Workshop: Too slow, too quick, too small, too big – Reading, imagining, making maps

Monica Basbous

Feb 03 - Feb 12, 2021

Wednesday, Monday, Friday 11:00 am- 2:00 pm Beirut time

This workshop will be held online

REGISTRATION IS CLOSED



By negotiating visibility and erasure, complexity and abstraction, documentation and fiction, maps oscillate between the desire to see, and the need to produce worlds and realities. Because they inherently encapsulate notions of power and knowledge, maps are politically motivated instruments, deployed to describe and prescribe carefully chosen objects, relationships, and possibilities.

Throughout the sessions of this workshop, we discuss the limits underpinning the production of spatial and geographic knowledge and representations and we examine deliberative mapping as a potential framework for articulating notions and imaginaries of collectivity and livability. We also explore the production of maps as world-building tools that operate across various scales of space and time – including, but not limited to, the cosmic, the planetary, the geopolitical, the transnational, the territorial, and the hyperlocal.

The workshop aims to provide participants with methods and tools to advance their own investigations and projects. It is open to thinkers and practitioners from all disciplines and fields whose work tackles questions of spatiality, urbanity, territory, ecology, among others. No prior technical knowledge is required for this workshop. However, participants are expected to be familiar and comfortable with a medium of their choice.

The workshop will be held online in the form of three 2.5 hour sessions, accommodating for up to 15 participants: session 1 (Wednesday 03/02/2021), session 2 (Monday 08/02/2021), session 3 (Friday 12/02/2021).

 

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Readings:

Kanarinka, F. A. (2006). Art-Machines, Body-Ovens and Map-Recipes: Entries for a Psychogeographic Dictionary. Cartographic Perspectives, (53), 24-40. https://cartographicperspectives.org/index.php/journal/article/view/cp53-kanarinka/pdf

Corner J., “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention,” in Mappings, ed Denis Cosgrove. (London: Reakton Books, 1999), 214-252 http://n.fonty.free.fr/PhD/Corner-The%20Agency%20of%20Mapping_ch12.pdf

Gharbieh A., Basbous M. “On the Mappability of Things” in Refugees as city-makers (2019), p16 https://www.aub.edu.lb/ifi/Documents/publications/research_reports/2018-2019/20180910_refugees_as_city_makers.pdf

Powers of Ten (1977) 

La ville 17h38 (2008)

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Monica Basbous is an architect, researcher and educator based in Beirut since 2013. Her practice focuses on questions of urban mobility, informal spatial practices, politics and representations of space, and speculative geographies. Monica teaches architectural design at the Lebanese American University since 2017, and was lead researcher and partner in Public Works Studio between 2016 and 2020. She holds a MSc. in Architecture from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2012) and was a fellow of Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program (2015-2016).