Moving cartographies

Urban interventions - an artist's book

 

 

The project presented below already poses a paradox: Moving Cartographies of Bogota contains, in its statement itself, what seems to be a contradiction in terms. Legally, cartography is a solid system that aims to fix a place, to stabilize its condition, while the word “moving” tends, on the contrary, to destabilize, to set in motion.

 

Moving cartographies (in plural) of a city (in singular): Bogota.

 

But if a map of Bogota already exists, of what map and of what sort of movement are we talking about? Our interest in learning about and making visible an ordinary practice made by thousands of people who, moved by different circumstances –mainly of a socio-economic order - travel from their place of residence to their workplace within the Capital, launched the questions that generated this project.

 

Who are these walkers traversing the city – in new and unprecedented ways and outside of the established routes - to get to a physical destination? In what context of mobility or un-mobility do citizens turn into city walkers? How do the path and the walking affect the body of the walker?; What -physical, political or symbolic- maps draw their travels?

 

Perhaps the most significant contribution of this research project lies not in verifying a naive hypothesis: there are walkers in the city because there is no access to mobility, but in the creation of a methodological device that is built at the pace of the research, and which appears, in the end, as the actual object of research.

 

The proof of this lays in the way in which this proposal addresses the predicaments of walking, parting from the body experience that the members of the laboratory of creation underwent, through developing a methodology of the “trans-urbanity” inside the city and of the very act of walking.

 

Walking understood as an aesthetic action, a way of thinking and a critical lens through which to look at the city and its landscape.

Rolf Abderhalden