REVERBERATIONS
COUNTER-ATLAS
Welcome to the Reverberations Counter-Atlas!
As an experimental, open-ended cartographic project, it brings into conversation wildly eclectic transoceanic “things” that flow, circulate, and sojourn – allegorically as reverberations – across and beyond Indian Ocean worlds, bridging the historic and the contemporary. Among other things, its digital canvas is intended as a pedagogical tool for and beyond the blue humanities. It offers contemplative space for the reimagination of various kinds of counter-dominant mappings (and their concomitant mobility-inspired concepts), through multimodal forms of transoceanic storytelling. As a collaborative endeavour, the counter-atlas invites contributions from across diverse spaces of artistic co-creation, public scholarship, pedagogical experimentation, activism, policy, and more. We invite iterative explorations and heterogenous transdisciplinary exchange that spark provocations of what a “reverberative mapping” might look like in all its fluidity and diversity, while recentring anti- and decolonial, posthumanist, postdevelopment, feminist and other intersectional currents of/in seeing and being in its wake.
Reverberative Mapping – A Genealogy
What conceptual purchase might the term ‘reverberation’ hold? The concept evokes metaphors associated with light- and soundscapes, conjuring images of sonic waves and ripples, reflections and echoes. Etymologically, these associations may not be too far-fetched for to draw on its medieval Latin roots; the verb reverberare bears connotations of rebound, repelling, recoiling or a beating back.
In contemporary parlance, reverberations as a term might also appear as a contranym, indicating moments, events, ideas and actions of profound prolongation, things that resonate and resound in after-effects and go on to assuming afterlives of their own. One might be left thinking of Tsing’s (2015) notion of traces / tracework and the creative yet ‘silent’ workings that rhizomatic sojourning perform, as less visible mobilities implicating people, species, capital, worldviews, and materials cross a myriad boundary in untold number of ways.
To critically engage with what empirical and heuristic value the notion of reverberations may hold, it might be worth interrogating a few binaries and assumptions that may implicitly shape our thinking. We might start with the premise that reverberations – as a notion – offers its own conceptual versatility in relation to other mobility-related terms such as movement, flow, and circulation. While particular events and objects might prove amenable to charting reverberations (whether as echoes, afterlives, hauntologies, futurities, or even as silences and fixities), we ask: might there be particular circumstances, socio-cultural and political contexts that make certain reverberative renditions more felt and visible?
Arguably, the very intangibility of reverberations (both as action and subject/object) makes for this kind of tracework elusive insofar that what reverberates and how is determined by what is known and made manifest in plain sight. Indeed, not all ´things´ that travel and traverse reverberate. Yet, might all these that reverberate flow and sojourn?
Yet, if such afterlives and spectral resonances might appear so faint, fleeting or tacit, how might dis/connections be imagined through the arts of counter-atlasing?
Why a Counter-Atlas?
The process of colonization was divided into diverse episodes and one of them was to slice, cordon and differentiate the globe through spatiotemporal and geopolitical boundaries drawn according to diverse social, political, cultural, and economic desires. These worldmaking practices birthed a modernist, post-Enlightenment cartographical structure that we regard as the standard world atlas. Lesser known existential and cross-cultural atlases and mapping modalities historically curated by indigenous communities and more-than-human living beings, have been systemically, epistemically and institutionally erased.
Yet nascent ways of seeing and being in the world are being reimagined. In part, these visual and sensory experiments continue to encompass geographical and topographical boundaries that are fluid and intensely mutable. They embody storied worlds seen through the lens of climate transitions; songlines; forests, glaciers, deserts, tidalectics and windscapes; floras and faunas; the flow of seas, oceans, rivers and estuaries; atmospheric and subterranean fluxes; or perhaps a world remade through the sojourning of plant matter narrated through historic routes of spice trading and culinary cultures.
Our possibilities for rupture, remembrance and rebraiding are endless.
As a collaborative endeavour that invites similar initiatives across spaces of critical scholarship, artistic production, activism and policy, this counter-atlas project strives to co-think questions around atlas-making through textual-aesthetic representations of the different functional patterns of human and more-than-human living beings that do not conform to anti-ecological and colonialist patterns of movement, belonging, and knowledge production.
Ours is an era mired by existential environmental crises, political polarization, growing inequality and inequity. Calls to reimagine, redraw, and reinterpret the world through a myriad living entities and phenomena, inanimate objects, artifacts and everyday practices (that historically and normatively have been silenced, backdated, and/or rendered insignificant by contemporary capitalistic projects of development and modernity), remain all the more urgent.
