Mapping Intimate Geographies of Grief and Loss

Abstract

Cartography has been pivotal in making visible the number of people who die in the context of migration. In this article, the author explores the potential of mapping to study and develop another dimension of the geography of death within exile: the more intimate dimensions of post-mortem geographies as experienced by those who survive a loved one. Inspired by Avril Maddrell’s call for developing new cartographic representations to share difficult emotions and memories associated with death, the author mobilized two alternative mapping practices—inductive visualization and sensibility mapping—to chart the emotional and intimate geographies embedded in the stories of two migrants who lost a close friend with whom they lived while in exile. The mapping process that led the author to represent these intimate post-mortem geographies brought me to reflect on the importance of developing alternative cartographic forms of expression that focus on the experiential and the emotional, rather than on the factual and the measurable. By steering this cartographic shift away from the fact of death as the end of a journey to death as a lingering event in the life of those who survive, the author proposes a cartography of grief and mourning that aims to contribute to individual and collective remembering.