their unstable equilibrium must be constantly (re)modulated and the individual and collective maps — that is, the affective images tracing relations, knowledge, memories and practices that compose the spatial fabric of both individual and collective bodies — reimagined. And while this movement renders the representation of these images impossible, it is their incorporation in a nightfaring knowledge that matters.

During France’s Ancien Régime, the city of Lyon became the country’s main manufacturer of clandestine books. Cities are privileged spaces for any activity seeking invisibility. The multiplicity of times and spaces create useful gaps allowing for disappearances and duplicity (Sylvie Aprile et al., Clandestinités urbaines: Les citadins et les territoires du secret (XVIe-XXe, 2008). In Lyon THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

“Map of a Tuareg Transhumance Zone,” originally drawn in the notebook of geographer Edmond Bernus by Kill Kilu Ag Najim, and later modified by Bernus himself for Les Illabakan (Niger) Une tribu touarègue sahélienne et son aire de nomadisation (1974).

daylight marked the space of the sanctioned book while nighttime offered the perfect refuge for any forbidden activity. Nonetheless, books, materials, and communications had to be both organized and kept secret during the day and that activity involved an extensive network of agents, both human and non-human. Authors, editors, printers, bookbinders, etc., were obviously involved as were their families and neighbors, with their knowledge of the town and its everyday rhythms. The city and its architectures, with their overlapping nature, became accomplices as well. Active parts of a complex spatial assemblage that shows clandestinity not as a place or state but as a practice that is simultaneously architectural and political.

Clandestinity’s political dimension does not end in this collective quality. Within its darkness, survival is always at stake and that renders everything instantly political. Decisions can not be postponed, for there is always impending danger. This narrows the space and presses everything closer to the body. This can be seen in the rival geographies deployed in the US South by African American men and women of the 19th century (Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, 2009). These geographies did not define bounded territories but alternative strategies and practices deployed by slaves in the plantations of the South. They allowed for the creation of small spheres of freedom beyond the control of the white man. These circuits did not require lines or borders; on the contrary, they represented an embodied knowledge honed by reading the medium, sharing information, and composing trajectories as a balancing of forces. The discovery of a passage, a hiding place or a threat must be instantly incorporated. While the representation of a territory demands a deferment, for information must be collected, prepared and THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

rendered visually available, for the body whose survival depends on the production and preservation of that invisible geography, there is no possible deferment, only imminence. Each sign must be instantly thread into the map that runs through his or her body: “All that I heard about liberty and freedom to the slaves I never forgot,” wrote Henry Bibb in 1849 when recalling his flight from the South.

Certainly, some exercises of representation that render visible power suppressed realities manage to transform and strengthen our knowledge of the world, but it is not less certain that there is potential in invisibility. It restores a certain tremor to the clear image produced by capitalist realism (Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2009), an image that narrows the world and whose lines press onto our bodies and block our senses under the weight of inevitability and disenchantment.

By affirming the value behind these invisible maps, affective images mapped onto our bodies, against the clear-cut image of representation that close down the possible, I have tried to defend the role of nebulous imaginaries that widen our world. For, as Kierkegaard exclaimed, “the possible, the possible or I shall suffocate!”

Lucía Jalón Oyarzun is an architect and researcher. She studied at the ETSAM School of Architecture of Madrid where she has also defended her PhD thesis Exception and the Rebel Body: The Political as Generator of a Minor Architecture. Her work attends to the relation between the political — the power of the body in the interweaving of our being in common — , and the architectural — the power of that same body to situate itself and produce complex forms of spatiality. Since 2017 she is the Director of Academic Affairs at Escuela SUR, an arts postgraduate school sited in Madrid.

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PLACING TIME, TIMING SPACE DISMANTLING THE MASTER’S MAP AND CLOCK RASHEEDAH PHILLIPS

(1) Journal Notes 1 / collage on canvas (2016). (2) Community Futures Lab Event Map (2017). 3) Quantum Event Map and Time Travel Experiments in Black Quantum Futurism “Alter-Native Time Portal” installation at Philadelphia Museum of Art (2017).

Playwright Tennessee Williams referred to time as “the longest distance between two places.” To think about or refer to time (in the English language) often involves its spatialization; a tendency known in linguistics as space-time mapping. For instance, we speak of temporal domains of the past and future as being near or far, as being in front of us or behind us, and often as destinations, i.e. “returning to the past.” In the present, the “now” is “here” (spaced and placed), when you are here instead of there, you are at this point instead of that one, again invoking a sense of space or place. Albert Einstein only reinforced this sense of spatialization of the temporal when he declared time to be intimately bound up with space creating “spacetime.”

A map is an object/phenomenon that allows for the re-presentation of this fused space-time. As much as the map represents a geographical territory, landscape, or space, it is infused with time and temporality, usually at the intersection of 44

the distance between two points on it. The map is also infused with several intersecting and conflicting temporal domains. There are the past(s) — of the mapmaker, of the mapped territory that lies inert on the map — the present(s) — of the map user, of the mapped terrain’s changes in reality — and the future(s) of all of those events. These interactive temporal domains fuse together as a 3-D invisible hologram layered over the body of the map.

Philosopher Henri Bergson found a fundamental incompatibility with “representing time by space,” since it is not possible to “follow the process of psychic activity [...] like the march of an army on a map.” (Time and Free Will, 1889). Bergson’s argument follows in the ancient wisdom that the mapped image is not the reality or the territory itself: it is merely re-presentation. The map is not the land itself, it is not the rivers, it is not the place; it can only ever be a symbol of those things. You have to walk the land to know it. Maps do not account for experience and lived knowledge. They do not account either for how many paces it takes for you to walk somewhere, or your own experiences and memories of where a thing used to be or not be.

