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A Call to Mapmakers

February 8, 2008

My good friend and comrade Daniel Tucker in Chicago just sent this over. If you are working on any sort of map projects, get in touch with him!
 

Dear Mapmakers,
This is an invitation to have your maps included in the new “We Are Here” archive that will travel the United States for 2 years (starting Fall 2008) in an exhibition entitled “Experimental Geography” and then be housed in a portable archive in Chicago IL to be available for future exhibition, preservation and research. The archive is dealing with 3 main categories of contemporary cartography: Complexity/Power Mapping; Resource/Asset Mapping; and Alternative Visions of Dominant Geography (see below outline of the kinds of maps we are thinking about).
 
I have been asked by the organizers of “Experimental Geography” to put together this archive because of my background in organizing mapping related exhibitions and events in Chicago for the last 4 years. This is a great opportunity to get a lot of really interesting and inspiring work together! I should also say up front that I am not being paid to do this and am receiving no budget to work with, only $400 to purchase a poster display rack to preserve the maps. The cost of shipping the collection once it is complete will be covered by the host institutions, but I have no budget for your initial shipping costs to mail the maps to me. I am hoping your motivation for sending your work to me will be the same as mine for putting this together, to get new and excited audiences to have access to this interesting and inspiring work. The show will tour primarily to university galleries and small museums, almost always engaging audiences who are not in attendance at small galleries or cultural institutions where this kind of work is typically displayed. The benefit of having it as part of a larger exhibition about the use of geographic metaphors in contemporary art will also connect this cartographic work to conceptually related work from other genres and spheres of influence.
 
The maps (40 total) will be displayed in a wall mounted poster rack which will keep them from damage over the 2 year tour organized by Independent Curators International and the exhibition curator Nato Thompson. Here is a link to the display case we will use. Because of the size constraints of the display case, the maps must be smaller than 25”W x 37”H.
 
If you are interested in participating please send a web compressed image (.gif, .pdf or .jpg) to mapsarchive@gmail.com with a short description of your map. Do this by March 1st, 2008 to be considered for this archive. The inclusion in this archive will not be based on an arbitrary nor subjective determination of ‘quality’ but will be carefully considered in relationship to the rest of the maps in the archive in order to ensure aesthetic and conceptual diversity in the overall collection of 40 maps. If your map is selected then it will need to be mailed directly to me at a later date.
 
Thanks for being open to participating.
 
in cahoots and many thanks
Daniel

 
More information is available here.

Subjects
Culture & Media

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