Decentralization is map-making.
The abstraction of decentralization makes it easier to ignore questions of place. How can we draw a map with differences that matter?
As part of this research project I will create a workshop and underground publication to connect our senses with the decentralized geography.
Workshop exploration in excalidraw:
The continents move veeery slowly and the oceans don’t sprout new islands very often. So I thought mapping was the craft of dead explorers. Old maps were full of unexplored corners painted with dragons, lions and other dangers. But then humans caused the mass extinction of dragons by planting their boots and their flags into all the possible open spaces in the map. Every trace of magic was erased from the map. Everything was known, water was dominated, land was appropriated.
Everything was known. 500 years ago, when Europe was discovered, Mercator, an European man, projected his smart invention into all the maps and minds to this day. Maps are hard because the world humans perceive is 3-dimensional. Mercator aligned all the rhumb navigation lines so they are straight in a 2-d map. A geopolitical side-effect of this science was that it made the empires of the north look much bigger and scarier in the map.
Then he died, and somebody wrote on his grave: “The whole Earth is no burden for a man who had the whole weight of her lands on his shoulders and carried her as an Atlas.” mmm ok 
This is where humans could live without Mercator:
Alaska and Greenland seem to have decided to run away, I can understand them. It’s a representation that shows more accurately the relative sizes of every country, ignoring the convenience of the navigation lines. And I still see some issues there.
Borges once told the story of an empire with maps so perfect that that they “struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it”. Because that was a useless map, it is now in ruins. The principle of reality disappeared. So maybe this is not a science of exactitudes and every relevant map will have inconveniences.
Let’s come back to reality, and ground. My invitation to you is to get lost, right now. Where are you now? How does it feel if you sit under the table? Go on, take the wrong bus. Walk through your garden barefoot, and backwards. Or maybe, just surrender to uncertainty and mystery. Do not look at your map app. From this viewpoint, can you see the little cracks in the empire? Look harder. You can trust your senses, they are real. Leave some tracings in a notebook to show the places you visited while you were lost.
On top of the Mercator map humans started drawing the oceanic winds and currents, and they built technologies to navigate the oceans following the currents drawn in their maps.
A geopolitical side-effect of this science was the displacement of humans where the mapped currents made it easy for the colonizers to land. Then genocide, epistemicide and mass extinction. This is the map of the slave trade routes:
When the modern nation states were discovered they were drawn on top of the slave trade map. Defending their new map they built technologies to fight wars for the domination of the land, the extraction of more-than-human value, and to impose democratic freedom.
A geopolitical side-effect of this science was the need for fast speed trading and capitalistic speculation between the countries that seem too big in the map. This is the map of the internet submarine cables:
And now that the empire is so well connected, on top of the internet map they are drawing the map of the virtual, the artificial and the interplanetary, and they want me to buy it. And they want all of my life to be normalized so I can fit in their map and they can sell me to others. But moderns! stop, I don’t want to be in your map. I can’t see in there any of the things I care about.
While I was lost I saw the straight arrow of modern human development, linking colonizacion, slavery, science, capitalism, bitcoin, and ai. My situation in their map is not a geopolitical side-effect.
I don’t want a post-modern map on top of this one. This is not about fixing the map of the genocide and the speciocide. It is broken. I just can mourn, bury the dead, and walk, what else is there?
It’s not about representation. It’s about living together. From being included in or excluded from the map to create the map to be the map.
Sophie Strand said that eurocentric epistemologies are new and not a good measuring tape for real knowledge. Moderns, it was a lie, nothing was known.
My invitation here is to make relevant experiments with maps that are very other. Ground yourself, and consider following the directions of a child instead of the google maps lady. You’ll get there, just trust, keep moving, escape capture.
Or maybe, get high, pray with the plants, and consider the aesthetic shift of a map in which the south is pointing up. Bayo Akomolafe once told the story of the Douglas Adams geomagnetic excursion. It happened 42000 years ago, when Earth’s magnetic field reversed for a while and the south became the north. It coincided with climate transition, mass extinction, and human cave art. Close your eyes, see the world upside down, go into a cave, start a fire, and draw a map.
Now go on, grab your phone. I know it’s scary, I’m here with you. Go to https://www.comaps.app/ and install it. This is no solution, just a different map app, one that can make the cracks visible. When you see a crack, dance on it.
Or, you know, the dragons are still here with us. Take a look at the iNaturalist reptiles map. Can you see how magic can’t be erased from the map?
I have the privilege of the invisibilized. I can become so illegible that there’s no possible 2-d representation of me and the relations I care about. So from this viewpoint, I question what’s a relevant balance of exactitude and inconvenience in the maps and the worlds in which I’m becoming.
There are many possible ways to measure them. Fairness is one, welfare is another, but they both sound very modern. I hear stories about buen vivir, sumak kawsay and mino bimaadiziwin, those have my entire attention. Maybe, there can be some very simple basic agreements: nobody goes hungry while another eats, no sentient being is enslaved, the land is honored.
I’m calling this experiment fugitive infrastructures. Not imposing freedom, but playing in indeterminacy. Co-creating a non-legible future. This will require rescaling the map, and reconfiguring relations among and across scales. Engaging simultaneously with different scales, dragon scales.
I want this to be a place for blessings, generosity and hospitality. To make sanctuary, refuge, home with the human and more than human.
Come visit, you are safe here. We’ll share tea and a soup. With other others, I’ll show you how to get lost. You can tell me your stories while we get there.
This text is a remix of quotes from others, old new emergent, not academically properly cited. A 2-d representation of a workshop I have shared with various people in various formats. Here are the tracings for the workshop, with links to all my references: Excalidraw+
