Dr Luisa Gandolfo will deliver a talk at The Bodleian Libraries' Oxford Seminars in Cartography (TOSCA) 30th Anniversary Conference, Artful Maps: the Visual Culture of Cartography, to be held on September 25 and 26.
The interdisciplinary conference will explore how art shapes cartography’s processes, products, and personnel, encompassing various areas of the world and time periods.
In particular, the conference considers how artists have attended to maps and the ways that aesthetic choices influence the message that artist's maps convey.
In her paper, entitled, 'Utopian cartography and political imagination in Palestine-Israel', Dr Gandolfo explores the ways that maps of Palestine-Israel have varied depending on the cartographer.
With the rise of online mapping platforms, maps have taken on new purposes, as mechanisms of remembrance, counter-erasure, and representations of past, present, and future utopias and dystopias.
Focusing on the work of Palestinian artists Bisan Abu-Eisheh and Mohamed Abusal (A Metro in Gaza, 2013, pictured above), the paper considers the practice of memory work and the ways that absence and desire are represented through tactile and visual maps.
The two-day event will be recorded; for further details on presenters and papers, visit the conference website.