Urban mobility, participation and belonging are urgent topics in the current public debate and high on the agenda of the arts. Employing different methods artists and designers enquire into how citizens search for expression and a sense of belonging; how they dynamically construct a sense of self in urban space; how they reflect on their mobile existence and how urban space invites resistance, appropriation and/or engagement.

In this lecture spatial designer Naomi Bueno de Mesquita and performance scholar Sigrid Merx will discuss the method of collective mapping as a particular means to investigate the design of public space and the experiences and actions it can produce. They propose that collective mapping is a creative practice that can be of particular interest to scenographers and designers to research and better understand public space.

According to James Corner a map is “a staging ground or a theatre of operations upon which the mapper collects, combines, connects, marks, masks, relates and generally explores.” Mapping in this respect has a performative quality. It produces a particular understanding and experience of the world that is being mapped. Mapping often helps “uncovering realities previously unseen or unimagined, even across seemingly exhausted grounds. It re-makes territory over and over again, each time with new and diverse consequences.”

Naomi en Sigrid will share with you the preliminary findings of the workshops collective mapping that Naomi has organized in the city centre of Prague. They hope to demonstrate how mapping unfolds potential and how collective mapping allows for collectively laying bare different layers of public space by actively negotiating public space and discussing one’s observations and experiences with each other.