Subjectivity of the Map: Cartographying with the Body

Lucia Jalón Oyarzun and I share a fascination for the act of cartographying. In this conversation, we establish the impossibility for a map to live by the status of objectivity that the common understanding of it comprises. We look at cartographies accomplished by her students or by Peter Greenaway in his film A Walk Through H. (1978), which, on the contrary, embrace their subjectivity. This embrace is often characterized by their modus operandi that creates these maps through a dimensioning accomplished directly by the body, the body being what is subjected by the spaces that these cartographies describe. Lucia Jalón Oyarzun is an architect by the ETSAM School of Architecture of Madrid (2010) and Master in Advanced Architectural Projects (2011) by the same university. There she is now the Coordinator of the Landscape Specialty Line at the MArch II in Advanced Architectural Projects (MPAA) where she also teaches at its Landscape Fall Lab and #crimescapes workshop. Since 2011 she holds a UPM post-graduate fellowship to work on her PhD thesis ‘What a body can do: the political as generator of a common spatiality’ as member of the Cultural Landscape Research Group and since 2013 she is editor-in-chief of displacements: an x’scape journal. In which first number, to be launched in March, some of the mapping works commented in the conversation will be published. Her research interests focus on the relation between the political and the spatial construction of the common and the relationships between body and the built environment.