1 – Venue, dates and places
Wageningen University and Research (WUR)
Building Impulse Stippeneng
2-115 6708 WE Wageningen, The Netherlands
Monday, September 29 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM
Tuesday, September 30 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM
Wednesday, October 1 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM
Contact persons:
Emma van Dalen emma.vandalen at wur.nl
Philippe Rekacewicz philippe.rekacewicz at wur.nl
Mariana Rios Sandoval mariana.riossandoval at wur.nl
2 – Activities and what we would like you to bring
From Monday 29. September, we will be meeting at Wageningen University in the Netherlands to share our cartographic practices, ideas, and creativity.
We will therefore “sense the space,” draw, map, listen, and engage in dialogue in an atmosphere we hope will be friendly and informal. Among the participants, some, coming from French- or Spanish-speaking backgrounds, are not very comfortable with English, which will be our main language of exchange. We therefore count on your kindness and understanding. In any case, we all share a common language: that of cartographic drawing, which should help us a great deal.
Over the course of these two and a half days, theorists and practitioners of alternative cartography—as well as researchers and curious participants—will be invited to:
- Share and discuss concepts, approaches, research fields, and ongoing questions during presentations and roundtable discussions;
- Explore a variety of practices during workshops, where participants will experiment with creating their own sensorial and emotional maps, using tools that blend scientific and artistic approaches.
These exercises will be simple and accessible to all. No prior artistic or cartographic skills are needed—only the desire to listen to oneself and others, to explore, to play, and to share.
Lectures, workshop proceedings and summaries, as well as all the maps produced during the symposium, will be compiled and published (both in print and online).
This symposium/workshop will offer three types of activities over two and a half days:
- Short presentations, during which participants will share methods and ideas, and describe the different aspects of their participatory or creative mapping practices. We place great emphasis on keeping presentations short (15 to 20 minutes maximum) to allow time, on the one hand, for dialogue and exchange, and on the other, for us to take the necessary time to run the workshops, draw, and create;
- Hands-on workshops of 2 to 3 hours, during which we will create sensory maps and illustrations based on data and information collected in the space around the place where we gather, or by exploring our memory;
- Collective discussions around key themes and questions related to the definition and practice of this sensory, emotional mapping, and reflections on the relevance of such practices for the humanities, and perhaps for understanding the world and space in a different way.
About tools and organization:
- Drawing material: We will provide drawing materials: lots of colours, oil pastels, pencils, and gouache, everything you need to create, draw, paste, and cut. But you are also welcome to bring your own drawing supplies, your pencils or pastels, the ones you prefer to use!
- One or two publications: eventually, over the past few years of organizing these workshops, we have established a tradition: we ask participants to bring one or two publications on cartography,— books, atlases or journal that deal with maps — to help create what we call a “temporary (or ephemeral) library” (since it lasts only two and a half days). The books will be displayed on a table in the room so that everyone can consult and browse through them, and discuss about them. Don’t forget to write your name and email address on the inside page!
- The militant manual by Cian Dayrit: Cian Dayrit is an artist from the Philippines who, unfortunately, will not be able to attend in person, but has agreed to give a presentation via videoconference to talk about his experiences with activist workshops (Militant Mapping, in which cognitive mapping prompts are used to explore and address inequality, conflict, and resistance). Cian Dayrit asks that you download his “activist manual”
- You may consult beforehand the “Embodied Ecologies training series, short videos presenting the project “Embodied Ecologies” and giving a context in “sensory mapping” and “cartographic semiology”:
3 – Key arguments of the Symposium/workshops
The experimental mapping workshops (sensorial and emotional) are spaces for exploration and creation—an invitation to engage in original cartographic practices on representing our sensitive and personal perceptions of the world, our everyday environments, our life trajectories, or simply our imaginations.
This form of mapping is an “extension practice” of radical or critical cartography, as conceptualized and developed in the 1970s by David Harvey and especially William Bunge with Gwendolyn Warren, following the civil rights movements in the United States. After being widely and effectively used in political contexts to reveal and denounce injustice, violations of international law or fundamental human rights, this cartographic approach has evolved toward more intimate, immersive, and sensorial dimensions.
This practice invites us to mobilize all our senses and to be attentive to our emotions, both during data collection and the creative process itself: our sight—to finally notice what we usually look at without seeing; our hearing—to listen to the sounds we often ignore; our sense of smell, taste, and touch—to fully grasp what is truly important in the atmosphere of a place. Lastly, it calls upon what we often refer to as our “sixth sense”: our intuition, our ability to feel and interpret reality through the lens of our imagination. This opens the way for poetic and artistic expression, and for the development of our creative sensibility—especially through the use of color, form, and movement.
