We are not above

From April to July 2025 kollektiv orangotango, Digital Geography Working Group (University Halle) and StadtLabor (University Münster) realize the collaborative This Is Not an Atlas-Online Lecture Series focusing, in this first edition, on critical mapping practices related to “Mapping the earth from inside”.

In this era marked by multiple crises—pandemics, climate breakdown, soil degradation, etc.— the Earth transcends its role as a mere stage; it has evolved into – indeed, it always was – an active participant, challenging, thus, the conventional perception of the world as “around us”. It is imperative that we reimagine the Earth in the context of our (co)existence. To achieve this, a fundamental shift in orientation is necessary. We have to reposition ourselves within the critical zone and cultivate awareness of the interconnected, more-than-human relationships within the planetary web of life. Mapping a planet under multi-crises condition demands critical cartographers to develop sensitivity, along with ecological affectivity and transcultural tact.

This experimental and collaborative lecture series presents and discusses alternative, pluriversal, and speculative approaches to representing the planet we live on. It highlights the shift from classical (from-above) cartographies to a sensitive perspective of “being-in-the-world.” At its core, it attempts to conceptually go beyond our current satellite images, projections, or critical cartographies. The lecture series revolves around approaches such as Sensorial Mapping, Pluriversal Mapping, Body Mapping, Indigenous Mapping, Deep Mapping and Speculative Mapping, among others, from fields like art, activism, architecture and geography. Our objective is to imagine, and potentially illustrate collectively the Earth from the ground, or simply as a part of us.

Join the lectures here!

Download the program here!

22.4. „We are not above – Mapping from below”
kollektiv orangotango
16:00 – 18:00 CEST, UTC+02:00
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kollektiv orangotango was founded in 2008. Since then it has been constantly developing through a network of critical geographers, friends and activists who deal with questions regarding space, power and resistance. With our geographical activism, we seek to support processes and actors who instigate social and ecological change by prefiguring social and ecological alternatives. We conduct emancipatory educational work as well as concrete political, ecological and artistic interventions. Through our work we collectively (de)learn how to read space and how to support self-organized processes from below. In 2018 we published «This Is Not an Atlas».

6.5. “Sensibility Mapping”
Dr. Élise Olmedo & Prof. Sébastien Caquard
16:00 – 18:00 CEST, UTC+02:00
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Élise Olmedo is a postdoctoral researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, Passages Laboratory) and affiliated with the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University in Montreal (Quebec). Her research explores theoretical and empirical practices to develop sensibility mapping as a creative research tool in social sciences. This approach offers an embodied and processual perspective on places, reflecting geographical perceptions and subjectivity through the interplay of representation and experience. After two postdoctoral researches at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilization, the Mucem in Marseilles (France, 2017-2019) and at Concordia University in Montreal (2019–2023), working on the mapping of emotions in life stories, she is now developing a Marie Sklodowska-Curie European project at the Passages Laboratory in Bordeaux (France, 2023-2025). This project focuses on the need of alternative maps in collaboration with indigenous communities in French Guiana.

Sébastien Caquard is a geographer and a mapmaker interested in mapping stories to better understand the complex relationships that exist between places, narratives, memories and maps. His research lies at the intersection of Cartography, Oral History and the Humanities. As the founder and director of the Geomedia Lab, he has led the development of Atlascine, an open source mapping application designed to map collections of stories and to reflect on cartographic processes and practices. Atlascine has been used to produce several online atlases, including The Atlas of Rwandan Life Stories that has been exhibited at the Kigali Memorial Genocide in June 2024. Sébastien Caquard is a professor in the department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University (Montréal Tiohtià:ke).

watch the recorded lecture here:

