Maps that were never published

Somewhere in Potosí, in the seventeenth century, a man descended into a mountain that would kill him. He carried a candle. The silver he extracted from the Cerro Rico would travel further than he ever would — to Habsburg coffers, to Spanish creditors, to slave traders along the African coast — circulating through a world whose total geography he could not have imagined, financing wars in which he had no stake, enabling purchases of people he would never meet. And yet the mountain kept records of him. The rock strata remembered the labor. What the maps of the time did not show was where he entered, where he fell. I think about this when I look at maps. Not the elegant ones — Humboldt's careful measurements in the Physical Atlas, the clean vectors of contemporary GPS — but the ones that are missing. The gaps. The routes drawn by bodies that cartographers had no interest in tracing.

Humboldt left for Latin America in 1799 in a state of euphoria. He wrote to his brother Wilhelm that he and Bonpland were "running around like fools," overwhelmed by wonders. The semantics of discovery pervade his early letters — that particular European joy of standing before a world apparently not yet organized, not yet legible, awaiting the grid. He was, as Ottmar Ette writes, "at the beginning of a new discourse about the New World," one he would spend decades elaborating into something called knowledge. What Humboldt could not quite see — or chose not to — is that the world he arrived in was already fully mapped by those who lived in it. The Mita laborers of Potosí had their own cartographies of suffering, of descent, of which tunnels collapsed and which held. These maps were never published.

There is a distinction worth dwelling on, between a map that fails to represent and a map that actively works against representation. Humboldt's Physical Atlas was not merely incomplete. It was organized around a gaze — one that converted the plurality of the world into a legible surface for European consumption, arranging mountains, rivers, and peoples into a coherent system in which the observer stood outside and above. The atlas did not simply describe; it produced a world in which some things counted as data and others did not. The labor in the Cerro Rico. The knowledge of the indigenous populations whose routes Humboldt followed. The names already given to the places he named again.

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We live now in a fully mapped era. Our gestures are recorded: in traffic systems, in the metadata of messages, in the coordinates logged when a boat crosses a sea border that a satellite watches from above. The question is not whether mapping happens but who does it, to whom, and for what purpose. Maps are power — not because they distort reality (though they do, always; no projection is neutral) but because they produce reality, settling into the landscape as if they had always been there. 

What would it mean to make a counter-map? Not simply a corrective — a more accurate representation of what is already there — but a map that changes the question itself, that reveals the mechanisms of the maps it contests. This is different from adding marginalized voices to an existing framework. It means asking who draws, who is drawn, and what kind of world becomes imaginable depending on the answer.

In Buenaventura, on Colombia's Pacific coast, the community of Comuna 6 faced this question not as a theoretical proposition but as a condition of survival. A motorway completed in 2005 cut directly through their neighborhood, fragmenting decades of accumulated social geography — the invisible lines by which a community knows itself, which corners belong to which memory, where the mourning happens and where the celebrations do. In response, they took the archive of Don Temis, a murdered activist who had spent years documenting the life and struggles of his people, and returned it to the streets it described. Lugares de las luchas comunitarias — places of community struggle — appeared on signs throughout the neighborhood, marking sites of conflict, of loss, of continued presence. A mural of Don Temis now lives beneath a footbridge connecting the two halves of what the motorway tried to sever. The map became a bridge became a memory.

What this community understood is something that academic counter-cartography sometimes forgets: that a counter-map derives its force not from its formal ingenuity but from its rootedness in inhabitation. It is made by people who live in what they are mapping. It does not claim objectivity. It claims presence. And presence, in a place structured by erasure, is already an argument.

Which is perhaps why I find myself returning, again and again, to the image of the man in the mountain. Not as a symbol — he was a person, with a name history did not consider worth preserving — but as a reminder of what the grid cannot hold. The rock strata remembered him even when the map did not. There are forms of inscription that precede and survive official cartography. Counter-designs, I want to say, are not only for those who have been cartographically erased. They are for anyone who has learned to look at a map and notice what it is working to conceal — the labor in the mountain, the route through the tunnel, the name given before the renaming.

The question is not whether new maps are possible. It is whether we are willing to let them change what we think we already know.

Migrant potentiality

There is a moment in M.I.A.'s Borders — released in December 2015, four months into what German media had already named the Flüchtlingskrise — where the camera lingers on a group of young men arranged into the silhouette of a boat. Their bodies form the hull. M.I.A. stands at the prow. The image is striking, compositionally deliberate, and deeply troubling in ways I have been trying to name ever since.

I want to try again here.