In this sense, we might speak of “experiential cartography”: a drawn expression of our embodied presence in places where we physically have been or are. It may also be “memorial,” as it reconstructs places based on impressions and perceptions rooted in memory and “transmitted territorial knowledge”—especially relevant when Indigenous communities undertake mapping their ancestral lands.
Since the early 1990s, many citizen collectives around the world have embraced this form of expression, recognizing its power as a medium for advancing and defending their causes—particularly those related to social and spatial justice. Artist and activist groups have adopted and shaped this practice under a rich variety of names: radical cartography, critical cartography, participatory, collective, sensorial, emotional, olfactory, experiential, mental, perceptual mapping—and even counter-cartography (though this term is now debated). It has thus taken on a militant and activist dimension, in service of communities, minorities, and citizens more broadly.
In parallel, academic groups focused on critical and radical mapping have also emerged, giving rise to laboratories and university programs dedicated to the practice and theory of critical, radical, and experimental cartography—exploring the full diversity of its uses and perspectives.
Since 2021, the “Embodied Ecologies” project, led by anthropologist Anita Hardon in the Department Knowledge Technology and Innovation, has integrated sensorial mapping into its research methods, using it as a tool of investigation alongside interviews and field surveys.
The outcomes of these ongoing experiments are already very promising, showing how this approach enriches anthropological research.
For researchers, it enables the “territorialization” of interviews and a deeper understanding of territories—sometimes ancestral domains—in their sacred and intimate dimensions. It also brings greater awareness of spatiality, particularly the significance of distance, in shaping the complex social and economic processes lived by communities.
For the communities themselves, this practice has led to what might be called “synthetic illustrations”—clear, accessible visual representations of subtle and complex issues that are often obscured in traditional qualitative or quantitative data. It also offers a new perspective on their own living spaces, revealing potential and enabling new ways of understanding them.
Moreover, the act of mapping emotions has helped communities overcome psychological barriers and gain insight into the reasons behind certain spatial practices and their own social positions in the spaces they map. In this sense, this method acts as a revelatory tool in ethnographic research—enabling the map to dialogue with written texts and to reveal overlooked phenomena, processes, or dynamics. It thus allows for a revisiting of the past, a reconnection with the present, and a projection toward possible futures.
4 – Programme
Monday, September 29, 2025 – 09:00 to 17:30
Location: Impulse, NcountR:
- 09:00 – Welcome, coffee and cake
- 09:15–10:00 – Opening by Anita Hardon & Philippe Rekacewicz
– > Introduction
– > Mapping in the context of Embodied Ecologies
– > Presentation and framework of the workshop
– > Sensorial mapping: a bit of context and a bit of semiology
- 10:10 – 12:15 : Workshop 1:
– > Florence Troin & Philippe Rekacewicz - Embodied sensory walk with the deprivation of one sense
- 12:15 – 13 :00 – Lecture (Speaker’s Corner)
– > Denice Salvacion: Creative and collaborative mapping practices with communities in the Philippines (in particular in the Cordillera in the North): representing imaginaries, making complex social interactions visible:
– > Precious Angelica Echague: Mapping blurred spaces in Marikina, Manilla (Philippines):
- 13:00 – 14:00 – Lunch
- 14 :00 – 14 :30 – Lecture (Speaker’s Corner)
– > Josh Snow & Kevin Lai: Mapping soil care infrastructures in Amsterdam.
- 14:30 – 16:30 : Parallel workshops
– > Workshop 2a: Severin Halder & Paul Schweizer: Integrating audio in maps. A method to make oral and other audible sources hearable within our analogue maps, in order to give voice to those layers of meaning that elude visualization.
– > Workshop 2b: Aniara Rodado & Mariana Rios Sandoval: creating a collective map through drawing, focusing on bodily perceptions. Movement, gesture, and touch guide the exploration of space, memory, and imagination.
16:30 – 16:45 - Short break
- 16:45 – 17:30 – Lecture (Speaker’s Corner)
– > Katharina Wahedi: Haiǀǀom engagement with land and the environment: Sensorial mapping at Tsintsabis resettlement farm, Namibia
– > Afroditi Avgerou: Commoning toxic space: uneven exposure, embodiment and collective action in the peripheries of Paris.
Tuesday, September 30, 2025 – 09:00 to 17:30
Location: Impulse, NcountR:
- 9:00 – 10:00 – Lecture (Speaker’s Corner)
– > Cian Dayrit: Talk on videoconference from Manilla: Militant Mapping in workshops where are activated cognitive mapping prompts to unpack and address inequality, conflict and resistance. You can download the zine/manual Militant Mapping.
