In the Cartographies of Erasure workshop, part of Alexandra Juhasz's collaborative poetry project, we consider the phenomenon of "fake news" as located within a long history of imagined projections of the "real" onto the ideological, historical, narrative, and scientific imagination.
The workshop will ask how have the physical and social sciences, architecture, media, and other disciplines co-produced "official" models and "maps" of place, body, and identity that "precede the territory," erasing existent ecology, experience, difference, and story? How have cartographic and documentary practices become "facts," driven by political economic agents and agendas?
We ask, too, what perceptions, choices, and identity formations are offered (or refused) to the body inscribed into (or erased out of) an imagined place? What allows a body/ system/network to deviate from, exceed, or refuse predetermined mappings, definitions, or structures?
We will read and respond to excerpts from a range of texts, explore our embodied cognitive relationship to our responses through somatic exercises, and produce our own textual experimentation based on media from the #100hardtruths-#fakenews digital media literacy primer.
Lynne DeSilva-Johnson [they/them/xe/per] is an interdisciplinary creator, scholar, and performer. DeSilva-Johnson is an assistant visiting professor at Pratt Institute, as well as founder and managing editor of The Operating System. Per work addresses, in particular, the somatic impact of trauma on persons and systems, as well as the study of resilient, open source strategies for ecological and social change. DeSilva-Johnson is co-editor, with Jay Besemer, of the forthcoming anthology, In Corpore Sano: Creative Practice and the Challenged Body. They are the author of Ground, Blood Atlas, and In Memory of Feasible Grace, as well as two forthcoming titles, the chapbook Sweet and Low, and the collaborative Body Oddy Oddy, with painter Georgia Elrod.