This article analyses the articulations of temporality in the Mercator-Hondius Atlas. Firstly, the atlas reflects the sense of the past as the cartographers had to assess the information included in ancient texts in relation to modern testimonies. Secondly, Hondius had to take into account the worldview provided by the explorers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Hence the experience of time articulated in the Mercator-Hondius Atlas reflected not only the cartographers’ ideas of the Dutch cartographic industry but also directed the (...) making of the atlas. (shrink)

This paper considers some of the curatorial devices used in exhibitions at the South End Museum in Gqeberha. The South End Museum, which opened on 3 March 2001, is modelled in several respects on the District Six Museum in Cape Town: it, too, is an urban-based, self-defined 'community museum' constituted around the histories of the apartheid Group Areas Act and the implementation of forced removals. Like many post-1994 museums in South Africa, the South End Museum relies on photographs for their (...) displays, whilst also making use of maps, a mural and reenactment. The paper considers the ways in which these different displays touch, recall, reflect and activate one another. Keeping in mind that the notion of 'community' in South Africa bears the burden of being raced by its apartheid and colonial pasts, and abiding by the spectrality that is constitutive of the image, the paper grapples with the haunted space of 'community museums' in the Eastern Cape. While the South End Museum deploys some of the same curatorial devices as the District Six Museum, and deals with related histories of forced removal, South End, it is argued, brings the relation between race, indigeneity and 'ruin' within 'community museums' into fleeting focus. (shrink)

A close reading of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1st century CE), an anonymous captain's manual written in everyday Greek, provides ways of thinking about broader questions concerning the connectedness of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. It is located primarily in the Red Sea, an interstitial zone between the two large seas, and concerns long-distance networks of exchange between South Asia, the Arabian peninsula, the Horn of Africa, Alexandria, and beyond that the Mediterranean. Among the issues to emerge (...) are the linear nature of spatial experience and the means by which commodities are mapped. A goal of the article is to identify ways in which to link the practice and representations of travel. (shrink)

This article explores the link between the territorial imperative of the modern state, the exercise of violence and the practice of cartography. After first tracing the ways in which the exercise of ‘non-state’ coercion has been either eliminated historically or isolated ideologically, the question of the map is brought to bear on the issue of violence and territoriality. The article thus illustrates the importance of cartographic violence: the way the state and its violent constitution of territory have been sanctified through (...) the project of the map. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin introduced the idea of epochal and ongoing progression in interaction between mind and the built environment. Since early antiquity, the present study suggests, Benjamin’s notion has been manifest in metaphors of gender in city-form, whereby edifices and urban voids have represented masculinity and femininity, respectively. At the onset of interaction between mind and the built environment are prehistoric myths related to the human body and to the sky. During antiquity gender projection can be (...) detected in western perceptions linking natural and built environments, commencing with Plato’s Atlantis and his Myth of Er, and later as a likely import of the Chinese yin-yang mythology. Culminating with the Age of Discovery, alongside advances in experiential awareness of the Earth’s sphericity, respective feminine and masculine earmarks can be detected in early modern perspicacity of the Earth’s southern and northern hemispheres. Our conceptions of natural and built environments inherently continue to contain gender traits. Yet urban voids, as the feminine face of city-form, have been severely understated in the built environment. Through design and configuration of urban voids, allegories of femininity in city-form ought to be celebrated, not discarded. (shrink)

Drawing from de Certeau, in this thesis I investigate graffiti and street art as part of the everyday visual landscapes. The city of Stockholm has gone from zero tolerance towards all forms of street art to now including the art form as a strategy for creating a so-called attractive city. In this thesis, I aim to examine street art and graffiti in relation to Stockholm´s mobile landscapes. The theoretical framework builds on mobility and landscape theory. I argue that if we (...) are to better understand the world we live in, the concepts of mobility must be understood both in terms of its physical and social implications. Using a qualitative approach, interviews, document analysis, and ethnographic methods have been used to gather data. By analysing discourses and statements by artists, officials, and housing companies, I demonstrate how graffiti and street art moves between different expressions in Stockholm. Furthermore, I discuss the perspectives of artists who are engaged with their bodies to produce the visual landscape we live in, and how their bodily mobilities affect the outcome of the landscape of Stockholm. I argue that there is a paradox between mobility and immobility in the use of street art to create safe environments. The positioning of these concepts as opposites reveals how Stockholm stad and housing companies use the mobile in graffiti and street art, to create something static, attachment to place. This thesis thereby contributes to the societal and academic debate concerning mobility and the understanding of how the visual landscape is created. (shrink)