What is a map? As found in dictionaries: a) a diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads, etc., and b) a person’s face. So, in other words, a drawing that aids recognition. What could be a map, then?
Whenever I think of a map, I imagine delimited territories. Erratic lines made with certain precision and scale to help us locate things in a particular order. Nevertheless, when I reflect upon what a territory means, it is much more complex than just referring to a geographic amount of land and sea. In that matter, I think more of a geopolitical construct on which our identities are based and designed. So mapping is not just about establishing boundary lines, most importantly it might be about realizing how we organize certain elements and which places they occupy or inhabit in the map we are designing.
This takes me to my practice and how it holds a certain positionality I carry with me in my processes and methods. I guess I’d have to start off with trying to explain how the natural rhythm of my practice is. I feel it like the lines on my hand: random, unique, at moments clear, at times foggy. But also, I link it to the lines shaped by mountain chains, like the ones shaped by the Andes that cross all our South American territory. So, I like to see my work moving across people, then communities, so across my city and Peru, and hopefully more regions too. In this way, my boundary lines are rather flexible, like rubber bands, drawn with a tremor in my hands, a voluntary shaking that lets that line live. Maybe that’s why my practice is about dealing with complex thresholds such as individual or collective trauma: because the lines drawn by this kind of narrative are intense, powerful and vital, as well as part of our shared stories as Latin Americans and Peruvians.
So, trembling lines are erratic lines: imprecise yet alive. Like the life line present in our hands, according to chiromancy, but also like the silhouette shaped by mountains. Now, maps also lead me to imagine geographical accidents, again, like mountains. It’s funny to me to think how these geological formations are considered, in technical terms, “accidents”, because then it’s funny to think how “accidents” can be located in a drawn or designed surface like a map, which is definitely a planned representation of the place where our practices happen. This leads me to keep wondering how my practice is not something I’ve chosen, but something I’ve responded with, almost by accident, to a specific context. On that matter, what aspects of our practice are shaped by the accidents present, found or lived in our territories? How much of a practice was an impulse, nowadays, shaped into an affective and artistic methodology? While I keep unveiling challenging questions, I do feel and know my practice seeks that same quality of the unplanned, the emergent, the boundary that is not a wall but a massive, historical and beautiful fact: storytelling is an ancient practice of longing to reencounter with oneself and our tribes, in acceptance, in love, in curiosity, in desires to be and do better.
This leads me to question the very act of making. What acts of translation might I be performing when exercising my practice? What happens when we read a book or make a zine? Therefore, what is happening with the reading experiences in my community, the people who surround me (and not), whether they make zines, read them, or don’t? What kinds of acts of translation, of intermodality, of transpositionality, take place in this practice of the book arts? Thinking about this map assignment is opening up reflections surrounding the idea of how I can identify the ecologies of the book in my community: the intimate circuits of its movement, its quiet distribution, its collaborative creation, its hands-on production and its difficulties or absences. And in between it all, how do I feel, think and act on it? What’s my positionality towards a local book arts context?
It is here, in this tangible, accidental geography of paper and ink, that I find a system of references that can hold me. The zine, the photobook, the artist’s book, among others, they are not final territories but ranges to be traversed. They are where I can most honestly ask: What acts of translation sustain our authenticities? What tremulous, hand-drawn limits allow us to be, in and outside their margins?
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