In the summer of 2015, the Mediterranean washed both people and images onto the shores of our perception. The dynamics were inseparable: flight and its visual mediation arrived simultaneously, so that the news cycle and the experience of arrival became entangled in ways that made it nearly impossible to distinguish between witnessing and consuming. Into this saturation, artists intervened. Pop music, film, performance — they all reached for the image of the crossing, trying to find aesthetic forms adequate to what was happening. Borders was M.I.A.'s intervention: shot in a refugee camp in Greece, the video aimed — explicitly — to do something other than what mainstream media coverage was already doing.

And in some respects it succeeded. The imagery refuses the documentary idiom: there are no boats sinking, no bodies on shorelines. The colors are warm, the movements choreographed, the aesthetic somewhere between fashion editorial and protest banner. M.I.A. does not attempt to pass as neutral. She is present as herself — Sri Lankan-born, British, Tamil, globally famous — positioned alongside and among the young men she films. "Identities, what's up with that? / Your privilege, what's up with that?" (0:52–0:56). The lyric calls out the viewer directly. This is not the distanced gaze of the humanitarian news photograph.

And yet.

As the video progresses, M.I.A. remains consistently centered — compositionally, luminously. As her surroundings dim, she stays lit. In the image of the human boat, the young men's bodies become material: scaffold, symbol, vessel. They carry her. This is precisely the structure of well-intentioned representation that Trinh T. Minh-ha diagnosed decades ago — speaking over rather than nearby, claiming proximity to a subject while preserving the conditions that keep that subject as object. The refugees in Borders are visible, which is more than most mainstream coverage offered them. But visibility, as Stuart Hall reminds us, is not the same as subjecthood. They are seen; they do not speak.

What would it mean to actually disrupt the representational space, rather than reframe it from the same vantage point?

The question matters because the aestheticization of Fluchterfahrung — the experience of flight — carries specific risks. When "being a refugee" becomes a visual signature, a category that precedes and overrides all other attributes of personhood, the aestheticizing gesture does something structurally similar to what it claims to oppose: it fixes. It marks. The refugee remains legible only as refugee, and the viewer remains legible only as witness. Both are stabilized in positions they cannot leave.

What I find myself returning to is the concept of Autonomie der Migration — the autonomy of migration — as Manuela Bojadžijev and Serhat Karakayalı developed it: migration not as crisis, not as problem to be managed, but as a constitutive social force, as a form of political life already underway. If migration is already active, already organizing, already speaking — in the legal battles of refugee organizations, in the community archives of displaced collectives, in the languages people refuse to abandon — then the artistic question is not how to represent migration, but how to create forms that can receive it, that do not domesticate it into legibility for someone else's consumption.

M.I.A.'s "refugee we" is genuinely interesting as a rhetorical gesture — it attempts to construct solidarity across an asymmetry that ordinarily enforces separation. But the construction of "we" is always a site of struggle. Whose terms does the community form on? Who controls the conditions of belonging? The "refugee we" in Borders still circulates through M.I.A.'s image, her platform, her production economy. It is a "we" assembled by someone with the camera and the budget. This is not a reason to dismiss the video — it is a reason to ask what other forms remain uninvented.

In Migrant Potentiality, Giorgio Agamben's concept of potentiality is quietly at stake — not because he is especially useful for migration theory, but because the distinction between potentiality and actuality maps onto something real in these debates. The young men in Borders are shown as they are: stranded, circumscribed, subjected to the management of their movement. But potentiality — what they could be, what they already are beyond the frame — is not representable through the image of containment, however aesthetically generous. Potentiality lives in what is not shown, in the capacities that border regimes specifically work to suppress, in the forms of life that continue despite the camp.

This is where artistic practice might find its most radical task: not to make the refugee legible within existing representational economies, but to produce forms that register what those economies structurally cannot contain. Not the image of the crossing, but the music made after arrival. Not the human boat, but the archive of a language kept alive in a reception center in Mytilini.

Does art have the capacity to do this? Can an image produced for mass consumption — for Apple Music, for the news cycle, for the viral circuit — genuinely rupture the logic it enters? Or does the medium impose its own conditions of legibility before the content has a chance to speak?

I don't think the question has a clean answer. But I notice that the works I return to most — Filipa César's Spell Reel, Philip Scheffner's Revision, Trinh T. Minh-ha's insistence on speaking nearby — are all works that refuse resolution, that leave the asymmetry visible rather than papering over it, that make their own conditions of production part of the thinking. They do not grant permission for the viewer to feel that something has been done.

What would it mean for citizenship itself — not as legal status but as political imaginary — to take migration as its inherent condition rather than its constitutive exception? It remains, as I said, a highly unlikely utopia. But utopia, as Ernst Bloch understood it, is not the description of an achievable future. It is the pressure of the not-yet on the present. The image that won't quite close. The hull still moving through water, even when the camera is off.