The spaces of ‘Deep Mapping’: A partial account

Abstract

This article sets out an understanding of the emergent practices collectively referred to as ‘deep mapping’. It adopts Mike Pearson’s view that the optimal deep mapping takes ‘region as its optic’ (2006), while also recognizing the value of smaller-scale approaches. It draws on Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism to underpin deep mapping’s environmental and social dimensions and provide a productive counterpoint to its ethno-autographic element and its focus on a ‘militant particularism’ able to facilitate ‘the passage from memory to hope, from past to future’ (Harvey 1996). Critical Regionalism is taken here as a ‘post-disciplinary’ poetics that interweaves a multiplicity of ‘creative’ and ‘scientific’ material to enact, in the socio-geographical domain, John Wylie’s understanding that ‘landscape is tension’ (2007). Deep mapping is presented as offering a multidimensional understanding of place that enacts these tensions through our engagement with a second, specifically cultural, space-between, understood here as a metaxy. It is only in this space that we are able to put into practice Geraldine Finn’s insight that, while we cannot do without categorical thinking, ‘we are always both more and less than the categories that name and divide us’ (1996). The argument put forward here locates this active social space between the institutional worlds of art and of the university as that with which deep mapping specifically engages as a discrete practice. It posits that an ‘open’ deep mapping draws on the resources ‘managed’ by each institutional world so as to maintain a critical solicitude towards both professional worlds while remaining non-aligned with the presuppositions of either.

Going Deeper or Flatter: Connecting Deep Mapping, Flat Ontologies and the Democratizing of Knowledge

“…undertakes as co-artistic director of the highly successful physical theatre company Marrugeku 6 . Her group utilises contemporary dance, circus skills, installation, video art as well as traditional and contemporary music in large-scale indoor and outdoor productions.…”

“…These proposed tenets of McLucas [10,11] adopted by Swain are useful in furthering my argument for both the performative nature of deep mapping--notably in the sense that it invokes a carrying out of something, as well as according to prescribed ritual--and in relation to how it functions as a democratisation of knowledge by exposing hierarchies. 6 Marrugeku's work, which they explain as being a "process-driven, intercultural performance practice" [15] received far-reaching exposure in national and international arts festivals and has had a significant impact in raising awareness of Indigenous culture. Productions are created through long-term collaborations with artists from remote and urban locations, through international collaborations and in dialogue with Indigenous cultural custodians.…”

Anticipating Deep Mapping: Tracing the Spatial Practice of Tim Robinson

“…The early work of Tim Robinson that this article discusses took place largely before the (practice-led) theorisation of "deep mapping" by figures in Europe such as Ian Biggs [9,10] Pearson, Clifford McLucas, and Michael Shanks [11]. It even precedes the moment when the idea of it was called forth from the work of Wallace Stegner by William Least Heat-Moon [12] in the American tradition.…”

“…Nonetheless, the way that deep mapping, in the UK especially, has formulated itself in practice does suggest a reflection on the curious historical relationship between it and Robinson's work. Not least of all because, for Ian Biggs in particular, Robinson is singled out as a figure who "anticipates" deep mapping, part of a thread that Biggs traces back through John Cowper Powys to Thoreau ( [10], p. 11). Reading Robinson's work holistically as "deep mapping" rather than just as writing also encourages us to draw attention to aspects of the work that have involved a wider, committed social engagement, the germ of which emerges from certain tensions that were there in his early artistic practice.…”

The Quarry as Sculpture: The Place of Making

“…If I perform a 'deep mapping' (Biggs, 2011) -a multisensual, multi-disciplinary and multi-durational investigation of place, people or objects -I see that all material narratives return to a geological source or influence. Within this kind of expansive frame of reference, granite's enrolment in cultural projects, such as headstone, sill, trough or cladding seems radically ephemeral, a brief stop on a much longer passage through time.…”