MAPPING OTHERWISE
Posthuman Body-Space Mapping

Year 2022
Location Beşiktaş, Istanbul
Context AURA Istanbul Research Certificate Program
Duration March–June 2022
Type Individual research and mapping project
Role Research, conceptual development, mapping, visualisation

Mapping Otherwise explores how the city can be mapped beyond a fixed, human-centred point of view. The project questions the separation between subject and object and examines the relationships between bodies, space, everyday routines and urban power structures. Portfolio_Hilal Bozkurt Keskin

Rather than treating mapping only as a tool of representation, the project uses it as an experimental method for recording subjective experience, multiple perspectives, movements, sensations and encounters. Each new observation, story and piece of information becomes part of an expanding relational network. Portfolio_Hilal Bozkurt Keskin

The final map is constructed on a 60 × 60 cm surface that can be cut, folded and recombined, allowing different spatial relationships and narratives to emerge through its changing configuration.

The Anthropocene period and its ecological, physical, and spatial effects on cities start with the concept of “human”. Human, Anthropos. Rosi Braidotti, in her book “Post-Human,” writes, “When did we separate ourselves as a species? Am I human? Were blacks, Jews, gays, or trans people human? Since when did man become an all-encompassing concept?”. (1) With his post-human studies, the concept of human-defined in terms of the western-centered white male comes into question, and a new awareness develops that humans can only “exist” in interactive relationships with other species. What kind of cartographies do cities offer us when their subject is post-human?

The project named Mapping Otherwise takes Beşiktaş as a context. He deconstructs the concept of “human” as city subjects and pursues the relationality between the subject and the object. It accepts the body between subject and object and offers a critique of the dualistic structure of the coded Cartesian logic on bodies. The mappings produced cannot be a representation of the city, body, and things, but they try to go beyond representation. These mapping experiments are a process for understanding the functioning of the city and the coded power relations related to the body and opening this up to criticism. For this reason, the mappings produced are far from the final product. They pursue new questions and make these questions multiple.

Full Research Paper

Mapping Otherwise
Post-Human Body-Space Mappings of Beşiktaş

Keywords: post-human, body, urban space, relationalities, performative becoming, non-representational theories, mapping.

Preview

The Anthropocene period and its ecological, physical, and spatial effects on cities start with the concept of “human”. Human, Anthropos. Rosi Braidotti, in her book “Post-Human,” writes, “When did we separate ourselves as a species? Am I human? Were blacks, Jews, gays, or trans people human? Since when did man become an all-encompassing concept?”. (1) With his post-human studies, the concept of human-defined in terms of the western-centered white male comes into question, and a new awareness develops that humans can only “exist” in interactive relationships with other species. What kind of cartographies do cities offer us when their subject is post-human?

The project named Mapping Otherwise takes Beşiktaş as a context. He deconstructs the concept of “human” as city subjects and pursues the relationality between the subject and the object. It accepts the body between subject and object and offers a critique of the dualistic structure of the coded Cartesian logic on bodies. The mappings produced cannot be a representation of the city, body, and things, but they try to go beyond representation. These mapping experiments are a process for understanding the functioning of the city and the coded power relations related to the body and opening this up to criticism. For this reason, the mappings produced are far from the final product. They pursue new questions and make these questions multiple.

Mapping Otherwise

Today, with the development of technology and its integration into our daily lives, we often use maps to find a place in metropolises and get the fastest directions. Maps have been accepted as a “rational” information tool for centuries and offer an essential representation of the city and architecture.

Thus, maps can be thought of as a tool that claims the place, looks from a single point, and selectively presents precise information about the place. However, a map can produce much more than that. They can be seen as an act of understanding and expressing the relationships we establish with the place, going beyond representation. More than a didactic and informative map, Mapping Otherwise is a production process that allows for to addition of subjective experience, establishes the production methodology through multiple perspectives, observes the flows and routines of different actors, and tries to go beyond the standard body-space boundaries and their representation on maps.

During the mapping process, the sensory and physical limits to which the body is exposed were questioned, the given information of the given maps was changed speculatively, and new relationalities were pursued in the urban space to construct new narratives. Mapping Otherwise criticizes the understanding that the city is accepted as an object and the map’s creator as a subject. Urban objects, urban trees, animals, and bodies outside the standard accepted codes are produced differently on the mappings in a dynamic way by forming a network structure, and each new emotion, information, story, and imagination are layered by overlapping.

Mapping Otherwise takes place on an ample space measuring 60 cm x 60 cm, but it is cut and folded in various ways, allowing each piece to be read as a stand-alone and to establish different relationships with multiple combinations of pieces that come together in different ways.

Beyond Representation: Mapping

i.Mapping and Critique

Authorities have long used maps as a means of asserting power and ground. Maps generate embedded information and present this information in a single-layered, single-view section. Human-centric understanding chooses the information, narrative, experience, and history of the place to exclude or not to exclude. Mapping Otherwise means not only changing the map production mechanism but also critically looking at the information produced by the map.