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And in that way, argues Bergson, you cannot go back in time in the way you are able to turn around in space, making them ultimately unequivalent:

hegemonic Western Spacetimes and dismantle the master’s clocks.

We create maps that embrace the inherent tensions between space and time that provide opportunities for reconfiguration of the same.

“If I glance over a road marked on the map and follow it up to a certain point, there is nothing to prevent my turning back and trying to find out whether it branches anywhere. But time is not a line along which one can pass again. Certainly, once it has elapsed, we are justified in picturing the successive moments as external to one another and in thus thinking of a line traversing space ; but it must then be understood that this line does not symbolize the time which is passing but the time which has passed.” (Time and Free Will, 1889.)

Our practice includes quantum event maps, housing journey maps, sonic mapping, and communal memory mapping. The quantum event map mimics African and Asian diasporic cultural practices and perspectives on time and space, bringing together the micro (or quantum) events that like to “happen in time together” to construct future moments/events or re-examine past moments/events as individuals or as groups and communities. Through this method of mapping, event memory (both future and past memory) is not attached to a specific calendar date or clock time, and memories are not formed in regard to a specific date or time. Rather, time and date are made a part of the memory, so it is embedded or weaved in and controllable in future memory. The date or time of your choosing is embedded in the map as a part of your memory, which means you can forecast or backcast events. Time becomes something remembered, not something that defines and predates the memory. The quantum event mapmakers become the active agents in the synchronicity/focal point, instead of time defining the synchronicity. In our workshops, groups create communal quantum event maps that allow them to struggle through the ways in which a community constructs communal time around a past, future, or present event, composed of diverse and intersecting temporal rhythms and other event textures and features. Personal quantum event maps help mapmakers revisit personal pasts to encounter new features of a past event, plan and create personal futures, or explore and recontextualize personal “nows.”

Time and temporal experience are too dynamic to be re-presented after the fact, embodied and frozen into a mapped space. But even the idea of time “moving” and “passing” implies a spatialization. As Giordano Nanni notes “[T]he conquest of space and time are intimately connected. European territorial expansion has always been closely linked to, and frequently propelled by, the geographic extension of its clocks and calendars.” (The Colonisation of Time, 2012). Clocks are themselves maps, offering another way of spacing time and timing space. Like maps, clocks are objects that embody certain ideas, politics, notions of time, and boundaries. For example, we find that clocks, time, and slavery are also intimately bound. Nanni describes how “the science of horology was instrumental in the exploration and charting of the oceans and in the ‘discovery’ of the so-called New World.”

Some of the very first acts of slavery and colonial terrorism were necessarily mediated by time, as an accurate timekeeping device was crucial to maritime navigation and determining longitudinal measurements.

Further, the inscription of linear space-time can be discerned in slave ownership in the American South. 36°30’ North is the parallel of latitude that divided the United States between where slavery was allowed (U.S.) and prohibited (Confederate States) under the Missouri Compromise. The idea of slave and master even extended into the development of mechanical clock time technology as clock makers in the early 19th century created systems of synchronization, with the concept of “master” clocks to “slave clocks.”

And just as we take for granted that a map is a true representation of the territory it is depicting, we assume that clocks can capture the true nature of time and reality or subjective temporal experience. However, clocks do the opposite; they objectify time and render flat all experiential notions of time. Bergson’s critique of maps could be made of clocks, in that they are merely symbolic of moments rather than the moments themselves. For Western society bound to the Master Clock, mechanical and digital clock time becomes the synchronizing mechanism — instead of the subjective duration of your “now” interacting with other nows. Trauma and dissociation happen in a society that negatively qualifies a departure from or disruption of mechanical clock time.

To the extent that Einstein coupled time with space and created spacetime, BQF is seeking to explore that coupling, and decouple it through that same exploration. White men have conquered both time and space and then said they were the same thing, and what that has meant for Black people is a colonization of the temporal space of the future and the future of man in the universe. It has meant futures that are “too far away” for us to reach on the linear progressive timeline. Black Quantum Futurism reappropriates clocks and maps to deconstruct THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

Questions to Consider When Encountering Maps & Clocks /// • Who is the mapmaker or clockmaker?

• Who is the intended map/clock user?

• What is the purpose of the map or clock?

• What, if anything, on the map or clock is up for question?

• What is being taken for granted if and when you use the map?

• What temporal landscape does the map/clock embody? What year was it made? Does it still stand the test of time? What has changed? What has remained?

• Where are you in time when you are using the map or clock? What are the intersecting and conflicting temporalities are pulled into your NOW/present when using the map or clock?

• Imagine the boundaries and Contested Boundaries that the map or clock contains. How can they be remapped/redrawn/re-envisioned to be more equitable in time and space?

• What unspoken agreements, understandings, contracts, social constructs, and negotiations are embedded in the map or clock?

• Once we dismantle the master’s clock, what clocks or timekeeping practices will take its place? What already exists that we can learn from? What can we communally create?

Rasheedah Phillips is the Managing Attorney of the Housing unit at Community Legal Services, a mother, writer, the creator of The AfroFuturist Affair, the co-creator of Black Quantum Futurism multimedia arts collective, and a founding member of Metropolarity Queer Sci-Fi collective. She is the author of Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales) (2014), and of two anthologies of experimental essays from Black visionary writers called Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice Vol. I (2015) and SpaceTime Collapse I: From the Congo to the Carolinas (2016).

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INTERVIEW MAPS AND BLACKBOARDS: REPRESENTING PEOPLE’S LIBERATION STRUGGLES A CONVERSATION WITH BOUCHRA KHALILI

(above) “The Mapping Journey Project” at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016. (right page) Mapping Journey #3 (2009).