20.5. “Between indigenous anti-mining struggles, bodymapping and cosmovisions – A school of territorial resistance”
Dr. Manuel Bayón Jiménez
16:00 – 18:00 CEST, UTC+02:00
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Manuel Bayón Jiménez is a graduate geographer (2011) and PhD(c) in Regional Studies (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) about indigenous struggles in Amazonian Urbanization. As part of the Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador, he has been cartographer for Yasunidos in the first national referendum that left the oil in the soil, and the first Interamerican Court sentence for Amazonian isolated indigenous peoples. He has worked with different geographical methodologies, from body-mapping and mobile ethnographies to pollution and boundary maps. As part of Critical Geography Collective, he is part of the Territorial Defense Popular School, that has been the vehicle to popularize tools and reflections against extractivism. Now, he is working at Colegio de Mexico University and is studying Mexican groups involved in tourism and infrastructures in Yucatan peninsula.

watch the recorded lecture here:

3.6. “Sensorial cartography applied to embodied ecologies – Mapping territories as we experience it, from our body to the toxicity of our living spaces”
Dr. Philippe Rekacewicz & Dr. Mariana Rios Sandoval
16:00 – 18:00 CEST, UTC+02:00
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Philippe Rekacewicz (b. 1960) is a geographer, cartographer, and information designer. He was an editor at Le Monde diplomatique (1989–2012), co-leading the production of geopolitical atlases (2002-2012). From 1996 to 2008, he was chairman of the cartographic department of GRID-Arendal (UNEP) in Norway. Since 2006, he has been dedicated to research projects exploring new forms of cartographic expression (radical, sensorial, and experimental mapping) participating in international carto-artistic events. He co-founded Visionscarto.net with Philippe Rivière. In 2017, he joined the Crosslocations program at the University of Helsinki and the Territories of Urban Extension program at ETH Zurich. Since 2020, he has been a researcher and associate lecturer at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Author of thousands of cartographic documents, his style and distinctive touch reflect his research in graphic semiology and geometry. Co-author of Radical Cartography: Explorations (La Découverte, 2021) and Palestine-Israel, A Visual History (Le Seuil, 2024).

Mariana Rios Sandoval, born in 1980, is a researcher at the department of Social Sciences at Wageningen University, with a background in biology (BSc at UNAM, Mexico City) and in anthropology (PhD at UvA, Amsterdam). Her work is situated at the intersection of anthropology and STS (science and technology studies) from where she studies the embodied, daily experience of toxicity. She is interested in the politics, poetics, and sensoriality of the everyday. In the study of chemicals as ethnographic objects, in the relationship between bodies and environments and in collaborative, methodological experiments that help advance social and environmental justice.

24.6. “Experimental Pluriversal Mapping of Spacetime in Spiral – Insights into speculative cartography exercises”
Dr. Pablo Mansilla
16:00 – 18:00 CEST, UTC+02:00
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Pablo Mansilla is Professor at the Institute of Geography, Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso, and Director of the research group Social Geography and Alternative Territories. His work, grounded in decolonial thought and Latin American critical theory has a strong commitment to Indigenous peoples and social movements across Latin America. In recognition of his contributions to social geography, he received the Glenda Laws Award 2025 from the American Association of Geographers (AAG). His interdisciplinary research within the social sciences has led to numerous publications, including “Cultural Cartography of Wallmapu: Elements for Decolonizing the Map in Mapuche Territory “, co-authored with Indigenous intellectuals. Currently he is leading the research project «Climatic Pluriverses: A Decolonial Perspective on Geohumanities for Alternative Territories in Climate Change». 

8.7. “Terra Forma – Speculative Mapping”
Dr. Alexandra Arènes
16:00 – 18:00 CEST, UTC+02:00
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Alexandra Arènes is a graduate architect (2009) and holds a PhD in Architecture (University of Manchester, 2022). Her research and practice focus on understanding and representing landscapes in the context of climate change, at S.O.C (Société d’Objets cartographiques) and Shaā, studio for architecture and urbanism. The studio designed an installation at the ZKM museum in Karlsruhe for the exhibition « Critical Zones – Observatories for Earthly Politics », curated by Bruno Latour. She is co-author of Terra Forma, a book of speculative maps published by MIT (2022). Her new book ‘Gaïagraphie. Carnet d’exploration de la zone critique’ (B42, 2025) features the fieldwork in the critical zone and fosters a collaboration within earth scientists at developing maps of the Earth’s cycles at the IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris). Her work can be seen at gaiagraphie.com and at s-o-c.fr.