Mapping Spectral Traces Events

Terra Incognita (all grass is flesh) -
with (and for) Anna Boulton Biggs
© Iain Biggs
Camp Coldwater, MN ©Mona M Smith
The international Mapping Spectral Traces symposia encourage a comparative and transdisciplinary practice of ‘curating’ conversations, papers, performances, community workshops, exhibitions and excursions through haunted national landscapes and as hosted in particular locales. These explorations, reflections, performances, and conversations for each symposia in specific locations contribute to individual and collaborative projects. Equally, these activities delve into the myriad ways that spatial imaginaries for the future have been limited by linear temporal narratives – in ways that have excluded social groups and natures, for example – and consider alternative pathways toward more socially just futures. The philosophic nature of attendant cultural, social and political values, and how they have prevented this larger vision, is also a feature of these interdisciplinary discussions.

Through a range of formats, visits, and exchanges, symposium participants have considered how difficult pasts can be researched, documented, represented, and animated in responsible and ethical ways.
MST IV, 2011
Participants and attendees are often asked to reflect upon their work and ideas in progress by considering the following questions: How might we listen to and recognize stories, remnants, and submerged ways of knowing as unresolved residues of memory? What might mappings that are sensitive to past injustices look, sound, and feel like? In a larger sense, how do visual pieces open up the presence of these past traces in ways that text does not? Might there be approaches to environment that treat ground as home and resting place, as thresholds through which the living can make contact with those who have gone before? And how do aspects of these researched and creative responses acknowledge the individual and specific while addressing the larger questions?
Mapping Spectral Traces