Unmapping Landscape
| by Leela Keshav |
If the map is a work of fiction, what stories does it tell?
As an architecture student, I’ve made countless maps. Architects are mapmakers of possible futures: we draw plans of rooms, buildings, and cities that don’t yet exist. Because of this, I’ve never taken maps at face value. They are always a product of someone’s imagination, even when they present themselves as objective truths.
Rethinking the map is a call to reimagine relationships to Land*. To “unmap” a landscape is to remove the distance between the viewer and the viewed: to see oneself in direct relation to Land, not apart from it. Can new forms of mapping —particularly ones that are temporal, affective, and embodied — point toward reparative Land relations?
This short film was created as part of my master’s in architecture at the Architectural Association in London. When I moved here two years ago to begin my degree, I wondered how I might ever call this sprawling and unknowable city my home. A child of a white American settler and an Indian immigrant, I grew up in so-called Canada but moved frequently after the age of eighteen, accompanied by a sense of placelessness. As I moved, I carried a longing for rootedness, a desire to care for a place because I knew I belonged there.
Unmapping Landscapes by Leela Keshav
Visiting the Peak District for the first time last summer, I felt an immediate sense of familiarity. The landscape’s rolling green hills traced by lines of dry stone walls aligned seamlessly with ideals of the English picturesque I’d absorbed growing up in one of Britain’s colonies. My research drifted toward this landscape and now reimagines western capitalist Land relations which are predicated on extractivism and commodification. To repair these relationships is to unmake—and unmap—the white supremacist and heteropatriarchal global world order that relentlessly forms hierarchies between humans, Land, and more-than-human worlds.
In Unmapping Landscape, I imagine new forms of “living” conservation to emerge, ones that require situated and embodied engagement with Land to mend and heal both ecological and social harm. These modes of conservation have revolutionary potential, calling for the abolition of private property in the process of restoring the commons. And they require new cartographic orientations, where practices like collective walking, dry stone repair, and storytelling become ways of mapmaking toward reparative futures.
I invite you to view this film as a kind of map in itself. If you were to map your own relationship to the Peak District landscape, how would it appear?
* Following anticolonial researcher Max Liboiron, I capitalise the word Land to signify land-as-relations rather than land-as-resource/commodity.