Multiple Perspectives of a Mapping Otherwise

Bird’s-eye maps of cities are beyond the boundaries of the body existing in the city. While walking in the city, despite the dynamic and fluid state, bird’s-eye maps convey the place in a static and stable state. Mapping Otherwise thinks and produces the mapping of Beşiktaş with the movements of the bodies. The relationship with the sea, the dynamic structure of the square in constant flux, and the impenetrable signs begin to produce the map. Thus, the spatial information of the existing map, which is produced in two dimensions by changing the line thickness, begins to deteriorate, and a layered mapping that is constantly reproduced takes its place. Thus, instead of reproducing the physical and symbolic boundaries of hegemony, other information about the place is produced from within the city through multiple perspectives.

ii. As Something Within Relation: The City

Spatial boundaries exist symbolically and physically to delineate hegemonic normativity and differentiate different groups bound by hierarchical relationships. (3) Bodies can challenge, change, and re-establish hierarchies of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and age borders. Likewise, bodies are the place to enforce, maintain
With the questioning of the definition of the body through dualities, the blurring of the boundaries that exist in contrasts with the city and nature. It means that the boundaries of the city physically begin to be embodied.The idea of the embodiment of the city, which Elizabeth Grozs put forward regarding Deleuze’s philosophy, is nourished by the deterioration of the interior/exterior duality in the urban space and the change in the definitions of privacy and private space of the body. This fluidity between the body and the city makes it impossible to think with dualities such as mind/body, inside/outside of the body, experience/social environment, subject/object and self/other, and subject the body and the city to a simultaneous formation and deterritorialization. (4)We stand in the post-human era, a place that accepts the body between subject and objects instead of boundaries and definitions and seeks meaning through relationships. Seeking multiple glimpses of the boundaries of space becomes a tool for contemplating these relationalities.

As a Bodily and Spatial Performance: Sitting on/in/with the Street

The performative concept of the body in the post-human period means that the dual concepts of the body are destroyed. Judith Butler explains gender through the performative structure of the body. According to Butler, the body is controlled by power through boundaries, norms, and choices. It is the performance of heterosexual cultural codes and the meanings and behaviors attributed to it by the power. Thus, if the body can be shaped on a structure, it can be reshaped and reshaped at its own will. Being performative can define multiple bodies with variable boundaries instead of carrying a single identity and belonging to a single ethnic origin. In this case, the “being-human” state is also disabled. (5) Mapping Otherwise considers sitting on the street as a bodily and spatial performance. There are many ways to sit on the street to create a “place” of oneself. These situations blur the lines between private and public. It can create temporary/permanent spaces for different needs or reasons for the elderly, women, fat, and young bodies. These created spaces add new invisible borders to the existing border lines.

iii. Kinships and Companion Species

Braidotti and Harraway have brought expansions to the concept of the post-human body, whose boundaries have become blurred through hybridity. Donna Haraway’s cyborg body unfolding displaces anthropocentrism in favor of robotic, non-human, post-human, bio-centered equality and relationality. (6) Therefore, Harraway calls this new association “kinship.” The relationship to be established not only with humans but also with non-human actors includes animals, plants, cells, and bacteria, that is, all the relationships that can be established in the world. It opens up human/machine, nature/culture, male/female, and other oppositions into discussion and thus displaces the concept of human.

iv. Creating New Narratives about Space, Looking to the Future of the Present

While the linear time narrative describes the sequential accumulation of time, this understanding has left its place in the heterogeneous cyclical movement of time. We also allow multiple future possibilities if we think of time as duration. Thus, the way the future is built can likewise change. Maps can look into the future of the present rather than being a mere representation of the future or a record of the past.(7)

Where time is thought of as duration, space shapes the memories of the actors from the past and their hopes for the future. Mappings, on the other hand, can describe collective occurrences where these individual time cycles come together.

“You walk behind a wall in the city for a long time; the wall is five times bigger than you. What’s behind the wall?”

The fact that the mapping process is collective means that it is constantly changing. In the Mapping Otherwise, if someone who was walking from Beşiktaş square to Ağaçlı Yol had not looked at a conventional Beşiktaş map, would he have known the size and plan of the Dolmabahçe Palace behind this five stories high wall, and even the border of the sea next to it? The collage, which was produced with the question “What is behind the wall?” asked by different people during the mapping process, was speculatively added to the place where Dolmabahçe Palace was on the map. In the answers received, the memories, dreams, and questions of the collective consciousness about the inaccessible can be transformed into visuals in different ways according to each person and reproduced on the map over and over. Thus, new narratives about the place are established, can be corrupted, and reconstructed. Everyday life and its transforming cycle with each actor are like this.

Conclusion

Rather than producing a map of urban space, which is a conventional representation of the powerful, Mapping Otherwise, by considering the body with the city, proposes mapping as a different critical spatial practice. By discussing the dual orders of urban space and the body, he reads and produces architecture and urban spaces through processes, flows, movements, intersections, and encounters rather than borders, and static objects. Thus, the mapper’s body multiplies with the mapping.

References

Braidotti, R. (2014). İnsan Sonrası. Kollektif Kitap Yayınevi.
Şenel A. (2014). disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, Volume 23 Mapping. Mapping as Performing Place.
Yardımcı S., Bezmez D. (2014) Yeni İstanbul Çalışmaları: Sınırlar, Mücadeleler, Açılımlar.Normativite Sınırlarında İttifak İmkankarı: Heterotopya olarak Queer ve/veya Sakat Bedenler ve Kamusallığı Beden Üzerinden Okumak. Ayrıntı Yayınevi.
Özçelik B. (2018) Canavar Bedenler, Canavar Mekanlar. İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi.
Butler J. (2016) Cinsiyet Belası: Feminizm ve Kimliğin Altüst Edilmesi. Metis Yayıncılık.
Haraway D. (2006) Siborg Manifestosu. Agora Kitaplığı
Awan N. (2017) Mapping Otherwise. Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice. AADR