This interview is an email exchange with Bouchra Khalili.

She is a Moroccan French artist “working with film, installation, photography, and prints. [...] Each of her projects investigates strategies and discourses of resistance as elaborated, developed and narrated by individuals, often members of political minorities.” She participated to numerous exhibitions, the most recent one being a large monographic one entitled “Blackboard” at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. In this conversation, we address the way she relates to cartography in four historical and political researches that her artwork materializes.

LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: It is my hypothesis that cartography is omnipresent in your work. Sometimes, it is more explicit and obvious than others, but it is always there, somehow. Perhaps we can start with these most explicit examples. The “Mapping Journey Project” (2008-2011) is one of them, as its very title indicates. It consists in eight films in which the viewers see a hand tracing a path on a map — seven of them 46

showing parts of North Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean Sea and Europe, the last one showing the area between Ramallah and Jerusalem in Palestine. A voice accompanies the trace in telling the story of a transcontinental displacement (or a much reduced one in Palestine) with its numerous obstacles, its dead ends, its occasional returns to square one, etc. Ever since I saw these films in 2014, they have embodied for me the most sensible way to map and express the movement of the numerous exiles who are seeking in Europe an escape from extremely precarious conditions of life due to wars or economic disparities, in which Europe has itself a historical responsibility.

Far from the thick arrows and their linearity that respectively suggest massive migrations and unobstructed trajectories, the cartographies you have created with the first concerned by what is mapped are, on the contrary, insisting on the duress of these displacements but without the pathos that always fails to fuel durable mobilizations. Could you describe how the potential cinematographic dimension of cartography allows such a sensible and sensitive expression?

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Einaudi, Jacques Panijel who made the film Octobre à Paris (1962) on the subject in the following days and weeks of October ‘61, along with Elie Kagan who took pictures on that night, and Maurice Rajsfus (see insert [1]). I don’t know what happened to the film footage I filmed; it was about 20 years ago now, and at that time I never thought that I would become an artist. I just went there thinking that someone should film it.

INSERT [1] Maurice Rajsfus was a journalist, historian and activist. Born in France in 1928, his parents were Polish Jews. He survived the 1942 Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, while his parents were deported to Auschwitz, from where they never came back. A communist, he later joined Cornelius Castoriadis in the Libertarian Socialist Group “Socialism or Barbarism.” He is the author of numerous books on the the Jewish genocide in France, police violence, and critique on Zionism.

[2] The Dziga Vertov Group is named after Soviet Union filmmaker Dziga Vertov. It was founded in 1968 and was composed of Nathalie Billard, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Armand Marco, Gérard Martin, and Jean-Henri Roger. The group was active between 1968 et 1972, and produced several films, among which Vent d’Est, Vladimir et Rosa, and Letter to Jane. Godard talked on several occasions about the concept of “blackboard”: “There are two kinds of militant films: what we call ‘blackboard’ films and ‘Internationale’ films, which is tantamount to singing the Internationale at a demo, and the other which enables a person and shows him how to apply in reality what he has just seen, or go and rewrite it on another blackboard so that other people can also apply it.” (“Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard,” 1985).

BOUCHRA KHALILI: I’m not sure if one can talk about the cinematic potential of cartography. Mapmaking is still too often about producing the representation of a territory and the representation of a knowledge on that territory — geographic, political, economic, demographic, and the list is almost infinite — produced from the perspective of power. It may sound very “Foucaldian,” but it was always an inventory of the power, by the power, for the power.

I know very well that your own work and your interest in cartography is quite the opposite of this historically anchored conception of cartography, and one of your latest works about the cartography of the October 17, 1961 massacre of Algerians by the Paris police is a great example. I was actually very moved by this project, because, at the age of 18, while I was a very young student in art history and film studies, I conducted a research on October 17, 1961. It had nothing to do with my studies. I heard of what had happened, and I was so shocked that I literally became obsessed with it. I collected a lot of material and had the chance to meet Jean-Luc Einaudi, whose book La bataille de Paris (1991) was among the very few deep researches on the subject at that time. I even recall filming in the North of France a public conference gathering THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

Anyway, I digress from the subject. But looking at the visual shape of your maps, it immediately reminded me of Guy Debord’s notion of “psychogeography,” which was inspired by an Algerian friend of his. I always had a profound admiration for Debord’s work and his psychogeographic maps, which certainly had a huge influence on my work. And we both know that he made some extraordinary movies too. So at least when it comes to him, there’s an essential connection between cartography and filmmaking. However, I’m not sure until what point one can talk on a cinematic potential of mapmaking. One could argue that a map operates as a frame, limiting a geographical area, which off-frame is the world itself which does not need to be represented, because, although the “map is not the territory,” it is a representation of the world.

Cinematic shot is somehow the opposite: it is a metonymic capture of reality in which the off-frame — what remains invisible — cannot be ignored: it is there, somewhere, anyway.

To return specifically to “The Mapping Journey Project,” even before starting filming the project, the visual apparatus was already defined: one-long static shot on tripod, a map, a hand holding a permanent marker, a voice, a singular trajectory. The aim was to articulate metonymic details, including the invisible as an essential part of the image, inviting the viewer to picture components that are not shown but resonate mentally. I started from a very simple question: how does one produce the representation of an invisible geography, the geography of those who are forced to travel illegally because their right to mobility is denied?

The majority of the maps I have used are political maps that anyone can find in bookshops, with one exception, the map used for Mapping Journey # 3, which focuses on the occupied territories between Ramallah and East Jerusalem. That map does not exist in bookshops, because it is produced by a group of mapmakers whose work is to map the occupation.And that’s the reason why I always considered that that very video is the key work of the whole installation, illuminating the project. It is about a young man from Ramallah.

