Mathieu Lamontagne-Cumiford

Cartography (re)makes the world through the epistemological imperatives of abstraction and representation. Powerful rivers and groaning sheets of ice dissolve into thin lines and crosshatched etchings, as devoid of vibrancy as they are of connection to the material conditions they exist in. Cartography, however, is broad, and not the only way of mapping the world. As a system of techniques, subject to the forces of culture, sociality, and political-economics, how does the creation of cartographic knowledge go on to generate consequences for mapped places?

            My project is working alongside different map makers in (and around) the community of Inuvik, Canada. At the heart of the Western Arctic, Inuvik is regularly subject to the cartographic attention from a host of different actors. From resource surveyors to government geographers, from indigenous land-managers to habitat monitors, how are different experts generating different maps of the same place? Further, maps go on to have political, economic, and social lives after their creation, defining locations often remote to the experiences of those who view them. Through ethnographic analysis and archival research, this project will engage the intersections of map epistemologies, asking: how does the cartographic process entangle with diverse epistemics and cultural techniques of being-in-place to generate emergent and conceptual landscapes through maps?