Founding co-curators
Peter Kærgaard Andersen, Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa, Sayan Dey, Damian Borovsky
Acknowledgements
As an experimental, open-ended cartographic project, it brings into conversation wildly eclectic transoceanic “things” that flow, circulate, and sojourn – allegorically as reverberations – across and beyond Indian Ocean worlds, bridging the historic and the contemporary. Among other things, its digital canvas is intended as a pedagogical tool for and beyond the blue humanities. It offers contemplative space for the reimagination of various kinds of counter-dominant mappings (and their concomitant mobility-inspired concepts), through multimodal forms of transoceanic storytelling. As a collaborative endeavour, the counter-atlas invites contributions from across diverse spaces of artistic co-creation, public scholarship, pedagogical experimentation, activism, policy, and more. We invite iterative explorations and heterogenous transdisciplinary exchange that spark provocations of what a “reverberative mapping” might look like in all its fluidity and diversity, while recentring anti- and decolonial, posthumanist, postdevelopment, feminist and other intersectional currents of/in seeing and being in its wake.
Reverberative Mapping – A Genealogy
What conceptual purchase might the term ‘reverberation’ hold? The concept evokes metaphors associated with light- and soundscapes, conjuring images of sonic waves and ripples, reflections and echoes. Etymologically, these associations may not be too far-fetched for to draw on its medieval Latin roots; the verb reverberare bears connotations of rebound, repelling, recoiling or a beating back.
In contemporary parlance, reverberations as a term might also appear as a contranym, indicating moments, events, ideas and actions of profound prolongation, things that resonate and resound in after-effects and go on to assuming afterlives of their own. One might be left thinking of Tsing’s (2015) notion of traces / tracework and the creative yet ‘silent’ workings that rhizomatic sojourning perform, as less visible mobilities implicating people, species, capital, worldviews, and materials cross a myriad boundary in untold number of ways.
To critically engage with what empirical and heuristic value the notion of reverberations may hold, it might be worth interrogating a few binaries and assumptions that may implicitly shape our thinking. We might start with the premise that reverberations – as a notion – offers its own conceptual versatility in relation to other mobility-related terms such as movement, flow, and circulation. While particular events and objects might prove amenable to charting reverberations (whether as echoes, afterlives, hauntologies, futurities, or even as silences and fixities), we ask: might there be particular circumstances, socio-cultural and political contexts that make certain reverberative renditions more felt and visible?
Arguably, the very intangibility of reverberations (both as action and subject/object) makes for this kind of tracework elusive insofar that what reverberates and how is determined by what is known and made manifest in plain sight. Indeed, not all ´things´ that travel and traverse reverberate. Yet, might all these that reverberate flow and sojourn?
Yet, if such afterlives and spectral resonances might appear so faint, fleeting or tacit, how might dis/connections be imagined through the arts of counter-atlasing?
Why a Counter-Atlas?
The process of colonization was divided into diverse episodes and one of them was to slice, cordon and differentiate the globe through spatiotemporal and geopolitical boundaries drawn according to diverse social, political, cultural, and economic desires. These worldmaking practices birthed a modernist, post-Enlightenment cartographical structure that we regard as the standard world atlas. Lesser known existential and cross-cultural atlases and mapping modalities historically curated by indigenous communities and more-than-human living beings, have been systemically, epistemically and institutionally erased.
Yet nascent ways of seeing and being in the world are being reimagined. In part, these visual and sensory experiments continue to encompass geographical and topographical boundaries that are fluid and intensely mutable. They embody storied worlds seen through the lens of climate transitions; songlines; forests, glaciers, deserts, tidalectics and windscapes; floras and faunas; the flow of seas, oceans, rivers and estuaries; atmospheric and subterranean fluxes; or perhaps a world remade through the sojourning of plant matter narrated through historic routes of spice trading and culinary cultures.
Our possibilities for rupture, remembrance and rebraiding are endless.
As a collaborative endeavour that invites similar initiatives across spaces of critical scholarship, artistic production, activism and policy, this counter-atlas project strives to co-think questions around atlas-making through textual-aesthetic representations of the different functional patterns of human and more-than-human living beings that do not conform to anti-ecological and colonialist patterns of movement, belonging, and knowledge production.
Ours is an era mired by existential environmental crises, political polarization, growing inequality and inequity. Calls to reimagine, redraw, and reinterpret the world through a myriad living entities and phenomena, inanimate objects, artifacts and everyday practices (that historically and normatively have been silenced, backdated, and/or rendered insignificant by contemporary capitalistic projects of development and modernity), remain all the more urgent.
Founding co-curators
Peter Kærgaard Andersen, Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa, Sayan Dey, Damian Borovsky
Acknowledgements
As a project of the Southern Collective(www.thesoutherncollective.org), this initiative was
generously funded by the SSRC´s Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean, and
latterly by the German Science Foundation´s SPP 1889 Regional Sea Level Change and
Society (BlueUrban project). It continues to receive formative guidance from members of the
Southern Collective and project collaborators from the University of Michigan´s Department
of Anthropology. We are particularly grateful to Aarthi Sridhar (Dakshin Foundation) and to
Jatin Dua (UMich) for their continued support and input.