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(left page) “Foreign Office: The Archipelago” and stills from “Foreign Office (2015). (right page bottom) Hotel El Safir, ex-Aletti in the city center of Algiers, home of the Black Panther Party delegation during the 1969 Pan-African Festival . / “Foreign Office (2015). (right page top) Still from “Foreign Office (2015).

He’s not a migrant. He lives in the West Bank and is in love with a young woman living in East-Jerusalem. He cannot visit her, because as you know Palestinians from the West Bank cannot go freely to East Jerusalem, while according to UN resolutions — although Trump considers International Law count for nothing — it is still to become the capital of the Palestinian State. Thus, this young man is forced by an illegal occupation to climb hills, hide from armed military patrols, and walk a whole day to go to East Jerusalem only to see his fiancée, while by car it wouldn’t take him more than 15 minutes. For this young man, risking his life to see the woman he loves, is a gesture of resistance.

That’s why I never considered that “The Mapping Journey Project” was about migration, but about resistance against the nationstate model, whose raison d’être is to settle boundaries, borders, walls, defining who can be in and who is excluded. Excluded from citizenry, excluded from equal rights, excluded from the right to mobility, and so on, until considering that the excluded ones do not belong to humankind, which is what we are witnessing with European and U.S. policies regarding migrants and refugees. This says a lot about the failure of the “democratic states” in which we live.

So the project was not about the cinematic potential of maps but rather about challenging the most normative drawing which exists — a basic map — with the most singular situations. No forced journey looks like another one. And this is precisely the reason why permanent markers are used in the videos. The drawings of each participant cannot be erased anymore from the maps; they cover those maps and replace them.

The video becomes a map of a new kind: the maps of those who are 48

excluded from mapmaking. Thus, the maps become the page on which is written a singular trajectory as opposed to a nation-state narrative and, therefore, a site in which a geography of resistance can appear.

LL: As many readers will know, you and I share a productive fascination for the concept of archipelago — perhaps a common learning from Carribean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant! In “Foreign Office” (2015), you created a map of such an archipelago representing the situation of very specific buildings in Algiers. Could you describe what these buildings used to be and the historical context in which they became these crucial islands, not just for Algiers, but for the entire decolonization struggle, worldwide?

BK: The Archipelago is more a metaphor than an actual map, although it reproduces accurately the geographical dissemination of the many headquarters of movements of liberation and anti-fascist organizations that were based in Algiers between 1962 and 1972: Nelson Mandela’s ANC, Amilcar Cabral’s PAIGC, Eldridge Cleavers’ International Section of The Black Panthers Party, Mario Pinto de Andrade’s MPLA, FATAH, The Palestinian DFLP, The PFLOAG (Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arab Gulf), The FPLN (Portuguese National Liberation Front), and many others that are also present in the photographs.

It actually took me a lot of time to locate them because the access to the archives is very difficult in Algeria. I started THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

colonial period, so the images could definitely look like archival images. And, in a way, they have entered into archival field. This is even clearly the case for the former Aletti Hotel, which was built for the anniversary of the 100 years of French colonization of Algeria in 1930, and which was inaugurated by Charlie Chaplin. The hotel closed in late 2016, and its “renovation” started a few months ago with the destruction of the entrance of the hotel. I must be then the last photographer who could take pictures of the building and its inside.

This is why the captions of these photographs are so important: they add a historical layer to the images. They say: these images that seem to refer to the colonial period, but they actually refer to the internationalist period. There is then a kind of irony that appears: taking possession of colonial history and turning it against it. The presence of the triptych devoted to Kateb Yacine adds an extra layer: the relationship between location, poetry and resistance.

After this process of locating the buildings and “documenting” them, I could then go back to an actual map, using an aerial view of the city, locating again each headquarter, and producing this “Archipelago.” The point was not to produce a map of the city — although the scale is accurate, with the island formations reproducing faithfully the architectural shape of the buildings as seen from above. However, for me it was essentially a metaphor: could it be that internationalism was a response to the “Tout-Monde,” which Glissant hoped for? An archipelic world whose island formations are connected by solidarity?

with a sort of investigation on locations, checking many resources, including transcripts of meetings of movements of liberation at the United Nations, brochures and pamphlets published by those movements, or official mails addressed to international institutions.

I then visited each place, which one can see on the photographs, although for the photographs I deliberately focused on the entrances.

The photographs were operating as a sort of pastiche of the architectural photography style, produced with a live view camera with negative film rolls, frontal, and objective. Most of the buildings belong to the THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

LL: The two films/projects, “Foreign Office” (2015) and “The Tempest Society” (2017), operate mainly with the blackboard that gives the name to your exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (2018). Archival pieces are placed on this blackboard in order to recount the (hi)story of various antiracist, decolonial and class struggles that gather in Algiers (“Foreign Office”) and Athens (“The Tempest Society”). To me, this blackboard that allows you to be what you call yourself a Halqa (storyteller in Morocco) is a sort of cartography that incorporates space and time through the description of lives, struggles, and events. Could I ask you to think through this medium and the various dimensions it incorporates?

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(left and right pages) Stills from “The Tempest Society” (2017).

BK: It depends what one means by “blackboard.” To me it refers first to the definition given by The Dziga Vertov Group (see insert [2]). To them the “blackboard” is the film itself. It is this surface that circulates among the ones in need of a representation of themselves, for themselves, and that can then circulate among the ones in need of those images. It is a nomadic blackboard. I guess it is not by chance if hands populate my work. At some point, there’s always a flat surface on which hands are writing, drawing, or showing something to someone, sharing images and stories.

