Mapping as artistic practice
The seed of LandScaping was planted in 2017 with a practice about Mapping. In that year I was taking part in the BodyWeather training program with some of its developers in Australia, where I began to get sensitive about the communication between body and the environment. BodyWeather is an artistic practice developed during the 1980 ́s by Min Tanaka from a dialogue between landscape and body. For 15 years Tanaka ran, together with his dancers, the Dance Farm in a rural area of Japan, in an experiment of mixing body practices and farming.
During this period in 2017, I was focused on using my experience with BodyWeather to investigate how a social-economic landscape could influence the body and the process of performance making. In this process, the practice of Mapping appeared for the first time as a practice of creating sketches and organizing ideas for myself. One moment I realized that on these sketches I could find the answers that I was looking for:
I started to unfold this practice, developing different strategies and ways of creating mappings: Mapping from the space, from the body, from inside the movement experience, from the relation between my body and spatial architecture, from observating other bodies and from my body in relation to the environment. The drawings and sketches in these Mappings were abstracted representations of these different relations .
Then, I started to use the mappings I had developed as choreographic scores by when I turned to experiencing the movement and physical relations inside them. This practice of Mapping became a key working tool in my artistic practice since I first used it during the creation of the production What Now Where To (2018). It also became the base for the experiment Mapping in Movement, a research project I coordinated in the summer of 2019 with an interdisciplinary group of artists where we explored the idea of Mapping a rural landscape and used the mapping material to generate performative outcomes.
In the beginning of the LandScaping project, the idea was to deepen my investigation about landscapes, using Mapping as working method to understand landscapes as natural or urban sites endowed with a specific political, geographical and social context. How to map landscapes? How to use Mapping to choreograph landscapes, i.e., create choreographic settings that are deeply connected with the experience of being in a specific landscape? How to use the different layers of this landscape as compositional elements?
During the development of the first edition of LandScaping, this practice was transformed. The idea of Mapping remains, but now it is used as one of the working tools that were applied during the on-site investigations in the Brazilian Amazon, becoming an individual form of documenting the practices that are developed during this research phase in my physical encounter with that landscape.
A critical reflection on the coloniality of maps
Through the continuous development of the project, I started to move away from the semantic meaning of the word mapping. The act of mapping, in its historic and political context, is related to territory demarcation and was widely abused in the context of colonization.
When Conquistadores arrived in South America, they “took the absence of written maps as an endorsement of the ‘emptiness‘ of the land, as further evidence of its lack of ’cultivation’. Unmapped land was land unoccupied, and to that extent unpossessed. The uncharted territories that Europeans mapped commonly already had their maps, complex oral maps embedded in genealogy, legend and ideology, and sustained by memory and ritual, which took literal rather than visual form.” - Wystan Curnow - Mapping and the Expanded Field of Contemporary Art
Along the project, the investigation became more and more an effort to decolonize my practice and my position in relation to it. Rather than bringing along a working strategy that was developed in another context and imposing it on the landscapes I visited, the focus shifted to asking myself what I could learn from a landscape - building the practice and goals for the project from the logic and characteristics of the chosen landscape. How do the relationships between human and non-human agents form this landscape? I started to dive into layered memories of this place, of practices of story-telling and passing on traces of pre-colonial wisdom and world vision of the indigenous population while living in the reality of a colonial present.