Map Art and Popular Geopolitics: Mapping Borders Between Colombia and Venezuela

Abstract

This paper discusses whether the maps made by visual artists and media designers can be a form of counter-mapping, communicating narratives that may blur how state borders are currently defined. Maps and artworks have inseparable histories and many studies have been carried out in order to explore the role of cartography in the construction of national imaginations. If official maps published in atlases and textbooks are still limited to national territories, artistic maps became an important source of information about shared identities and cross-border activities. Taking as a case study maps made in a collaborative art project betweenColombia and Venezuela and maps published in the Colombian mainstream press, the paper identified contradictory narratives, which can simultaneously dissolve and reinforce international borders. Starting with the analysis of images created in a very particular context, this paper seeks to contribute to ongoing debates regarding the relations between map art and popular geopolitics.

The aesthetic turn in border studies: Visual geographies of power, contestation and subversion

“…Drawing inspiration from counter‐mapping and other critical methods approaching instead “[m]aps as resistance” against state‐framed cartographies of in/visibility (Crampton & Kryeger, 2005, p. 25), border scholars have also investigated counter‐hegemonic dynamics silenced by dominant cartographic narratives. Some scholars have engaged with counter‐mappings of international migration (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy, 2020) or by analyzing borders in maps produced by scholars of geography and geopolitics (Boria, 2015) or visual artists (Novaes, 2015), while others have instead investigated bordering through participatory digital methods and GIS. For instance, Kwan and Ding (2008) charted on space‐time cubes the life paths and autobiographical data of Muslim women to study the everyday, gendered effects of bordering processes that emerged in the U.S. after 9/11, while Buckle (2020) investigated bordering by mapping migrants' journeys on Google Maps.…”

Reimagining the national map

“…Inspired by Melilli’s video performance and by the many other cartographic disturbances of the national map emerging in visual arts (e.g. Novaes, 2015), especially through a postcolonial lens, with cartographic ContamiNations , we are not claiming a naive move towards an assimilationist, creative cartography of inclusion in which a centre embraces what is different. Instead, we refer to a centre that needs to be transformed by the very practice of contamination (Narayan and Harding, 2000; Tsing, 2012).…”

La política de fronteras de Colombia ante las nuevas amenazas de seguridad y defensa

“…Para el 2013, en consecuencia, la frontera es un territorio dinamizado por un poder criminal hostil y beligerante. Sin duda, el crimen organizado, el narcotráfico, el terrorismo, la comercialización ilegal de armas, la ingobernabilidad, la pérdida de la institucionalidad venezolana, la inseguridad energética y nuevas fuentes de conflictividad -como los recursos naturales y el medioambiente- (Cavelty & Balzacq, 2016) perturban la tranquilidad de las personas y afectan el desarrollo económico y social de la población civil fronteriza, todo lo cual genera inestabilidad y desequilibrio regional, en especial, en la periferia nororiental de Colombia 3 (Novaes, 2015).…”