Co-facilitated with dancer and educator Vanessa Vargas at Pioneer Works, 2017
Our bodies help us recognize, understand, navigate, and even create the urban space: the blue dot in Google Maps, traces of bodies in space that provide us with clues for our own movement, metaphors we use to talk about the city and its systems, and even measurement units. At the same time, cities can have a particularly interesting effect in bodies’ self-awareness and their interactions with the environment, other bodies, and themselves: think sidewalks, elevators, benches in public spaces, but also workspaces, supermarkets, and spaces for prayer and meditation.
How can using our bodies as mapping tools transform our knowledge and experience? And what if we look at our bodies as territories? In this workshop, we use cartography as a framework to explore corporeal and social practices in the urban space.
The workshop begins by creating a shared understanding of what maps, bodies, and territories are and can be in the context of our workshop. Then, through a series of guided exercises that include listening, walking, moving and talking, participants explore how their bodies can serve as cartographic tools; helping them orient in, recognize, make sense of, and produce space.