Between The Maps

“Admitting that atlases were narrative—that they were texts—would force the admission that the individual maps were texts too, that maps constituted a semiological system indistinguishable from other semiological systems, like those of paintings or novels or poems.”

Denis Wood, Everything Sings, 9.

As much as we are inclined and conditioned to believe that maps are perfect and objective depictions of land, maps, like any other image or media, are a carefully composed text that contain an implicit narrative. In the case of the WWOOFing website, the maps of host locations constitute themselves into an atlas that propels the idea that most Black and Indigenous people are not interested in organic farming, and that the few exceptions to this rule are not interested in creating sustainable ecologies that we can all learn from. The WWOOFing site, when read as an atlas, reifies white farmers as the sole leaders of sustainable farming development and permaculture-driven farming practices, disappearing the tireless work of the thousands of Black and Indigenous farmers and food sovereigntists across the US into the flattened, neutral-toned void of non-existence. As I visited and revisited this atlas countless times before and after my time WWOOFing, the crux of this project revealed itself in the blank space. I wanted to compose a map that confronts and defies the underlying narratives of the WWOOFing atlas, that, instead of disappearing any farm, community garden, or food justice network that didn’t bring the WWOOFusa site profit, explicitly highlighted the work and visions of the future that these alternate communities and organizations promote. 

As first said by mathematician Alfred Korzybski, “the map is not the territory”. There is no way to craft a map of reality because all maps are physical models of abstraction used to represent a something that must be abstracted for us to be able to comprehend it. All maps have shortcomings because the only map that can accurately and perfectly represent a territory is the territory itself. Because all maps are representative, and all maps are/hold narratives, maps are also beholden to the time in which they’re created. Even maps that function alternatively to traditional Western cartographic understandings, such as the maps made by Native Americans for white settlers of North American territories, are locked in time somewhen, no longer able to depict the location of major cities, the altered paths of rivers, and the miles of highways that now crisscross the country. There are three major facets of the WWOOFusa’s Find a Host atlas that influenced my construction of the project’s counter-map: the depiction of land, the over-focus on the present, and the ways that the filtering feature and categorization of farmstays promote doctrines of separateness.  

WWOOF is a series of networked organizations that exist somewhat independently in each recognized country that they operate, which means that all 132 factions of the network ascribe to colonial borders. As such, everything is organized relative to these borders, and leaves no room for food sourcing practices that rely on seasonal migration or exist in the borderlands. Additionally, WWOOFusa operates entirely on stolen Native land, and does not recognize the sovereignty of any tribal nation within its borders.

While it makes sense that the WWOOF atlas is concerned solely with present farm operations looking for WWOOFers in the current season, this focus does not take into account the importance of time in farming, especially in the regenerative practices used by BIPOC farmers who carry on traditional methodologies. Furthermore, a central tenet of the philosophies present in food sovereignty movements is the consideration of the futurity of communities in the present labor. For most BIPOC food sovereigntists, thinking about the future also requires a connection to the past, as the practices and knowledges of Black and Indigenous agrarians form the roots that inform nearly every aspect of sustainable farming and food-sourcing as it exists today. Creating a map that allows for a more fluid and slow understanding of time enables us to consider the work of past, present, and future food sovereigntists in a cyclical continuum that exists outside of capitalistic constructions of workdays and production value. How can we even begin to conceptualize a more sustainable and self-reliant food future if we aren’t looking to and learning from the wisdom of those who lived in self-sustaining food systems in the past?

Even as the series of filtering options on the Find a Host page allow potential WWOOFers to find a farmstay that best suits their needs, it also functions as a way to separate and exclude various farmstays from one another, prohibiting us from easily finding commonalities between the various locations. Farming and other ways of food sourcing are, first and foremost, about feeding our families and communities. As such, farms, community gardens, seed-saving collectives, and other sites of food production cannot function in isolation: where would the excess food go and how would non-farmers sustain themselves? Farms interact with one another constantly, share knowledge and material goods with each other, and form bonds of mutual reciprocity even outside of BIPOC food sovereignty circles. Farming is as much about building relationships—with other farmers and the local community—as it is about growing food, but the WWOOF atlas as it functions cannot display the local and regional networks that exist outside of their global network because it isn’t profitable. The lack of roads or other physical ties between the farmstays as depicted in the WWOOF atlas furthers this sense of individuality and isolation, but food sovereignty movements (Black and Indigenous-led or otherwise) are centrally rooted in the power of network-building and community bonds. 

When the idea for a counter-map first emerged, my initial instinct was to create a single, multilayered map wherein the first layers displayed the WWOOFusa site maps and the following layers provided sites of Black and Indigenous food sovereignty work that refuted the WWOOF atlas narrative. However, to create a map that effectively refutes the ways that the WWOOF atlas refuses to acknowledge the presence of the Black and Indigenous farmers leading sustainability movements and the Black and Indigenous roots of the sustainable practices that white farmers are profiting off of, it is not enough to just add a few dozen plot points to the expansive network. To simply add points to the WWOOF atlas does nothing to deconstruct the individualist narratives, the reification of colonial borders, or the lack of consideration of time and futurity. Instead, the counter-map needed to exist in a way that lived outside of the WWOOF atlas, beyond place, and through time. This map needed to shift the focus from the narrativized lack and environments of forced dependence that inform the realities of present Black and Indigenous communities to the rich histories of Black and Indigenous food knowledges, traditions, and practices that are being adapted and modernized in the present as BIPOC-led food sovereignty movements envision and create abundant futures.

