#3: “A Chaos and A Harmony”
On Emotional Mapping
Emotional Mapping is a seven-step mapping process which has become a cornerstone of our practice at RESOLVE Collective. It is a process we developed with secondary school students and community groups in Manor and Castle, Sheffield, but also draws on our collective experiences growing up navigating the fragmented psychogeographies of London.
Emotional Mapping augments the conceptual framework of Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City but specifically values the conversational and performative aspects of participatory mapping. The process visualises contradiction as a means of understanding place, making it an apt tool for negotiating tacit local knowledge. Participants are taken through steps that ask them to mark on Ordnance Survey maps where they live or stay, and then to identify their ‘ends’ or neighbourhoods, then familiar areas and routes. Having done this, they are then asked to annotate physical markers of significance on the map, non-tangible markers, such as tastes, smells, and memories, and finally gut feelings in reaction to places on the map.
For Angel Alley, we mapped with participants from Cardboard Citizens, Freedom Press, and Whitechapel Gallery and with each session we remixed the process for an array of results.
With Cardboard Citizens, we chose not to showcase or disseminate their map so as to protect the anonymity of the participants and instead it now belongs to the charity. The participants drew over a London-wide A-to-Z that only just about matched their collective knowledge of the city. Key social resources and places of respite were anchors in a seemingly ubiquitous network of memories, emotions, imaginations, and tacit knowledges. We were transported to the long-forgotten pasts of neighbourhoods we thought we knew, an endless proliferation of extant and extinct squats, raves, and shelters, and into the lives of a truly remarkable group of people.
For Freedom Press, we asked the participants to build the map from scratch in addition to going through the emotional mapping process. Together they constructed a scale-less cosmology of blended worlds; with orientation, distance, and relation defined not by coordinates on the Earth’s surface but by entanglement with an anarchist universe. This anti-atlas had a clandestine quality reminiscent of E. Simms-Campbell’s 1937 map of Harlem speakeasies, overlaid with the disorientation of Dennis Wood’s seemingly placeless ‘narrative atlases’ of Boylan Heights. It was methodically opaque, with present and historical anarchist spaces being plotted yet not revealed. Here, location was a byproduct of hegemonic resistance on perhaps the only ‘map’ of London with Angel Alley, logically, in its centre.
Lastly, Whitechapel Gallery staff with a range of experience at the gallery also built their map from memory, producing an altogether different cartography of East London. Their maps depicted the Aldgate, Whitechapel, Shoreditch, and Bethnal Green areas in molecular detail, speaking to both popular perceptions of the areas whilst furtively harbouring a number of nuanced perspectives. From an “annoying[ly] busy” Liverpool Street to the joyous approach of Victoria Park, three of these maps are shown here alongside the map from Freedom Press.
This pamphlet can be picked up for free at the Whitechapel Gallery, please contact publicprogrammes@whitechapelgallery.org to reserve your copy.
