Hackitectura

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Description

Craig Dalton and Liz Mason-Deese:

"Hackitectura is a small group of militant mapmakers in Spain who participate in constantly evolving transnational, transcontinental activist networks. Starting in the early 2000’s, they were part of a network of activists confronting the militarization of the Spanish-Moroccan border. This project was an effort to rethink and reshape the border region by integrating international networks of people and wireless technology (Cobarrubias, 2009).

Hackitectura works as a map-making node in these networks.

While Hackitectura’s core membership is composed of only a few people, each mapping project intentionally constructs a much larger topical network that includes artists, researchers and activists in the map-making process. This networking not only produces and disseminates the map, but also integrates these participants into the alternative practices plotted on the map. Hackitectura’s members directly cite Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of mapping to create new possibilities and in this case, border regions (Cobarrubias, 2009).

Hackitectura’s map Cartografía del Estrecho (Cartography of the Straits of Gibraltar) creates an alternative understanding of the Spanish-Moroccan border region. The border is not an abstract geopolitical line but an increasingly complicated, contested space. The inversely oriented (north at the bottom) map highlights connections between southern Spain and northern Morocco to show a single region. A multitude of migrants enters Europe in flows, past motion sensors, semi-military repression and expulsion. The idea of the map is to follow the flows that already traverse the border, such as migrants, Internet data and cell phone calls, as well as capital and police. The flows reshape the very border into a border region. In this mapping project, Hackitectura and their collaborators map the border region to contest and transcend it. Doing so depicts and literally helps produce a different kind of border than the crisp, abstract lines in a traditional atlas (Cobarrubias, 2009)." (http://www.acme-journal.org/vol11/CCC2012.pdf)