Cartography and Relational Imagination: The Glissant Maps Project

The Glissant Maps project consists of a constellation of hand-drawn artistic diagrams and conceptual mappings by Moses März that are dedicated to celebrating the legacy of the Martinican poet-novelist-philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928-2011).

Presented as a novel medium for artistic research, these maps propose a way of writing that moves away from one-directional textual structures and traditional modes of knowledge production, instead embracing what Glissant has called a relational imagination and a trembling thought, that does not strive for certainty or closure but remains alive, open-ended, and actively embraces the potential of mistranslations or ‘knowing without knowing’.

The political implications of Glissant’s work, namely his vocation to imagine and actively foster alternative forms of community, is a theme connecting the maps to one another. More generally, the Glissant Maps project suggests that the ‘politics of relation’ may be a useful notion to describe political practices developed by artists and intellectuals operating in situations of (neo)colonial domination.

In this seminar, experts who are familiar with the work of Glissant and interested students in the Humanities and the Arts are invited to respond to the general proposal and different aspects of the Glissant Maps project.

Potential topics to be discussed include:

- mapmaking as an artistic research method, and as a way of writing

- different modes of showing and reading maps (print, digital, exhibition formats) in different institutional contexts (educational, art contexts) and regions of the world

- the project’s particular framing of Glissant’s poetic-political practice and how it relates to debates among Glissant scholars and postcolonial studies more generally

Experimental cartography is an effective medium to visualize how we see the world, real and imagined. It is based on a combination of approaches from the visual arts, human sciences, storytelling and activism, and is driven by the desire to share knowledge in an intuitively accessible and inclusionary manner. In this workshop, researcher and artist Moses März introduces participants to this alternative way of writing, which is inspired by Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of relation. After a presentation of different modes of mapping, participants are invited to make their own drawings. During several practical exercises, participants learn how to draw their own geographies of knowledge and trace narrative structures that emerge from their research.

Info: Tuesday, 10 February 2026, MOFA, FSU

Info: Friday, 13 February 2026, 4.30-6.30 p.m., MOFA, FSU

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Host or Publisher The Winthrop-King Institute For Contemporary French & Francophone Studies