Artist's Statement

Abstract

The cover for this issue is centered on Guarani territory, in Jaraguá Peak. This work was part of a collaborative effort, indebted to many, as part of the Master of Environmental Design thesis project at Yale School of Architecture, by Laura Pappalardo (a juruá—the term for non-Indigenous, white, in Guarani Mbya—and visitor in Guarani territory, in the region today known as São Paulo). The project was produced on the traditional lands of the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian-speaking peoples, in what is now the state of Connecticut, United States. This work honors the past, present, and future relationships between these nations and their lands.Sectional maps reveal ground change not perceptible in “top-down” maps. Sectional maps unravel how infrastructural impacts keep unfolding over long periods of time and appear in different scales exposing the history of deforestation, ground perforation, and extraction caused by roads, telecommunication towers, and power line construction. Each infrastructural layer served as an instrument for land dispossession and fragmentation, disrupting both human and other-than-human environments.This analysis is incomplete and carries limitations. Maps carry limits of translation, and are not completely accurate. This work questions ideas of “data impartiality” or “data accuracy.” Instead of aiming for accuracy and fixture, this sectional map, which illustrates the cover for this issue, foregrounds contradictory, uncertain, and ever-shifting ground relations.