Output details

Participation Cartography: The presentation of Self in Spatio-Temporal Terms

Sotelo-Castro focuses on disclosures by one participant, as enabled by a kind of artistic practice that Sotelo-Castro terms “participation cartography.” By using “participation cartography” as a framework for the analysis of Running Stitch (2006), a piece by Jen Southern (U.K.) and Jen Hamilton (Canada), Sotelo-Castro demonstrates that disclosures by participants in this practice are to be seen as a form of self-mapping that positions the self in relation to a given performance space. These self-positionings present the self in spatio-temporal terms and by means of performative narratives that re-define the subject from an isolated individual into a participant within an unfolding live process.

Sotelo-Castro argues that most of the participation performances to which the term “participation cartography” may be applied don’t have a mechanism for participants to share reflections about their participation experience. By discussing Running Stitch from some participant’s perspectives, Sotelo-Castro demonstrates that if such a sharing mechanism was provided, the participant’s disclosures would enact a poetics of sharing that at once reveals and conceals aspects of the self. “Participation cartography” performances hold the power to generate autobiographical conversations and exchanges. Without these (collective) conversations and exchanges, the disclosures made by participants in and through “participation performances” such as Running Stitch conceal more than what they reveal, shattering thereby the cartographic (self-mapping) power of these practices. The next two outputs listed here build on this, using case studies from practices ranging from so called ‘locative media’ to group walking performance.