(In/im) possible cartographies: The Island

Abstract

The text articulates a group of maps: the sticks charts of islanders of the Pacific Ocean. It seeks to sketch human and nonhuman trajectories that gave existence, silenced and retaken these maps which, in this last movement, came unaccompanied by encounters that gave life to it: the body, the canoe, the rippling of the sea. Traces of a spatial imagination are insinuated by the surviving examples and current reconstructions of these maps, but the absence of the islander thought, that drove the art of dislocation in the movement, keeps them in unsurpassed incompleteness, a cartography impossible to update. From the outlined trajectories, the article seeks to problematize how the West has juxtaposed knowledge and thoughts and consolidated it in maps or, in words of Doreen Massey, how the Western maps took life the way we imagine space. At the same time –and from this– these trajectories are taken as intercessors for the thought of/in/with smaller geographies, of cartographies in possible.