From May 11th until June 15th
Gallery 3 by Topological Atlas and Borders & Territories
How do we get to know the world, and how do we locate ourselves within it? For spatial practitioners these are crucial questions that guide the way we produce knowledge, and the kinds of practices we value in our work. On a planet faced with multiple crises, Weaving Worlds is a call to create speculative models that work with multiple truths and actively envision other realities. Paying attention to the entanglements of the many, heterogeneous, and situated worlds, Weaving Worlds asks, how might we produce maps differently? And how might we reimagine the practice of representation, giving precedence to different ways of knowing the world and committing to developing forms of practice that weave together what might be contradictory positions into future scenarios?
The pop-up exhibition in the words of Topological Atlas and Borders & Territories
In recent years, mapping and modelling have become key tools through which we understand spatial situations and are often also central to forms of intervention. While the practice of mapping has been thoroughly deconstructed, as can be discerned in the use of terms such as counter mapping, within the realm of the digital many familiar problems have returned in a different guise, such as externalised reference points, immutable base maps, or simply our own unacknowledged presence. The digital realm also produces representations of worlds that are all encompassing, where paradigms of existence beyond the statistical, capitalist and imperial logic of the model are difficult to imagine (Galloway, 2014). Such technologies have enabled new forms of colonisation and are complicit in the ending of many lifeworlds. If we were to learn from indigenous thinkers that we live in ‘a world of many worlds’ (Cadena & Blaser, 2018) that are deeply entangled, how might this transform our practices of mapping and modelling to apprehend heterogeneous, material and situated worlds? What would an intensive practice of mapping look like? What might it mean to know the world through multiple reference points? If maps are tools that conceptualise ways of knowing and aid navigation, how might we produce them differently to help us place ourselves within multiple constellations?
What in more optimistic times was considered the democratising influence of social media has produced a highly complex landscape where the line between fact and fiction has blurred. In such a context, evidentiary ways of knowing have become more popular across the arts and culture contributing towards a forensic turn. Such work is situated within the idiom of the juridical and through an investment in certain forms of evidence producing unquestionable truths (Weizman, 2019). Visual regimes of modelling and mapping are also imbricated in the production of such evidence. In a post-truth world, the ‘return’ to this unitary truth runs the risk of reproducing universality in a different guise. How might we resist disentangling the knotty world of social relations to produce unitary truths? Rather than basing our politics on a logic of pre-emption and optimisation that reproduces a world based on its own narrow understandings of risk and threat, and of cause and effect, we might need to create speculative models that work with multiple truths and actively envision other realities. In this sense, a critical approach might not only analyse the modelled spaces of standards, practices and computational geometries, but would also deploy ‘agential cuts’ (Barad, 2007) through the extractive geometries of digital modelling to reveal thick surfaces for action and for alternative interpretations. How might we reimagine the practice of representation as a turn towards this thick surface that we always already inhabit, and how might we account for the ‘racialised assemblages’ and ‘heavy waves and vibrations’ (McKittrick & Weheliye, 2012) of life that run through it? And what approximate narratives and future worlds can we imagine on a planet faced with multiple crises (Tyszczuk, 2019)? This means giving precedence to different ways of knowing the world, to other forms of intelligence, and a commitment to developing forms of practice that weave together what might be contradictory positions into future scenarios.
About Topological Atlas and Borders & Territories Topological Atlas aims to develop a transdisciplinary research programme for mapping, analysing and intervening in border areas in the form of a digital atlas. The project investigates the relationship between technologies of border security, systems of documentation, border landscapes and the experience of crossing borders without papers. Topological Atlas uses topology as conceptual framework and methodology to make maps that produce 'seamless transitions' from the space of the migrant to that of the security apparatus that creates barriers to her movement. Borders & Territories (B&T) is an architectural design and research collective engaged in the critical relationship between architectural theory, spatial analysis and architectural design. The group considers architectural construct as a precursor of 'now’ discourse, and addresses 'indices of other possibilities' in architecture by speculating on the relevance of the appropriation, implementation and application of methods and instruments that have been progressively externalized to the disciplinary core (cartography, literature, art, philosophy); and the constructs and objects that historically have not been considered as architectural 'material' as such.
About Gallery 3 In addition to its own programming, the Nieuwe Instituut offers a platform for third-party initiatives from the field of art and design in its building in Rotterdam’s Museum Park. Since the beginning of 2020, pop-up exhibitions in the Gallery 3 space have given individual makers and organisations the opportunity to show their work to a wider audience in a museum setting.
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