Perform the Map: Using Map-Score Experiences to Write and Reenact Places

Abstract

In this article, we aim to show the implementation of a kind of mapping that combines spatial experience, sensitive cartography, and choreographic scores. We explore this approach through an experiment led in the city of Washington, DC, in and around the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Memorial, in July 2017. Showing how research and creation can support each other, such an experiment locates the map in the sensory and emotional side of cartographic practices, which leads us to reconsider how the spatialized and temporalized language of an experience might be reconstructed with drawings and writings. In other words, the map-score methodology allows us to observe how the experience of a place may be recorded during fieldwork (memory, drawings, notebooks) to create an archive that extends and enhances our knowledge of sensory perceptions, emotions, and points of view. This kind of experiment allows another regime of reflective cartographic practice, one that reconsiders its spatial and temporal dimensions and its modes of creation.