This article aims to challenge the widespread consensus that Rio de Janeiro is a divided city by deploying two concepts in critical cartography: cartographic silences and cartographic calculations. As a kind of unconquered territory, a terrae incognitae, favelas were silenced on many of Rio de Janerio's maps over the last century. When these places began to be mapped, and converted to terrae cognitae, power relations often become even more apparent because of the intention to make it legible for purposes of intervention. By analyzing maps published in the mainstream Brazilian press throughout the last century, this article explores how national press often portrays Rio de Janeiro as a city divided between formal neighborhoods, where the state apparatus can ensure the rule of law, and favelas, where parallel politics enforce local forms of governance. In order to disseminate this image of the city, maps can play an important role, locating different urban zones and reinforcing old stereotypes. Despite many studies that focused on both material and embodied forms of state presence within favelas, maps can be an important source of information to understand persistant representations of favelas as excluded and divided places.

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This paper discusses whether the maps made by visual artists and media designers can be a form of counter-mapping, communicating narratives that may blur how state borders are currently defined. Maps and artworks have inseparable histories and many studies have been carried out in order to explore the role of cartography in the construction of national imaginations. If official maps published in atlases and textbooks are still limited to national territories, artistic maps became an important source of information about shared identities and cross-border activities. Taking as a case study maps made in a collaborative art project betweenColombia and Venezuela and maps published in the Colombian mainstream press, the paper identified contradictory narratives, which can simultaneously dissolve and reinforce international borders. Starting with the analysis of images created in a very particular context, this paper seeks to contribute to ongoing debates regarding the relations between map art and popular geopolitics.

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