unmapping thunder bay lisa rapoport
For the last six months I have been undoing a Canadian Automobile Association map of Thunder Bay. I have driven through Thunder Bay many times driving from Toronto across Canada and back, and had a vague mental map of it, but more as a way-station on very long drives across a quintessential Canadian landscape. Until GPS and Siri narrated our journeys, CAA and other touring maps were the foundation of travel organisation with their clear symbols and colour legends neatly breaking down each place into fixed components. I decided to make a project of manually cutting out every landscape claimed by use in the map – parks, parking, golf courses, open mines and cemeteries – and organised them by taxonomy into new mappings where I could contemplate their curious shapes and sizes, literally detached from their adjacencies, and their reason for being. The vast majority of the area remaining was built form, undifferentiated areas of green – textureless areas of landscape which appear to be unoccupied because they have no function to name in the map, and blue – named and unnamed waterways. Lacking in named functions, these areas are portrayed as uninhabited/ useless – though experience here would show these have been inhabited/useful for millennia and continue to be occupied. The built form of the city ( pink ) remains as a sinuous contextless experience on paper, its road and internal logic completely disengaged from the landscape – the woods, hills, stone outcrops and patterns of ownership that define, restrict or direct movement, views, or city growth. Perhaps this is closest to how we might understand a city in a map as we are planning a driving route – detached, completely devoid of real experience. Cutting the map out by hand was laborious, precise, and slow, in defiance of the apparent efficiency of the map. For me, it created an armchair trip to Thunder Bay that wandered haphazardly and slowly, unconsciously lacking a fixed route, and yet was a rich experience filled with curiosity and exploration of this place. This process brought time into the map, creating an analogue of wandering around a landscape and discovering odd corners and details, beginning the process of building a map of this place in my mind. p
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