MAPPING the pandemic - open call

 

THREE INVITATIONS TO MAP THE pandemic

Almost overnight our worlds were  transformed as social distancing and stay at home rules were enforced. Some us have been quarantined, confined to our homes alone – others relocated and all contained within the boundary of the immediate neighbourhood, bounded by as far as it's possible to walk or cycle in the allotted exercise hour.  Work life patterns are disrupted and sadly many are coping with the loss of loved ones. Much of this disruption is written into the landscape of our new day to day.

We invite Livingmaps readers to share their present, future or dreamed pandemic maps in a variety of media and formats including, texts, drawings, poems, images, day-dream narratives, audio or video diaries through three open calls curated by the Livingmaps team. A selection of images and texts will be published in the next edition of our journal and discussed in an online event in September. Click on the links below to participate in one or all of them.

Please share amongst your family and friends so that they can join in too! If you would like some inspiration take a look at Maps of Life Under Lockdown by CityLab.

Deadline September 1st 2020

Dreaming a Post-Covid World - curated by sol perez-martinez

‘Everyone has an ideal place. When you’re five it is probably the sweet counter at Woolworths; when you’re ten it might be a toyshop or the seaside on a summer day. But when you’re fifteen, twenty, thirty, fifty? The older you get, the more varied and complicated your version of an ideal place becomes. Is it an ideal place just for you, or your family or friends, or one which you want everyone to share?’ Colin Ward, Utopia, 1974

We invite all Livingmaps readers to map or draw their ideal place -or the place you dream you could visit- in a post quarantine world. Covid-19 has limited our movement but also our capacity to plan. Confined to our homes, our imagination is our best ally to explore other places real or imagined. Quarantine highlights spatial inequalities and poses questions about our socio-political reality, prompting us to think of alternative arrangements. Dreaming with a different world outside can give us comfort but can also help us clarify how we would like the world to be. We can find inspiration in Thomas Moore’s map of Utopia, Madeleine de Scudéry’s Map of Tenderness or Umberto Eco’s collection of Legendary Lands. Mapping our ideas of the future can operate as a way of escape or liberation. It can serve as a pre-figuration of a better world, either locally or further beyond.

  • What places are you dreaming about visiting when the lockdown is over?

  • What would you like to encounter in your neighbourhood post-quarantine?

  • What is your ideal post-covid town or city?

Please upload your map, drawing or image in the following link or send it to info@livingmaps.org.uk with your name and title.

Pandemic dreams - curated by phil cohen

Today the city of flesh, of physical contact and social encounter has melted away,  leaving the city of stone, of architectural vision and planners blight, suddenly exposed in all its sterile beauty and ugliness,  as if a neutron bomb had been dropped, eliminating the population but leaving the city’s infrastructures intact.

Covid-19 has limited our movement and suppressed our lines of desire but these aspects of our waking experience  may reappear, often in coded form,  in our dreams and day dreams. And these may  articulate our hopes as well as our fears and anxieties. Confined to our homes, living through a waking nightmare, our imaginations, nurtured by  our Unconscious, may be  our best friend  in exploring  these ‘other scenes’ of everyday life. 

Using the approach of  ‘social dreaming’ developed by some social psychologists I would like to invite you to share some of the  dreams  and day dreams you  are having at the current time and which you  think might be directly or indirectly influenced by the experience of living through this pandemic. 

All you need to do is to use this questionnaire to record a day/dream that you think is relevant to this project. Confidentiality is guaranteed and in the event that we wanted to quote one of your texts in anything we write we will contact you for permission first. 

Life Under Lockdown Mapping - Curated by Barbara Brayshay

We invite Livingmappers (and their friends and family members) to chart the landscape of their “Life Under Lockdown” by creating a map as a visual diary, to record your experiences through the medium of mapping or drawing as a memento of the CV-19 era. It is about creating something that will help to express  the lived experience of CV-19. 

Your map can be funny or sad - an expression of how you are feeling and in any style you like from precise cartography to abstract graffiti - whatever works for you. Most Importantly at a time when so many of us are experiencing the isolation and loneliness that accompanies the Covid-19 pandemic we invite you to come together and help to create something quite unique as a memento of these very unique times. At a later date we would hope to display the collection in an exhibition or publication as a record of an extraordinary moment in our history.

If you are confined to your home:

Make a plan of your home and if you have one add your garden. Draw a simple map – a rough sketch will do! 

  • Include dimensions - you can pace these out. 

  • Show the approximate location of main features (e.g. bed, sofa, work desk, chair, kitchen etc)

  • Illustrate your map with notes, and drawings of the things that give you pleasure, or comfort, as well as those “virus objects” that signify the experience of CV-19.

    • to heirloom you treasure 

    • A memento from happier times

    • Something you are making / doing to pass the time

    • Pets

    • Something funny, quirky, idiosyncratic that males you smile

If you are able to get out (under the constraints of social distancing) your map could include:

  • Your daily walking, jogging, cycling routines and the routes.

  • The shops or services you use for support

  • Annotate your map with:

    • the new things you may have seen

    • the familiar

    • the odd

    • the people and places you miss

    • the waypoints along the way. 

Please upload your scans or photographs of your maps with a brief description in this survey or to barbara.brayshay@livingmaps.org.uk. When submitting your map or drawing let us know if you do not wish it to be used in a future publication or exhibition.