Livingmaps Network is delighted to welcome two socially engaged graphic artists whose projects explore and capture stories of urban experience through illustrated maps.
PhD candidates Tania A Cardoso (University of Amsterdam) and Kremena Dimitrova (University of Portsmouth) will discuss their practice-based and creative approaches to research, involving community engagement, walking as praxis, comics and illustration.
Tânia A. Cardoso is an illustrator, urbanist, and PhD candidate in artistic research at the University of Amsterdam investigating the potential of illustration as a form of urban communication. Her artistic practice as research is based on the ground-based experience of the illustrator and explores the poetics of everyday life connecting urban experience, place and imagination. Her illustration work has integrated several international collective exhibitions; was awarded the “Worldwide Picture Book Illustration Competition” 2015 in the Netherlands, the “Gorsedh Kernow Creativity Award” 2017 in Cornwall, UK and was a finalist for the “Women Cartoonists International Award” 2019 in Normandy, France.
www.taniaaefcardoso.wixsite.com/illustration
Kremena Dimitrova is a London based illustrator-as-historian who specialises in visualising history in the museum and heritage sectors. Her commissions and residencies often involve working with communities, archives, and collections and using a mixture of creative approaches such as character development, mapping, humour, rhymes, words, and images to bring hidden and untold stories to life. Kremena is also a lecturer in visual culture and an interdisciplinary practice-based PhD researcher at the University of Portsmouth. Her project probes ways in which comics-based research and comics’ cartographies can engage with limited and marginalised archival material and participate in changing the prevailing representations and commemorations of the history of enslavement.