Participation cartography: blurring the boundaries of space, autobiography, and memory by means of performance

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the empowering potential of a participatory practice that frames walking as integral to a performative, self-mapping, and aesthetic process. By discussing my experience as a participant in Ere Be Dragons (2007), a work by the artists collective Active Ingredient (Rachel Jacobs and Matt Watkins), I set out some new concepts for thinking through practices which blur the boundaries between autobiographical, site-specific, walking, and cartographic performance art. In particular, I suggest that in these works it is the subject-who-takes-part who has been mapped, not space. It is my argument that maps, as conventionally understood representations of space, are not what account for the self-mapping enabling agency of this practice. I argue further that the artists that I discuss here do not have a mechanism for participants to share reflections about their participation experience embedded in the framework they provide and that this is a central problem as the lack of such a mechanism may shatter the self-mapping agency of this practice. It is through the act of sharing the spatial autobiographical narratives that result out of the participation process that the participants may be enabled to position and map the self; it is this self-positioning enabling agency that, in my view, accounts for the empowering potential of this practice.