– > Alexis Grussi-Séné, Alice Durot, Jakob Hottner (at large), Mariana Rios Sandoval: Collaborative mapping, memory and anticipation in the industrial town of Fos-sur-Mer (France)
- 10:00 – 10:20 : Short Break
- 10:20 – 12:30 : Workshop 3 part 1:
– > This workshop session will be split in two moments: A first set of 2h10, and after lunch and a presentation by Yamina, as in the afternoon of second set of 1h10, which will make 3h30 altogether.
– > We propose to double the Monday’s workshop and offer the participants the opportunity do attend one or the other of the workshop the would have missed the day before.
– > The session starts with a communication by Florence Troin who will tell about Three years of Sensory and experimental mapping in Mayotte (a French island beside Madagascar in the Indian ocean), with Children and teenagers. A short film will be shown at this occasion.
– > Choice of workshops between:
1) Drawing your “identity map” or “the map that tells something about yourself” (TMTTSAY) with Philippe Rekacewicz & Florence Troin.
2) Integrating audio in maps. A method to make oral and other audible sources hearable within analogue maps, to give voice to those layers of meaning that elude visualization with Severin Halder & Paul Schweizer.
3) creating a collective map through drawing, focusing on bodily perceptions. Movement, gesture, and touch guide the exploration of space, memory, and imagination with Aniara Rodado & Mariana Rios Sandoval.
- 12:30 – 13:30 – Lunch
- 13:30 – 14:30 : Workshop 3 part 2:
– >Presentation: Yamina Sam: Asmekhthey, or the ritual of remembrance: an appropriation of colonial maps by the Kabylian (Algeria) diaspora in Switzerland: Continuation and completion of the morning workshops, and collective debriefing
- 14:30 – 16:00 (Speaker’s Corner)
– > Emma van Dalen: How can we map the “hygge” in Denmark, in other word the gathering with friend an family who “just want to be well and enjoy friendship by being together”.
– > Andrea Pla i Rivas: Mapping Otherwise: A Manifesto in Crayons and Colour Pencils.
– > Magdaleine Maire: “Breathing spaces” in Marseille: spatializing desires against urban capitalism.
- 16:00–16:30 : Break
- 16:30 – 17:30/18:00 – Discussion 1 with the whole group (NcountR):
– > This discussion and collective exchange is a moment in which we would like to invite you to reflect on a variety of aspects of experimental cartography practice (definition, epistemology, relevance for the humanities, outcomes), but also to share your own experiences as practitioners—whether in the field with informants, for example, or in class with students.
– > It will take place in two sessions: one on Tuesday evening, and the second on Wednesday morning as a conclusion to our gathering. This means that the topics we do not have time to address on Tuesday can be taken up on Wednesday!
– > Experimental mapping: a young discipline in search of its identity: what we generically refer to as ‘experimental cartography’ and which we all practise in a wide variety of forms is also found under a wide variety of names: radical, critical, sensorial, sensory, emotional, participative, creative, collective… ?
– >We also often meet the expression “counter-cartography”, today challenged by the community of critical cartographers. What, then, would be the most appropriate ways to name the discipline we practise?
– > What do you think we are really doing? How do we define ourselves and what motivates us to choose to practise an ‘unconventional’ mapping, as an alternative to traditional practices?
– > How do we implement this “other way” to map the world”? How relevant is it for research in the social and human sciences to illustrate and map the data and information we gather from our (or others) experiences of space, landscape, and territory, as well as from our memories throughout our personal history and experience (or others)?"
– > These collective discussion sessions will also provide an opportunity for participants to share specific mapping experiences they may not have had enough time to present during their (short) communication. They will also be a space to bring forward questions they are, (for instance), currently struggling with, and to propose them to the collective.
- 09:00–10:30 – Lecture (Speaker’s Corner)
– > Camila Narbaitz Sarsur: Citizen knowledge and official data, where contradictions emerge
– > David Bautista Perez: From the flow of the Magdalena River, Mexico City, Mexico: An approach to socio-environmental challenges through participatory mapping.
– > Miha Turcik: Planetary Public Stack, flattened Worlds, Multiplying Perspectives: Critical Planetary Imaginaries:
10:30–10:45 - Short Break
- 10:40–12:40/13:00 – Discussion 2 with the whole group (NcountR):
– > Concluding remarks: As we wrap up, let’s take a moment for debriefing and feedback from our workshops: have we learned something new? By reflecting on our experiences with sensory mapping as one of the methods employed in social science research, we may ask whether this approach can be regarded as a genuine producer of knowledge, comparable to other established tools and techniques in the human sciences.
– > It is allowed to draw during this collective sessions!
- 12:40/13:00 – 14:00 – Festive lunch and end !
Few maps between art, emotion and scieence...
