Kollektiv Orangotango

= Activist mapping collective: organizes critical mapping workshops for producing Counter-Cartographies

URL = https://notanatlas.org/

Description

"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 oppositional actors who instigate social change by prefiguring social alternatives. We conduct emancipatory educational work as well as con­crete political and artistic interventions. These are supposed to enforce reflections on and changes of social conditions. Through workshops, publications, mappings, excursions, and creative in­terventions within public space, we collectively learn how to read space and how to initiate emancipatory processes from below. By sticking to the traditions of activist research, we connect theoret­ical reflections and concrete actions.

So far we have engaged in the fields of right to the city, (urban) agriculture, critical pedagogy, alternative housing and solidarity economy, mostly in Europe and also in Latin America. But kollektiv orangotango also functions as a platform for dif­ferent actions. In the case of Not-an-Atlas, its publication was realized by kollektiv orangotango in cooperation with other activists and academics. That is the reason why it was named kollektiv orangotango+.

All of this is happen­ing through collective and self-organized practice. In other words: “We’re going slow, because we’re going far”!"

(https://notanatlas.org/about/)

More information

• Critical Mapping: "Based on a long tradition of counter-cartographies from the fields of art, science and political activism, we use the power of maps to make marginalized perspectives visible. Collective mapping is a playful tool to take a joint look at spatial structures and processes, to question power and power relations and to develop perspectives for emancipatory approaches."

* Book: This Is Not an Atlas.