However, the blackboard can also be understood as the cinematic shot itself: a frame, a flat surface on which counter-narratives can be “written,” “drawn,” “performed.” Thus, one can definitely see the maps used in “The Mapping Journey Project” as a series of blackboards, in which the map as a surface is subverted through the performance and the drawing of accounts of resistance and resilience.

Similarly, the blackboard here is not anymore the tool on which knowledge as defined from the perspective of the power is being taught — the official and institutional knowledge. It is rather the opposite: the blackboard is the one being used by those who are said that they don’t have a knowledge, that they don’t have a story, that they don’t have a history.

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In “Foreign Office” and “The Tempest Society” the flat black tables operate similarly. It is the blackboard on which the protagonists compose their own story, history and historiography, using images, mixing up their own narratives with quotes, turning those tables literally into both a blackboard and an editing room. They thus illuminate the essential connection between film editing, or rather “montage” as a pedagogy of the image.

In “Twenty-Two Hours” (Bouchra Khalili, 2018), although there’s no table or physical blackboard, it operates similarly with the video monitors. We see Vanessa and Quiana, two young African American women from Boston, investigating Jean Genet’s clandestine visit to the USA in 1970, in support of the Black Panther Party. His visit started in Boston with a series of talks, organized by Doug Miranda a prominent Bostonian member of the BPP, who appears at many occasions throughout the film. However, it is Quiana and Vanessa who are “developing” this “blackboard.” Words are not written, but photographs and film footage displayed on TV monitors as a flat surface become a combination of fragments which, when brought together, eventually form both a physical and imaginary blackboard. In a sense, it is film editing as a form of storytelling generating an alternative historiography that that is turned into a collective blackboard.

THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

looks very much like what I do myself when working on a project: the notes always end up taking the shape of constellation. Making those constellations is my way of creating the connections between the many stories and many materials that I have collected for each project. But I’m sure that many people do the same thing for many different purposes. That’s why I don’t feel the need to include everything in the films or to exhibit all the material I use. What interests me the most is how the connections can be made.

LL: Finally, something struck me in your exhibition Blackboard in Paris’ Jeu de Paume (2018): it is the fact that the little plates describing each artwork (and the one describing the acronym of each liberation organization present in Algiers during the 1960s) could constitute in themselves an exhibition (and a cartography!) of some kind. Am I being anecdotal or is that something that resonates with what you would like your work convey?

BK: I pay specific attention to titles, captions that I always draft, the labels, including the way they are printed and hanged in an exhibition space when I’m given the opportunity to do so by museums.

There are different traditions when it comes to labels in institutions.

In France, labels are considered very important and are often hung next to the artworks. In Germany, there’s often no labels but instead a map of the show based on the exhibited artworks. So in Germany the artworks define the first perception of the space.

As for the connection with the Halka, its disappearing ancient tradition of storytelling is indeed close to my heart. In my childhood, the public storyteller was a living archive sharing his knowledge of popular tales and classical poetry, happily mixing vernacular language and dialect with classical Arabic. Was he transporting a blackboard: no. Was he himself the “blackboard”: why not?

LL: In a conversation with Omar Berrada, you describe the way you work on each new research project and refer to this process as a form of topography. Being involved in a similar process right now, I would love to hear you describe it more at length; how somehow the creation of an imaginary cartography is necessary to create an artwork that may not convey this entire topography but whose fragments are all formed by it.

BK: “Mapping” my project is actually a very practical thing: it is a matter of putting things in order, at least for myself. My notebooks, including filming material, like the scripts themselves, look like maps, or I should rather say like constellations. When at the end of “The Tempest Society”, Isavella, Elias, and Giannis gather in front of a blackboard and chalk the film itself, and the stories it articulated, they literally draw a constellation. They reveal the process of the making of the film, its narrative construction. What they do THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

My approach is to use labels which hang to reproduce the hanging of the artworks: it is in between traditional labels and maps. But it also makes sense with the way I hang artworks, which is not linear, but more like constellations. I think there’s not one single artwork that is hung accordingly to the traditional rule consisting of hanging a print at 150 centimeters from the floor to the middle of the frame. “Foreign Office” is very specific though: the labels are part of the works, so of course they have to be exhibited too. As I was telling you before, the photographs operate on a deceptive perception: there’s a gap between what is being shown and what the picture actually refers to.

The labels become a sort of editing articulation as in the process of “montage,” filling a gap in terms of time and space, including historically speaking. Labels are also literally “language,” and you know how much language plays a prominent role in my work.

Those silent pictures start to tell stories, and a sort of dynamic interaction between picture and words start to operate. That’s also the reason why the archipelago not only includes the headquarters and their architectural shape but also the acronyms, as if they were the only traces remaining of a lost language that needs now to be translated. And as a matter of clarity, an index is often hanged among the labels. So it is a complicated piece to install: there are the 17 artworks composing it as well as the 18 labels. However, I won’t show those labels alone, because to me what matters is the interval, this kind of film “montage” that operates when the works and the labels interact with each other because a viewer is making the connections in the art space.

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THE ATLAS OF LEGAL FICTIONS: JEWISH ERUV A RESEARCH BY PIPER BERNBAUM The Atlas of Legal Fictions plays a unique role in the world of map making — depicting a unique condition that is both a physical reality and symbolic space within our urban realms — the Jewish Eruv.

Unknown to most, the Eruv (literally “mixing/mingling”) is a defined physical area symbolically extending the “home” beyond its walls into the community. Acknowledged as a “legal-fiction,” the Eruv transforms space, providing leniencies to Orthodox Jewish communities by creating symbolic private realms within public urban space, allowing the performance of daily activities otherwise forbidden on the Sabbath. Laws written into the Talmud forbid any type of work on the Sabbath, including carrying, transferring, or pushing objects, such as a baby carriages or wheelchairs within the public domain. Limiting in many ways for the community, especially women who care for their children, the Eruv loop hole was established as a kosher practice to allow people to carry books of prayer, or push baby carriages outside the home without breaking religious law. How? Through the construction of a boundary in the public domain, 52

a defining edge of community that symbolically acts as a communal wall for a shared privatized space — an extension of the home into the city.

