Cartographies of the Future: Julie Mehretu's Dynamic Charting of Fluid Spaces

Abstract

If maps make meaning by locating us as agents in the world, the dynamic cartographies by the Ethiopian-American painter Julie Mehretu suggest the extent to which the modern project has given way to fragmented social identities and thus to new kinds of spatial awareness. Such excentric space is shot through with other spaces functioning in relation to and interaction with other spaces. In addition, these new spaces both produce and are produced by our active and continuous interchanges with sophisticated technologies in real time and virtual time, which themselves constitute spaces that are unbounded, heterogeneous and fluid, making spatial orientation indeterminate and jagged, ruled by chance and contingency. How can such territories be mapped? What do these cartographies of the future tell us about our present technosocial world? What relationship between the map and its territory do they suggest? That is what this contribution discusses by examining Mehretu's high-velocity urban charts which not only embody these indeterminate, jagged and indeed chaotic facets of spatial orientation and situatedness. Despite their bleakness and the uncertain future emerging from these hybrid fragmented maps, the stor(ies) they tell suggest poetic ways for agents to create new sensibilities and sensualities that do not rely on consumerism or consumption but evoke the potential for collective action and social change.