Now in Progress

As travelers abroad, we are all explorers. We experience discovery and disorientation. We navigate using a range of tools that serve as ‘maps’ and ‘guides’: our bodies, our languages, our tools and technologies, our books and social relationships, our skills and art practices, our cultural exposures and competencies. Mapping can be approached in many ways: as bodily sensation; as personal experience; through digital technologies for tracking space and time; as metaphor; as cultural concept; as the forms or ‘semiotics’ of graphic and/or written languages; and more.

PASCA’s Spring Semester will draw from these ideas, experiences, feelings, and tools, combining them with new ones learned in the studio and classroom. We’ll put this mix to work (and to play) in a range of explorations of the possibilities of ‘mapping’ as a studio and/or a critical practice. Mapping the body through painting and drawing; the uses of image and text across media; the creation of personal landscapes through sculpture, installation, and site-specific work; exploring rule-based systems in collaborative and personal projects; applying digital animation in the context of mapping and space-making; screening and discussing films and videos about space and mapping: all these will be part of our ‘map-making’ activities over the course of the semester.

Cultural site seminars to Madrid, Barcelona, Paris and Berlin will round out our work with maps and mapping, giving us a literal and on-the-ground sense of how ‘following our maps’ can also become the lived and embodied—vivid and unforgettable – experience of a lifetime.