Jewish communities build these boundaries themselves, establishing them through proposals, negotiations, and a lease signed with the city. It is a privilege given by the city and a physical space designed by people, not architects. The boundaries are designated by elements such as existing walls, natural boundaries — rivers, roadways, etc or made of commonplace materials like fishing line combined with telephone and lamp posts, fences, gateways, etc. The Eruv blends into its surroundings, attaching to the existing fabric of the city, encompassing portions, or even entire cities, yet remaining virtually invisible to those unaware of its symbols. Although established as a religious practice, the Eruv is urban in every way. Although it is intended to facilitate Orthodox Jews specifically, it does not eliminate others from being part of the designated space. The consequence is an open, permeable boundary that establishes community, maintains tradition, and yet allows interaction with new environments and other cultures. It is both spatial and social in its existence, a true place of “mingling” between public and private, old and new, the traditional religious practices of one culture, and the modern urban fabric of contemporary cities.

THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

Public roads/spaces require permission by city counsel so are often avoided in block scale Eruvin.

Household Eruv Extension Families commonly construct Eruvin within backyards to use outdoor areas to eat or play

Household Eruv Enclosure Existing fencing between properties can be used to create a privatized space.

Alleyway / Driveway Eruv Alley/driveways can appropriate building facades as solid boundaries and gates to create an Eruv.

Courtyard Eruv Courtyards can utilize interior building faces as symbolic Eruv boundaries for a shared symbolic space.

Building faces will commonly be used as Eruv limits in block typologies to avoid invading nearby community spaces

Block Scale Eruv Block scale Eruvin are typically built to allow for the Sabbath to be a social activity between Jewish residents and households.

This diagram of cityEruvin represents the ways in which Eruv limits will include or exclude spaces relative to the context of their establishment.

All spaces, homes, neighborhoods and public spaces, within city scale Eruvin are considered privatized space on the sabbath.

City Eruvin will often use existing infrastructure to inform the shape of the boundary or methods for fabricating limits

City Scale Eruv City / Community / Municipal scale Eruvin are established to serve larger and more dispersed Jewish communities. and can encompass small areas of or entire urban centers, and will have at least one synagogue within its space. Consent for the construction of such large Eruvin must be granted by higher powers in the city/town for the Eruv to be kosher.

The Atlas of Legal Fictions is an architectural cartographic analysis of these spaces — an account of these community boundaries illustrated by mapping and interpreted through stories, photography, and drawing in hopes to acknowledge the multiplicity of spaces and readings present in cities. Each map shows the useable space of a community, redefining an edge to urban space and communities. The first of its kind, this atlas brings together data to create original scaled maps of these community boundaries in numerous cities, documenting the 250+ Eruvin (plural of Eruv) that have been found to date.

As a part of the mapping, I travelled to many of these THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

communities, walking the edge of their boundaries to understand the intricacies and nuances to their symbolic community space. The Atlas of Legal Fictions exposes the factual existence of what is considered fiction in the modern world.

Piper Bernbaum is a registered intern architect and adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada, teaching design studio as a part of the undergraduate program in Cambridge, Ontario and in Rome, Italy. She is the recipient of the 2017 Canada Council for the Arts Prix de Rome for Emerging Practitioners and the 2017 Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal of Canada, and is currently pursuing her research in Canada and abroad.

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Clear Fishing Line Most common material used to represent the Eruv’s korah (roof line)

Aircraft Cable Used to connect posts, wall components or existing barriers.

Steel Strapping Durable steel strapping mends breaks in wire fences or connects large posts.

Metal Worm Gear Clamp Clamps are used around telephone/ lamp posts to attach Eruv wood posts to cylindrical structures.

Cord and Twine To connect wall components of differing heights, cord or twine is strung vertically between the top of the posts.

Colored Ribbon Color ribbon is often tied to the fishing line to help verify if the line is kosher or has been compromised.

Oval-Eye Turnbuckle Turnbuckles can be used to allow for tightening and easy repair of the symbolic lintel/roof components.

Tube Clamps Used to nail PVC or metal piping to existing timber infrastructural posts to support wall and gateway stakes.

Grout Grout can be added to facades in a vertical line to make a symbolic gateway if existing buildings are used.

Nylon Cord Tied onto components to indicate specific trees/light posts/fencing are symbolic for Eruv checkers.

Cable Ties / Zip-Ties Used as both an identifier of Eruv gates and entrances, as well as a fastening tool for lechi (door posts).

Screw Eyes Screw eyes are used as guides for fishing line and string to be drawn between symbolic wall components.

ERUV IDENTIFIERS / HARDWARE / FASTENERS The material quality of the Eruv is unspectacular and simple: most of everything used can be found at the local hardware store. These common place materials are bestowed with a new symbolic meaning, but to the untrained eye, blend into the city-scape.

THE MONTREAL HAMPSTEAD ERUV - INFRASTRUCTURAL BOUNDARIES Influenced by the railways running through Côte Saint Luc of Montreal, the Hampstead Eruv utilizes the inherently impassable infrastructural lines of the city to form its boundary. The Eruv bends around the Canadian Pacific Railway Côte Saint Luc Rail

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Yard, utilizing the fencing put in place to separate the industrial district from the neighboring residential communities. The remainder of the Eruv follows the same language of utilizing barricades and city fences to manufacture the Eruv space.

