Archipelago of Artistic Practices is an artistic and discursive programme around the development of Eavatea, a digital mapping tool for artistic practices. The project is initiated by Jubilee, platform for artistic research, in collaboration with Atelier Cartographique, Casco Art Institute, CKV, f.eks., Kunsthal Gent, M HKA, nadine.
Eavatea is a digital ‘mapping’ tool for research-based, often in situ, nomadic, collective, ephemeral, interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary practices. Its name stems from a word noted on a map drawn by Tupaia, a Polynesian master navigator who joined Captain Cook’s expedition in Tahiti in 1769. Tupaia merged the western Mercator mapping paradigm with his indigenous knowledge as a navigator: an oral tradition of ancestral songs combined with embodied knowledge of which wind patterns, ocean currents, movements of the sun and stars, fish, birds and the reflections on the underside of clouds, form the backbone. Eavatea is the point where the two systems of representation converge in an act of joint knowledge production: a countermap.
Counter-mapping allows for a constant alternation between the appropriative power perspective of mapmaking and a critical disruption of this power-consolidating and unifying perspective. Eavatea is a relational infrastructure that could inspire and initiate new research-based trajectories often with, but sometimes independent of, geographical references.
