Walking and drawing. Strolling and tracing. Exploring cities and mapping them. GPS systems and human/animal movement opens multiple paths of creative expression. Detours, derives, critiques, journeys, adventures, expeditions, logs. For several years I have been performing walks + GPS drawing in the cities where I live and visit, recording movements in hybrid space, speculating with histories and geographies, as part of a work-in-progress inquiry in cities and psycho-geography. How would a display of a walk performance would look like? How would a walk + GPS drawing look like when being display on a gallery or a public space?
This month RHINOCERVS IMPETVM is on display at the Berkman Klein Center mini-gallery. A mini exhibition and single display, this piece shows the records and speculations of a walk + GPS drawing I performed in Cartagena de Indias, a fortified port city in the Caribbean sea, present-day Colombia.
The installation is an assemblage of three pieces:1) an enlarged print of the GPS drawing (map of the walk); (2) a booklet with the printed version of the GPX file (record of the walk); and (3) a geolocative fanzine. The booklet contains the entire GPX file (with all the data including timestamps, geo coordinates, and elevation) I recorded while performing the walk/drawing. A digital copy of the GPX file is also available on OpenStreetMap.
The fanzine is a 16 page printed publication that contains a curated collection of texts, images, historical maps, and archival materials related to the city of Cartagena de Indias, the rhinoceros. The texts and the maps speculate on the colonial and postcolonial resilience of a port city that was attacked, plundered, and looted multiple times by European empires and pirates during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. You can find digital copies of them on the following entries published on this blog:
- Walking + Drawing Poetics
- The Resilience of Cartagena de Indias: Standing up after Multiple Colonizations and Plunders
- rhinoceroses
- The Glitch and the Horn. Noise on the edges
Filename: 20130820.gpx Location: 10.42611 (longitud),-75.54941 (latitude) GPS device: Garmin etrex Legedn HCx Movement: Walking Map Stats Center: 10.42611,-75.54941 South West corner: 10.42112,-75.55447 North East corner: 10.43110,-75.54435 Altitude range (m): -10.97 to 72.82 GPS Track information Track points: 943 Distance: 8.206 Km Duration: 3 hours