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THE GREATER AMSTERDAM ERUV - NATURAL / GEOGRAPHIC EDGE In 2008, a new Eruv proposal was set forth in Amsterdam, not to make use of the man made infrastructure of the city, but to focus primarily on the natural advantages present in the Amstel River, IJmeer Lake and canals. Using the waterways, the Eruv required

very few additions to be halachically approved, and could span beyond Amsterdam proper into further reaching rural areas. One of the largest Eruvin, the Greater Amsterdam Eruv was able to eliminate costs and risk of damage by using natural borders.

THE JERUSALEM ERUV - TERRITORIAL BOUNDARIES Every city in Israel maintains their own Eruv to serve the large Jewish Orthodox population, but Jerusalem’s Eruv is inherently the most politically charged. The Eruv in Jerusalem indicates the tensions present in the region, and the territorial methods of occupation.

THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

The Eruv encompasses the Holy City, all the religious quarters included, parts of East Jerusalem, secular Jewish communities, and Palestinian Communities and territories. The Eruv, although hardly visible, reflects the territorial conflicts across the land.

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Atlanta

Cherokee

Cobb

Paulding

F

Cherokee

Fors

Fulton

Paulding Douglas

DeKalb

Cobb

Fulton

Douglas

DeKalb

Clayton

Clayton

He

Fayette

Henry Fayette

PERCENTAGE OF INMATES REPORTING A COUNTRY AS THEIR HOME COUNTRY

PERCENTAGE OF INMATES REPORTING A COUNTY AS THEIR HOME COUNTY

PERCENTAGE OF INMATES REPORTING A COUNTY AS

0.29% 0.29%

0.36% 0.36%

(1) Police killings and inmate home counties in Georgia (2016).

8.61% 8.61%

0.36%

(2) Self-reported inmate home counties. / Georgia Department of

MAPPING POLICE KILLINGS, POLLUTION, AND PRISONS IN GEORGIA, USA

by CELESTE WINSTON

The Graduate Center, City University of New York (USA) / Tutor: Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2017) In her Spring 2017 CUNY Graduate Center course, entitled “Police Prison Pollutants,” professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore asked students to create atlases illustrating the intersecting impacts of police, prisons, and pollution in various United States cities and the regions surrounding them. Our work in the course was inspired by scholarship and activism founded in the recognition that policing, prisons, and pollutants are all forms of environmental hazards that operate together to produce concentrations of premature death in the “places where prisoners come from and where prisons are built” (Gilmore, 2008). We also used Rebecca Solnit’s and her colleague’s trilogy of atlases — entitled Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (2010), Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (2013), and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016) — as guiding examples of imaginative cartographic practices.

Focusing on the state of Georgia and its capital city Atlanta, I worked to map out relationships between police violence, incarceration, and environmental 56

pollution. The first map shows incidences of police killings (red dots) in Georgia in 2016, along with the self-reported home counties of people who became incarcerated in Georgia’s state correctional system in 2016. The map highlights the stark reality that police officers kill people primarily where it is most common to send people to prison.

It may be tempting to see in this map a relationship of causality that deems police killings a product of mass incarceration.

However, Ruth Wilson Gilmore urges us to see the problem the other way around. As Gilmore (2015) contends, “many people respond to [...] high-profile police killings by thinking: ‘They can kill us because they can lock us up.’ But I think it goes the other way: they can lock us up because they know they can kill us, because they can kill with impunity.” In other words, mass THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

Cherokee

Forsyth

Forsyth

Barrow

Hall

syth

Barrow

Hall

Gwinnett

Gwinnett

Cobb

Paulding

Cherokee

Forsyth

Fulton

DeKalb

Barrow Gwinnett Paulding Douglas

Barrow

STUDENTS

Hall

Hall

Gwinnett

Cobb

Rockdale

Rockdale Fulton

DeKalb

Clayton

Douglas Rockdale

Rockdale

Clayton

enry

Henry

Fayette

y

Henry Fayette

S THEIR HOME COUNTY 8.61% 8.61%

NUMBER OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE HOTSPOTS

8.61%

Corrections (2016).

0 0.36% 0

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8.61%

(3) Patterns of pollution in Metropolitan Atlanta.

incarceration is a product of already-existing fatal geographies, which produce premature death among primarily poor people of color as a result of overlapping concentrations of pollution, policing, unaffordable housing, exclusionary school policies, and other injustices.

For example, in metropolitan Atlanta the counties that send the most people into Georgia’s state correctional system are also hotspots of environmental injustice. These counties include Fulton, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, and Gwinnett counties. The second and third maps, respectively, show the metro Atlanta home counties of people who became incarcerated in Georgia’s state correctional system in 2016 (a scaled-down version of the first map), and concentrations of environmental justice hotspots in metro Atlanta counties.

The maps — which look strikingly similar — illustrate how the prison system combines with and exacerbates the effects of environmental pollution particularly among poor, nonwhite people.

The second map illustrates the metro Atlanta home counties of people who became incarcerated in Georgia’s state correctional system in 2016. One-third (33.62 percent) of people who were admitted into a state correctional facility in Georgia in 2016 reported one of the above metro Atlanta area counties as their home county. Among these counties, Fulton, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, and Gwinnett counties sent the most people into Georgia’s correctional institutions.

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The third map shows concentrations of environmental justice hotspots in metro Atlanta counties. Environmental justice hotspots are defined here as “blocks that contain the most pollution points, poorest economic conditions, highest linguistic isolation rates, and/or the largest minority populations in the metro Atlanta region. To qualify as a hotspot, the block must fall in the top quantile (1/5th) for both pollution points and overall demographic characteristics in the region” (GreenLaw, 2012).

