COUNTER/CARTOGRAPHIES

counter/cartographies is a project initiated in collaboration with U.K. based collective c.cred. By sending out an email asking people to reply giving us some basic information regarding their working practice and to, in their turn, forward it to other potential participants, we seek to make a map of artists, activists, collaborative frameworks, groups and collectives who are working with different notions or ideas of resistance and social engagement. We also seek to outline the different tactics, strategies and approaches being employed. The information we receive, and the way the email does or does not spread into wider and wider networks, will then be registered as a set of cartographies, or, better perhaps, counter-cartographies, published on the Internet. Hopefully, it will be a pragmatic project, a project that can be used as a beginning and a potentiality, a resource for some and the starting point for forming new networks for others. But it will also be a project that constantly confronts its limits; that is, the point where this email is no longer forwarded and the social, political and cartographical implications of that limit, as well as the point where the email is forwarded to such extent that its cartography encompasses too wide a difference, where the political and ethical agenda is dissolved, corrupted, or abused.

if you have questions, please write to cartography@16beavergroup.org
if you would like to participate, please read the details below:

Contents:
1. Invitation
2. Details
3. Links

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1. Invitation

Counter/Cartographies is a simple and essential project.  You are invited to participate with us.

We seek to make a map of artists, activists, collaborative frameworks, groups and collectives who are working with different notions or ideas of resistance and social engagement. Although many of us already operate within and in relation to a series of networks and alliances, our goal here is to use simple e-mail and forward technology to converge these networks into a wider set of alliances. We also seek to outline the different tactics, strategies and approaches being employed. This map will in turn serve as a resource for some and the beginning for forming new networks for others.

What is required of you is quite simple:

1. Please send us an e-mail. Include in this e-mail
a. a brief or lengthy description of your group, collective or, if appropriate, individual working practice
b. your location(s)
c. any contact info
d. the group, collective, individual who forwarded this email to you
e. a photo of your location (if you are not able to provide a photo at this time, please submit all other information and send us the photo as soon as possible).

2. Forward this invitation to friends and associates, groups, collectives or organizations you think may be interested in contributing.

3. If the e-mail has been forwarded to you, please indicate who you received it from.
(Please, indicate if any of the info is not intended to be publicly available on the web.)

please send e-mails to:
cartography@16beavergroup.org



___________________________________________
2. Details

COUNTER/CARTOGRAPHIES


Cartography: (early 19th Century), from Fr. cartographie, from Gk. khartes layer of papyrus and graphein to write, to draw.

If two come together and unite their strength, they have jointly more power, and consequently more right over nature than both of them separately, and the more there are that have so joined in alliance, the more right they will collectively possess.
(Benedictus de Spinoza)



Confronting expanding, global capitalist systems of repression within the framework of a dominant imperial-capitalist cartography – seen here as a way of understanding and producing the world in relations between territory to territory, and territory to monochrome surface; or between localities, and localities and globality – it becomes imperative for movements of political resistance and dissent to try to think through some of the most pertinent issues to do with counter/cartography, the condition and possibility of a different ‘mapping’- than the one presented to us by the global capitalist machinery, a different way of understanding and producing the world along with the social and political territorialities that are inscribed upon its surface.
 
However, often political resistance comes in the form and shape of something supposedly anti-global, which is an unfortunate term, since what resistance must be about, in order to avoid a regression to traditional proto-fascistic territorialities such as the local, the known, established territory, affiliation, identity, home, is to posit a different relationship between the local and the global, a relationship that displaces these difficult notions of locality against the global, and instead promotes a more productive mode of political and ethico-aesthetic experimentation: traveling, exile, lines traversing known territory and established binaries, alliances crossing traditional boundaries of various kinds. This will perhaps provide us with certain possibilities when it comes to the constitution of some kind of movement that can seek to be productively against the status quo, against the war(s), against racism, imperialism, fascism and capitalism, against apartheid and genocide, in all forms and cases rather than merely the most obvious ones; that is, it may provide us with significant possibilities for the affirmative production of other movements, counter-cartographies. This often involves two distinct, but interlinked movements: One being a movement of resistance, resisting and opposing that which is bad; the other being what one might refer to as a Utopian movement, a movement towards the affirmation and creation of alternatives to the dominant order.

We are interested in questions to do with the conditions, possibilities and indeed limits of this conception of counter-cartography. In order for any kind of cartographical production to take place, one must traverse and connect the character and specificity of a diverse range of localities and different territories, and then make alliances that traverse the field of discrepancy and difference that will without doubt present itself between these individual localities. It is easy, perhaps, to be against capitalism, to put differences and discrepancies aside in trying to oppose and resist capitalist repression and exploitation. However, in order for a movement of resistance and dissent to productively present alternatives to global capitalism, racism and fascism, alliances must be made on a transversal level that, in Spinoza’s sense above, increase our collective power and ethical right and capability not only to resist and be against repression and exploitation, but to form, shape and construct alternatives to the dominant order, and thus to really bridge discrepancies and differences between compatible and incompatible Utopias, projects, agendas, manifestoes, strategies, tactics and practices.

This current project is to be seen as somewhat a test of these conditions, possibilities and limits; an attempt towards a technology of counter/cartographies. It is an attempt towards a pragmatic project, a project that can be used as a resource, a beginning and a potentiality. But it is also a project that constantly confronts its limits; that is, the point where this email is no longer forwarded and the social, political and cartographical implications of that limit, as well as the point where the email is forwarded to such extent that the cartography encompasses too wide a difference, where the political and ethical agenda is dissolved, corrupted, or abused. What we set out to do is to try the capability of a group of people - such as ourselves in our collective enterprise - to use very basic communication technology in order to create a wider network of alliances and so to construct a different cartography, a kind of counter-cartography, by connecting different locations, agendas, manifestoes and Utopias - these micro-maps functioning at the level of locality - and plugging them into this larger counter-cartography. By doing this we seek to engage with the way in which this email spreads and connects into networks that function both as a possibility and a limit to alliance as an ethico-political figure. Furthermore, we are interested in how this network bridges discrepancies and differences between people, collectives, organizations and groups active in different locations and with different agendas and manifestoes; how it creates a different – possibly Utopian – graphic or map of affirmations that exceed the level of locality and similarity, to incorporate a sense of difference into its very terrain. However, we are also interested in the more affirmative, future dimension of this project; how this counter-cartography can, if successful, provide a reference of contacts creating possibilities for new alliances and networks, future counter-cartographies, outside of the immediate framework of this project.

And so we are now sending this email to friends, associates, organizations we have encountered, people whose work we know and people who work in the same area as we, asking you to contribute simply by sending us an email, including the following information: a description of your group, collective, organization and working practice; the details of your location; any contact info; a photograph of your location or that is indicative of any particular aspect of your location or your relationship to it; and then to, in your turn, forward this invitation to your friends and associates, groups, collectives and organizations you think may be interested in contributing. The replies will then be registered as a set of different cartographies focusing on different aspects of the project which will be published on the Internet and screened at various occasions, including an initial event in January 2003 at the exhibition Inscribing the Temporal, Exnergasse Kunsthalle, Vienna.

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