This past weekend, I attended a symposium, called Cartographic Exploits  at the Centre for Digital Media, organized in conjunction with the PUSH Festival. During the moderated panel discussion which followed artists’ presentations, I thought I would engage in some mapping of  spaces.  The little drawing here marks a rough plan of the seating, the dots and rectangles mark moments of speaking and the dotted lines trace the movement of people during a half-hour of the discussion.

We encountered some exceedingly interesting artists there doing extraordinary work – like the French duo from Project in Situ, who created an intimate theatre piece where participants were invited to re-examine their relationship to the city while touring blindfolded and with the aid of a guide – three guides in fact: an artist, a visually handicapped person and a dancer.  What came to mind immediately was the vulnerability, the need for trust between the blindfolded traveller and the guide  and the subsequent new relationship which developed as a consequence of these “unequal” pairings.  Another fantastic artist – a traveller, a wanderer, who presented at the symposium was Volker Gerling whose poetic photographic flip-book portraits of people encountered during his travels were captivating to see.