Venice - Emily Harvey Residency 2026

 CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE IMAGINATION

Thanks again to the Emily Harvey Foundation and a wonderful month in Venice. I began a new collaboration with poet Peter Hughes based on a series of Maps from 1821 which archive the 31 catholic parishes in Venice. Here are a few photos of our time there
and further explanation about the work which is still in process.

 

My work has in the past focused on the U.S.-Mexico Border and interventions and performances about bordering.  I have literally become the border by lying down on the border line in the middle of the Espejos en el puente Progreso-Nuevo Progreso bridge (2012). My previous works include actions of intervening with border maps such as sewing, erasing and amplifying the audio sound of the erasing, as well as interacting with an 8 x 8-foot map in a performance which includes sewing, constructing a garment out of it, sleeping under it, measuring my body against it, etc. My photographic work which includes images of building border walls, and border patrol and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border explores the continuous theater of the border enacted by nation states. 

Territories have often been created by powerful men who negotiated space and people's lives by drawing a line across a map while sitting at a table in a faraway space – separating families, cultures, and social groups. Alfred Korzybski remarked that “The Map is not the Territory” and the “Word is not the thing”. These are fundamental in my thinking about our new maps.

 

In the Venice work it was important for me to think about deconstructing the power behind maps and mapmakers. Who have they been made to support and who have they been created to exclude. The basic premise is that mapping is often about particular power structures and their viewpoint. In this new feminist cartography, we share and collect information based not on the historic patriarchal point of view but from a specific position or alternative view. We focus on power, lived experiences, and diverse perspectives about colonialist presents and histories. It is a new mutable way of thinking about mapping. 

Our project initiated with the phrase “cartographies of the imagination.” Our maps would allow us to cross over time and space, from personal viewpoints to political and historical images as we traversed the 118 islands over our month-long stay.

Peter Hughes, poet and founding editor of Oystercatcher Press, was inspired by poet and friend Peter Riley. Riley wrote a work in the 1970s tracing and retracing a journey from France over the mountains into Spain. This work, called 'The Linear Journal' (Grosseteste Press 1973) included two sketch maps. As well as notating route, place names and topographical features, these maps included such unexpected terms as 'horsefly', 'sadness', 'joy' and 'democracy'. Such additions serve to question what maps are for, and how subjectivity always overlaps with the objective. They also make the maps more creative, poetical and entertaining. Peter Hughes was keen to bring these innovative reinterpretations of 'mapping' to our Venice project.