Pollution points include air pollution sites, water pollution sites, hazardous waste inventory and storage sites, landfills, Superfund sites, toxic release inventory sites, and locations cited for environmental violations.

Together, these three maps illustrate how environmental pollution combines with the impacts of policing and prisons to produce a geographic concentration of premature death in poor communities of color. By highlighting often-concealed relationships embedded in place, maps such as these can help to expand our analyses and organizing efforts around issues like policing, incarceration, and environmental pollution.

Knowing how it all works together helps us to better know how to pull it apart.

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STUDENTS THE GRAND CANAL: ARCHITECTURE OF WATER AND RESISTANCE IN PALESTINE

by ZHIWEN WEI, LONGNING QI, JIAN WANG, & BINGQIAN LIU

Bartlett School of Architecture (U.K.) / Tutors: Godofredo Enes Pereira & Samaneh Moafi (2015) Water as a Medium of Conflict /// Tensions over the control of water have always affected the entirety of the planet, but they have become increasingly dominant in recent years, especially in arid regions. The demand for water has increased especially in the postwar period as a result of population growth and social and political development. The thirst of nations towards a finite supply of water has brewed conflicts between countries that share aquifers and rivers.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, water has been weaponized for depopulation and land appropriation. Water is an essential component for both the prosperity and the decline of a community. Ever since the beginning of immigration, with the diaspora of returning to the “Promised Land,” Jewish communities purchased the most water-rich lands and implemented irrigation schemes competing with Palestinian farmers over water resources. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the National Water Carrier was constructed in order to support a substantial rise in Jewish immigration. This act of water expropriation ignited the rage of the Arab League (the Kingdom of Egypt, 58

the Kingdom of Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria), and later led in part to the outbreak of the Six Day War in 1967. After the war, Israel controlled all ground water resources in the region.

Slow Violence: The Appropriation of Land and the Development of the Water Sector /// As agriculture represents permanence and is essential for claiming ownership to land, the Palestinian Authority (PA) subsidizes farmers to sustain their agricultural activity in the area, in order to claim the ownership of the land through the evidence of living and cultivation. Water is, of course, essential for continuous agriculture.

Access to water represented a fundamental “emblem of inclusionary citizenship.” In order to control Palestinian agricultural activities, Israel amended a series of military orders aimed to limit Palestinian access to water resources. Segregation walls, roadblocks and checkpoints are applied to restrict the free access of Palestinians to their wells. As a consequence of water shortages, Palestinians are forced to abandon their agriculture lands and to work in Israeli settlements, while Israel is slowly appropriating uncultivated lands. This is part of a broader process by which the West Bank has been converted into an archipelago. Palestinian THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

(left page) “Gardens Beneath Which Rivers Flow,” a map presenting the vegetation analysis in Palestine. Map of the upper and lower aquifer outcrops. (right page) Axonometrics and visuals of the Grand Canal around the Palestinian town of Yatta in Area A and B near Hebron.

farmers lost not only their livelihood but also their heritage to the land where they have resided for generations. The actions of evacuating the shared water resources pushed Palestine into a state of penury. Therefore, it is crucial to invest water in agriculture for minimum agriculture activities.

Water as an Apparatus: The Grand Canal /// The situation of Palestinians cannot be addressed merely as providing the people with an abundant amount of water but instead as collecting the limited share of water to invest in existing and potential Palestinian agriculture lands. This project proposes to create a water distribution system, The Grand Canal, as an opportunity for territorial THE FUNAMBULIST 18 /// CARTOGRAPHY & POWER

design and intervention. The intention is to improve political resistance against land appropriation and to protect the heritage of the lands.

The Grand Canal collects, transports, distributes and displays water in each island of the Palestinian archipelago It aims at unifying dispersed springs and wells into a single water loop transporting water across the territories creating links between scattered villages. By doing so, we maximize land irrigation as well as creating a collective form, thus creating solidarity.

Circular aqueducts form “greenbelts” and reinforce the existence of irrigation canals. This spatial tool reshapes the urban territories and constructs a new texture and landscape on Earth.

59

Issue 18 (July-August 2018): Cartography & Power Next issue: 19 (September-October 2018): The Space of Ableism Please note that the issue Settler Colonialism in Turtle Island guest-edited by Melanie K. Yazzie & Nick Estes, originally announced for July, will be published in November.

funambulist: fu·nam·bu·list (fyo͝ o-năm′byə-lĭst) noun. One who performs on a tightrope or a slack rope. (The Free Dictionary)

ISSN: 2430-218X CPPAP: 0921 K 92818 Editor’s Address: The Funambulist, 75 rue du Cherche-Midi, 75006 Paris, France Printer’s Address: Alpha S.A.S. 57, ZA La Boissonnette 07340 Peaugres, France Editor-in-Chief: Léopold Lambert Editorial assistants: Tomi Laja & Ella Martin-Gachot Contributing copy editors: Maxwell Donnewald, Noelle Geller Contributing translator: Chanelle Adams Contributors: Fabiana Ex-Souza, Lebogang Mokoena, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Caren Kaplan, Moad Musbahi, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Ahmad Barclay, Patrick Jaojoco, Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, Rasheedah Phillips, Bouchra Khalili, Piper Bernbaum, Celeste Winston, Zhiwen Wei, Longning Qi, Jian Wang, & Bingqian Liu. Special Thanks: Hiroko Nakatani, Candice Wagener, Mohammad Golabi, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, Anja Neidhardt, Claire Lubell, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Samaneh Moafi, Nermin el-Sherif, Mpho Matsipa, Nina Kolowratnik, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Cesar Reyes, Annabelle Floriant, and Justine Chassé-Dumont.

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