In November 2018, I had the pleasure of attending
Our Dance Democracy as an invited guest speaker,
where I shared with dance practitioners my
cartographic approach for studying embodied
memorial landscapes of post-genocide Rwanda.
The genocide against the Tutsi that lasted
ninety days between April and June 1994 has
been the subject of much international scrutiny
and scholarly discussion, but the role of dance
performance in attending to the legacies of
colonial violence and inter-ethnic conflict, as
well as the country’s contemporary search for
nation-building and identity formation, is little
understood.
Conceived as a dancing ‘deep-map’ that is
situated at the intersection of critical cartography
and creative geopolitics, this interdisciplinary
research aims to construct deep spatial stories
of post-genocide life through the medium of
dance and performance in Rwanda. It begins by
asking how dance practice can help us uncover
the heterogenous space-times of war as well
as identify the emergence of new hybrid ethnic
identities in Kigali’s changing urban environment.
The motivation for the research came from my
position as a political geographer and as a former
Irish dancer where I was intrigued to understand
the ways in which this “everyday spatial practice”
(Saldanha, 2002) could attend to the contested
identity-politics of the postcolonial state while also
broadening our existing frameworks for thinking
about political-geographic conflict, (Rogers, 2017).
Throughout history, mapping has featured
as a distinctly authoritarian visual and textual
“modality of power” (Wood 2010) that has been
integral to the Western quest for scientifically
measuring space. Maps enable us to build what
Ethington and Toyosawa (2015) have referred
to as “spatial relationships among elements of
a topography” that connect built and natural
features of a landscape with representational
imaginaries of people, place and culture. A more
recent ‘undisciplining’ of cartography outside
of the geographical sciences and professional
agencies which Crampton (2009) and Wood
(2010) have alluded to, has seen many challenges
to the ways in which maps are constructed and
utilised by an eclectic mix of practitioners and
scholars, all of whom are helping to move debates
regarding the ‘place’ of cartography and its use by
communities, forward.
At least since Guy Debord and the Situationist
Internationals Avant-garde movement of the
1950s, it has been recognised by artists that
cartographic strategies can be used as alternative
mediums in which to question established power
relations and open up new ways of viewing space
through a wider set of participatory engagements.
By experimenting with conventional modes of
cartographic design and reorienting our analytical
attention towards phenomenon occurring at
the innermost spatial scales, practitioners and
performers have helped to inform and unearth not
simply what maps ‘represent’ both qualitatively
and contextually, but rather how maps are put to
‘work’ and what they ‘do’ as “intermediated sets of
social practices” (Del Casino & Hanna, 2000).
Deep mapping, as a branch of critical
cartography then, draws from a diverse
constellation of disciplinary skill sets and expertise
to build a “polyvocal record of place” that is
too often elided by and from the traditional and
conventional disciplinary ‘thin map’ (Roberts,
2016). It remains a useful tool for intervening
temporally, as well as spatially, into the depths of
contested landscapes in order to archaeologically
uncover the hidden ruins, memories and ‘spectral
traces’ which give form and meaning to places in
the aftermath of violent injustices (Jonker & Till,
2009).
Within dance studies for example, Carol
Brown Dance Group has been developing a
‘place-responsive choreography’ that works
with Maoiri understandings of land and body in
order to educate the public about the hegemonic
narratives that structure settler cities and
which draw attention to the violent histories
of indigenous erasure in ways that chime with
decolonial narratives of encounter (Brown, 2015).
At stake here is a ‘deeper’ and more critical
understanding of the ways in which bodies move
through and with time; stepping in and out of
multiple pasts as part of a layered and palimpsetic
experience of place.
But creative mappings are not without their
problems, and at the conference I discussed how
many still suffer from their permanent transience
and mutability, leading Roberts (2016) to rightly
question: “how [do we] hold it all together? How
[do we] frame it as a ‘map’?” It would appear that
epistemologically, the remnants of what we know
and understand as a ‘map’ (not least in a material
sense) can be almost altogether obliterated
when we enact performance based cartographies
merely “lodged in the immaterial spaces of the
body and imagination” (Roberts, 2016).
