TiP Lab – it’s about the map

The Zapatista movement advances the notion of “walking with” as a form of solidarity built on reciprocity and mutuality. By physically “walking and listening, talking and doing”, each individual is able to engage freely in a variety of ways and to experience such activity differently: as we humans move, work, play, and narrate with a multiplicity of beings in place, we enact historically contingent and radically distinct ontologies (Sundberg 2014).
With this mobile lab, we draw on this idea as counter-cartography strategy in order to explore the city of Toronto. The project still employs those top-down set of data captured by a variety of devices, or recorded by historical maps and documentations of a long-gone urban agglomerate. However, instead of relying on those maps as the only source of content, it juxtaposes them to a different approach that draws information from the ground and from a diverse set of criteria established by participants and city dwellers; by plants, animals, and city waste; by the architecture that is surrounding us and that is no longer there.

But let’s be honest: maps can really help us uncover the colonial history of the city and can suggest how the power-to-be sees the city of the future as a geometrical grid. As a tribute to this past and to a –possibly too ideal – vision of the future, our mobile lab will carry two very different maps: on the right side we decided to paste the Annexation map dated 1915 (exactly 100 years ago) ; on the left side , the metrolinx transportation map extension.