published by Blaffer Art Museum

“We start with lines,” artist Cian Dayrit tells the room. “You can start with roads, rivers, creeks, or coastlines. Label and write your experiences there—the spaces of fear, pain, or trauma.”

These instructions, Dayrit explains, “narrate our personal accounts of abuse, land-grabbing, and other forms of aggression perpetrated by the so-called ‘authorities.’” With each line across a single A4 sheet of paper, participants in Dayrit’s counter-cartography workshop designate a boundary, border, or location to collectively map a community-authored geography.

Dayrit describes the beginning of his artistic practice as an expanded space between community-based participatory actions and solidarity work in the wake of the dictatorship of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. The artist began conducting counter-mapping workshops with the peasant and natmin groups, a colloquial term for the Indigenous national minority. During these sessions, narratives of everyday life, trauma, and collective aspirations are exchanged for narrative maps and drawings made by the participants. