BLUEPRINTS FOR URBAN OCCUPATION

I made this cartonera in July 2020, as a way to process and respond to the social tumult incited by the brutal police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May of that year. The sadness and rage, and renewed vigor to the struggle for racial equality in the United States cascaded from the Minneapolis riots to cities around the globe, demanding justice and a redefinition of what a police “force” ought to be. In the United States, the long-standing, sometimes seemingly bottomless, action for racial equality results from the foundational, willfully ignorant sin of enslaving Africans. For many white people (including, in many ways, myself) Floyd’s murder seemed to clarify the solidarity of the global community of People of Color, who tend to have a shared history of being discriminated against because of skin color.

It is with this solidarity in mind that I made this cartonera. Using this widely-used urban geography textbook, I pasted clippings of abstracted urban types from around the world. A common visual strategy in urban geography, these are not maps exactly, but urban forms that tend to repeat across regions with shared history, economy, culture, and topography. The idea is that to revolt against state-sponsored, racist violence in any particular city around the world, the tactics must be informed by how the city is arranged. This is not a playbook, but rather a thinking piece. Its three-dimensionality and topological attributes (see below) remind us of the similarities we share in the struggle for equality, and how those various forms of oppression have made the shape of cities in various ways around the world.

CARTONERA

Editoriales cartoneras (cardboard publishing) is a book-making technique that reuses the cardboard boxes that have proliferated in many parts of the world due to increases in e-commerce and its need, as it were, to ship large numbers of items to and from warehouses. What began in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the wake of a 2001 financial crisis, has spread throughout much of Latin America, including most strongly, perhaps, Mexico and Brazil. As described by the Cartonera Publishing project, based in the U.K., the practice “lies at the intersection between cultural trend and social movement, artistic intervention and community project.” I was introduced to this phenomenon by Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, a professor of print & narrative form at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, during a class she taught at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts called Radical DIY Publishing. While well-established in the Spanish-speaking Americas, the practice is still relatively new in Anglophone countries, with London’s first ever Cartonera Book Festival taking place in 2019. One exception to this is the University of Wisconsin’s robust online Cartonera Publishers Database, which has cataloged and partially digitized upwards of 2,000 cartoneras.

TOPOLOGY

I am inspired by the way 20th-century philosopher Jacques Lacan thought about form and space, particularly topology, as I make folding and bending book forms such as these. Paraphrasing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: for Lacan, topology, the science of surfaces, provided resources for his critiques of the popular images of unconsciousness as a depth psychology, with the mental and sketched pictures relying on simplistic 2- and 3-dimensional Euclidean spaces (e.g. the unconscious lives below the everyday conscious life). Topological constructions assisted Lacan in recasting the unconscious as an ensemble of contortions, curvings, folding inflections, twists, and turns internal to a single plane of minded subjectivity.

The pages, as represented digitally above, are removed and flattened from their original form, which erases the multiple ways the imagery can be brought together. What meaning, for example, might be produced when the diagram of Magnitogorsk, a Russian Communist city, comes in relation with a map of southeast-Asian-owned businesses on a street in St. Paul, Minnesota? And how might that change when the book is folded differently and it comes in relation with Kano, a 16th-century Nigerian city-state? The contortions and twists of this cartonera allow such provocations to emerge.

FURTHER READING

Martin, Lauren, and Anna J. Secor. 2013. "Towards a Post-Mathematical Topology." Progress in Human Geography 38 (3):420-438. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513508209.

Secor, Anna J. 2013. "2012 Urban Geography Plenary Lecture: Topological City." Urban Geography 34 (4):430-444. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2013.778698.