A World Map: In Which We See…

“A World Map: In Which We See…” charts the production of “statelessness” by following the figures of the “prisoner” and the “refugee.” Both denied meaningful access to participation in democratic space and practice, while protected by rights that no one is typically willing to enforce, the map traces these figures through landscapes of contemporary globalization, as they are conceptualized by multiple discourses and disciplines, including political philosophy, sociology, history, economics. The project evolved from an effort to think the terms of the U.S. anti-prison movement alongside those of the anti-globalization movement, feeling that while they were often addressing the same political, economic and social forces, the movements were not speaking to one another, defining the “object” of their critique so differently. In each installation the map was drawn uniquely for its context, while employing different methods for situating it into the conversation of that local space. This included interviewing people addressing criminalization and/or migration in each city, building the World Map’s Video Archive, which includes interviews by Rosie Braidoti, Rustom Barucha, Nils Christie, Leonardo Vilchis, and others. The second way of building dialogue around the World Map in each context was to build a workshop in which local activists, artists and others were invited to help with the drawing of the map, with different steps for engaging its ideas and asking how they relate to that local context. This included inviting the participants to become dossents for the work during the run of the exhibition who could offer viewers both their take on the map and the issues from the map that are locally relevant to them, offering them a platform for their own work. The most recent version of this workshop resulted in the creation of a collaborative response to the Map itself, which was then exhibited alongside the Map during the exhibition, “The Global Contemporary,” at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.