Every Bus Stop a Tomb: Decolonial Cartographic Readings against Literary, Visual, and Virtual Colonial Claims to Space

Abstract

This article offers a decolonial reading of digital counter-mapping processes through an engagement with settler artist Sylvia Borda’s art installation, “Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC.” By putting the theories of Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin into conversation with the research and insights of Indigenous feminist theorists Audra Simpson and Mishuana Goeman, I examine how counter-mapping efforts may contribute to and normalize the (settler) colonization of everyday life. I analyze Borda’s cartographic art project in order to illuminate the dispersal and (dis)placement of peoples in and across (virtual) urban spaces and examine how the experiences of these population distributions contribute to resistive artistic projects, and simultaneously how these art installations can reproduce settler colonial erasures, with Borda’s installation being an illustrative example. Using Borda’s text as a representative case, I advocate for the cultivation of a decolonial sensibility when engaging with digital cartography.