Dreading the Map, created as a map-lective. The Royal Geographical Society London. March 2021, 2021

The Map-lective is a collective of mapmakers who are dealing with the maps linked by triangular trade, involving the shipping of plants, trees, people, ores and animals from the African continent and Caribbean to the USA and Europe. Together we create new maps that reflect the interconnectedness of these spaces and challenge the hegemony of the map as understood in a Eurocentric way.
By braiding and dread locking the map to create an immersive aerial sculpture we use black and brown community-based practices of care-mongering to counter Eurocentric practices of war-mongering to which the map is central.

The map-lective was inaugurated in The Map Room at the Royal Geographical Society in London where key European mapmakers are celebrated, the rooms were also the public beginning and end point of many mapmaking expeditions. The work began using archival maps from the Society and the Colonial office.

We hope to iterate the work in each of the key geographical spaces related to triangular trade convening local map-lectives in each location to build on the work of the last iteration.

The map is something to be dreaded as it is the tool of the coloniser mapping to take territories. Dreading, as in dreadlocking or braiding and plaiting the map, is a way to smash some key problematic premise of the map.

The map is challenged in four key ways.

Firstly the tendency to privilege fixity things that are static in the environment, such as roads, mountains, and borders. This is a problem as everything that is most valuable about the space is in movement, air, water, nutrients, and gasses these become almost invisible on the map what is not seen cannot be attended to. The new map takes the old and makes it tell of the movement of some of the most important elements that are "off the Eurocentric map",
Secondly, the tendency to suggest total knowledge about space. The map is total there are no obvious gaps. This is problematic because it creates a sense that we are in control and all-knowing about the space giving us a god complex. This new map shows more holes with its swirling organic movement than "coverage."
Thirdly the map privileges the surface, privileging surfaces of landscapes and ignoring all that goes on above and below the surface. This is problematic as most of the environment is above or below the surface, which is but a sliver of space. This map takes the singular flat map and creates a multitude of surfaces that dip and rise above and below a single plane.

Fourthly it challenges the idea of here and there that the map shores up that square B2 is distinct and separate from square H4, this is problematic as it suggests human rights abuses can take place here and over there we can enjoy human rights. Or that we can pollute over there but enjoy a clean environment over here.
The map un grids the separate spaces and combines them again and again, naming and un-separating.

In the inaugural installation at the Royal Geographic society, it counters the idea of the singular exceptional mapmaker that this room celebrates. A map-lective of black and brown women convene to make the maps together, they open the space out to the wider community as the work grows and attracts attention.

https://www.rgs.org/research/higher-education-resources/dreading-the-map