As I began to consider the importance of the networks that tie food-sourcing sites to each other and their communities at large, the question of how to best visually bind together the various Black and Indigenous-led food sovereignty initiatives emerged. Considering this in combination with the importance of slowness and patience required for growing food, restoring the ecosystem, and saving seeds for the future, the focus of the map shifted from a depiction of the present work to a visualization of the futures that Black and Indigenous food sovereigntists are cultivating. Rather than constructing a map that simply illustrated the present work happening on the land we call the US, the project shifted to an imaginative vision of the potential abundance that our future generations need and deserve.

A number of already-existing maps and art-scapes influenced the vision for this project. The first creative map-based project that provided visual inspiration was the Feral Atlas project. Composed of four map-based “art-scapes” that illustrate what the project refers to as Anthropocene Detonators, these art-scapes each feature several plot points of ferality: events and occurrences of environments reacting to anthropogenic change. These feral map markers each link the viewer to essays, studies, videos, and poems, all of which are linked together through TIPPERS—modes of infrastructure-mediated state change—and Feral Qualities—the ways that these entities respond to infrastructure. There are near-infinite ways to travel through the four arts-capes, and an almost inexhaustible collection of essays that illuminate both the feral map markers and the underlying concepts behind them. In the construction of my map, I aimed to emulate the artfulness of the mapped landscapes and the “axes of comparison” that bind the markers together across the various art-scapes.

The other two major mapping projects/mappers that influenced the work were the Bdote Memory Map and Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s various paintings of the North American landmass. The Bdote memory map charts the ways that Dakota people have related to their ancestral lands (located in present-day Minnesota/Mnisota) across time and the ways that colonizing forces have upset and altered culturally important and sacred places. Each map point opens to provide a brief summary of the historic significance of the location along with several photos and videos depicting and/or describing the effects that settler colonialism has had on the land. Many of the locations on the map are in presently urban areas and are familiar to non-natives residing on or visiting Dakota land, and the map’s primary goal is to impart the historic and continued significance of these sites to non-natives in a way that unsettles their relationship to place. Smith’s “Untitled (Memory Map),” “Tribal Map,” and “Georgia on my Mind” each deal with place and the imposition of settler-colonial understandings of the stolen Native land all US citizens live on. The first two paintings both feature images of the continental US, superimposed with traditional Salish symbology and the names of Native tribal nations, respectively. The third is far more abstract but illustrates several figures and shapes that evoke both the industrial and organic. Each of these works uses a variety of visual techniques to unsettle colonial relationships to land and borders, reminding anyone who witnesses them that Native people have lived on their lands, are living on their lands, and will continue to survive and thrive on their homelands despite the executing force of settler colonialism. 

The aforementioned maps, images, and the essence of the work of Black and Indigenous food sovereigntists are what provided me with the visual and conceptual inspiration to create this map, which I’ll hereby refer to as a Map of Abundant Futures. As I began to sketch out my design for the map, I used these works to construct a natural landscape that depicted the material and relational abundance that food sovereignty initiatives use to fuel their work into perpetuity. As I drafted, I knew that two visual features were essential for the final product to properly capture the embodied responses I felt while learning about the work of each individual and community contained in the map-scape: flowing water and an interwoven connection of rope-like roads. 

In The Site of Memory, Toni Morrison writes of the Mississippi River “‘floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was” (99). The water that floods the Map of Abundant Futures is intended to invoke the importance of remembering who and where the practices that form self-reliant and sustainable/sustaining food systems come from. It is also a reminder that the violence done unto Black and Indigenous people and their lands cannot be undone or forgotten, but that the knowledges and practices that have survived white supremacy and settler colonialism thus far are what will carry us all to this place of perfect memory and guide the way to a more abundant future. 

The ropelike roads that crisscross the map are intended to symbolize the ties that bind us together on the path towards this vision of the future. They follow the contours of the landscape in some places while emulating urban street grids in others, but they’re linked together through multiple pathways. This choice is meant to signify two things: first, regardless of location or identity, we are all bound together and implicated differently in the move towards a sustaining food future, and second, the individual visions or material needs of food sovereigntists will not all align perfectly but are all crucial to changing the present material reality and invoke radical thought in ways that have more connections than dominant ideologies want us to believe.

The resulting map does not yet feel complete to me, but I’m not sure it ever could. In the end, this work is only one visualization of the imagined futures that Black and Indigenous food sovereigntists are propelling us toward, and will always fall flat in comparison to their rich ideas and pertinent work. After all, a map is and can only ever be an imperfect representation of the reality we’re hoping to depict. If you want to see this visual of a vision become a reality, then listen to the Black and Indigenous food sovereigntists who are speaking, working, and creating in your communities. They are there, doing the work, and there is nothing I could write, paint, or collage that would ever fully capture the song of futurity that they’re crafting. In the words of Denis Wood,

“I say to you there is no real deal. There is only this starlight falling tonight on these asphalt streets still warm with the sun’s heat, these slopes down which the streets slip, these mains beneath them with the runoff from this afternoon’s rain, and—listen!—if you bend over the manhole cover, you can hear the sound of the rushing water. There are only these wires scarring this sky, these trees with their heavy shade, this streetlight casting those shadows of branch and leaf on the sidewalk, those passing cars and that sound of a wind chime. But none of it is Boylan Heights tout court and none of our maps pretends to catch more than a note or two of a world in which everything’s singing.”

Everything Sings, 26.