Cartographies of the Future: Julie Mehretu's Dynamic Charting of Fluid Spaces

摘要

If maps make meaning by locating us as agents in the world, the dynamic cartographies by the Ethiopian-Americanpainter Julie Mehretu suggest the extent to which the modern project has given way to fragmented social identities andthus to new kinds of spatial awareness. Such excentric space is shot through with other spaces functioning in relation toand interaction with other spaces. In addition, these new spaces both produce and are produced by our active andcontinuous interchanges with sophisticated technologies in real time and virtual time, which themselves constitute spacesthat are unbounded, heterogeneous and fluid, making spatial orientation indeterminate and jagged, ruled by chance andcontingency. How can such territories be mapped? What do these cartographies of the future tell us about our presenttechnosocial world? What relationship between the map and its territory do they suggest? That is what this contributiondiscusses by examining Mehretu's high-velocity urban charts which not only embody these indeterminate, jagged andindeed chaotic facets of spatial orientation and situatedness. Despite their bleakness and the uncertain future emergingfrom these hybrid fragmented maps, the stories) they tell suggest poetic ways for agents to create new sensibilitiesand sensualities that do not rely on consumerism or consumption but evoke the potential for collective action and socialchange.