The danger as well of course, is that we risk
reifying their liberatory potential. Traditionalists
might worry about the danger of a “new
orthodoxy” (Hawkins, 2014) of artistic or amateur
mappings, but perhaps a more optimistic reading
is to suggest that their prevalence attests to their
intellectual and ethical strengths. As an exercise
that has extended our experimentation with the
power-geometries of space, critical and creative
mappings have made a number of significant
contributions to the social sciences. First, they
have probed our assumptions of map-making
by democratising the ‘map’ and recasting it as
a space for social commentary and community
involvement (Perkins, 2004).
Dance mappings help to subvert traditional
modes of knowledge production by incorporating
hidden vantage points while at the same time
affording communities with the opportunities to
develop the skills and tools to (re)imagine their
own environments differently (2012). Crampton
(2009) has made a similar point by claiming that
because art “provokes, surprises, seeks truths and
proposes alternatives” performance mappings
have the ability to challenge disciplinary sciences
that are still largely fettered by normalised
design principles. Secondly, from the dancers
perspective using embodied or bodily mappings
are a far more enjoyable way in which to obtain
research data when compared with standardised
interviews and research questionnaires that
provide little opportunity for sustained community
engagement.
For those of us researching in the underresourced
global South, creating cartographies
through dance with the communities enables us
to build more ethical and meaningful partnerships
with participants and organisations that are based
on trust and openness; virtues that are needed
if we are to truly understand the legacy of the
genocide in Rwanda today.
Info
gisele.e.o'connell@durham.ac.uk
References
1. & 4. Wood, D. (2010) Rethinking the Power of Maps.
The Guilford Press. New York
2. Ethington, P; Toyosawa, N (2015) ‘Inscribing the Past:
Depth as Narrative in Historical Spacetime’ in ‘Deep Maps
and Spatial Narratives’ (Eds) Bodenhamar, D; Corrigan,
J; Harris, T.M. Pp 72-101. Indiana University Press.
Bloomington and Indianapolis
3. Crampton (2009) Cartography: Performative,
Participatory, Political. Progress in Human Geography Vol
33. Issue No: 6. Pp 840- 848
4. See (1)
5. Saldanha, A. (2002). Music Space Identity:
Geographies of Youth Culture in Bangalore. Vol 16 Issue
3. Pp 337- 350
6. Rogers, A. (2017). Advancing The Geographies of the
Performing Arts. Progress in Human Geography. Vol 4.
Issue No. 4. 549- 568
7. Kitchin, R; Dodge, M. (2007). Rethinking Maps.
Progress in Human Geography Vol 31 Issue 3. Pp 331-344.
8. Del Casino, V; Hanna, S.P (2000). Representations And
Identities in Tourism Map Spaces. Progress in Human
Geography. Vol 24. Issue 1. Pp 23- 46
9. Roberts, L. (2016) Deep Maps and Spatial
Anthropology. Humanities. Vol 5. Issue 1. Pp 1-7
10. after; Jonker, J; Till, K.E (2009). Mapping and
Excavating Spectral Traces in Post-Apartheid Cape Town.
Memory Studies. Vol 2. Issue 3. Pp 303- 335.; Biggs, I.
(2010)c ‘Deep mapping’: A Brief Introduction. In Mapping
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Tech College of Architecture and Urban Studies, 2010,
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11. Brown, C. M. (2015). ‘City of Lovers.’ In V. Hunter
(Ed.) Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance
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12. Roberts, L. (2016) Deep Maps and Spatial
Anthropology. Humanities. Vol 5. Issue 1. Pp 1-7
13. See (12)
14. Hawkins, H. (2015). Creativity: Key Ideas in Geography.
Routledge. New York
15. see also; Perkins, C. (2004). Cartography - Cultures
of Mapping: Power in Practice. Progress in Human
Geography. 28. Issue No. 3. Pp 381-391; Crampton 2009;
Woods 2010
16. Till, K. E. (2012). Wounded cities: Memory-work and a
place-based ethics of care. Political Geography. Vol 31.
Issue No. 1. Pp, 3-14
17. Crampton (2009) Cartography: Performative,
Participatory, Political. Progress in Human Geography Vol
33. Issue No: 6. Pp 840- 848