Mapping the Substance of Trace - A multimodal workshop

This multimodal workshop investigates counter-mapping as both an ethnographic methodology and a creative, research-led form. Bringing together participants working across visual anthropology, human geography, art practice, and related disciplines, it examines how mapping practices can move beyond representation to engage memory, affect, materiality, and lived experience. Counter-mapping is approached not only as a political tool for challenging dominant spatial narratives, but also as an experimental process through which traces—of movement, violence, ecology, and everyday life—can be gathered, reconfigured, and made perceptible through multimodal means.

Through a combination of critical discussion, hands-on exercises, and collaborative reflection, participants will explore diverse mapping strategies that incorporate image, sound, text, gesture, and spatial practices. Attention will be given to how ethnographic research can unfold through situated acts of tracing and re-inscription, and how creative methodologies open alternative ways of knowing. The workshop foregrounds process over product, inviting participants to experiment with fragmentary materials, partial archives, and embodied encounters with landscape and infrastructure.

By situating counter-mapping at the intersection of scholarship and artistic practice, this workshop cultivates a space for thinking through the ethical, political, and sensory dimensions of mapping otherwise. Participants will leave with expanded methodological tools, new collaborative connections, and a deeper understanding of how multimodal practices can generate critical spatial knowledge.

The workshop will be led by artist and PhD researcher Ashley Bowes (University of St Andrews) and by filmmaker and PhD researcher Amir Garmroudi (Goldsmiths, University of London).

This event is linked to the “Audiovisual Remix” event.

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Host or Publisher ASA People Fest