Perform the Map: Using Map-Score Experiences to Write and Reenact Places

Abstract

In this article, we aim to show the implementation of a kind of mapping that combines spatial experience, sensitive cartography, and choreographic scores. We explore this approach through an experiment led in the city of Washington, DC, in and around the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Memorial, in July 2017. Showing how research and creation can support each other, such an experiment locates the map in the sensory and emotional side of cartographic practices, which leads us to reconsider how the spatialized and temporalized language of an experience might be reconstructed with drawings and writings. In other words, the map-score methodology allows us to observe how the experience of a place may be recorded during fieldwork (memory, drawings, notebooks) to create an archive that extends and enhances our knowledge of sensory perceptions, emotions, and points of view. This kind of experiment allows another regime of reflective cartographic practice, one that reconsiders its spatial and temporal dimensions and its modes of creation.

Mapping Landscape Spaces

“…In addition to these map-like figures, spatial information also can be converted into abstract, symbolic, or metaphorical modes. With graphic scores and choreographic language, Lawrence and Anna Halprin associate phenomenological experience with environmental awareness to display sensory perceptions, emotions, and intuitive behaviours through space (Haplrin, 1970;Hirsch, 2008;Wasserman, 2012;Meyer, 2016;Olmedo & Christmann, 2018). Furthermore, in the book The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin (1987) introduces Aboriginal Australians use songs, as the indigenous memory code, to record the journeys of their ancestors across Australia and communicate the territories with each other.…”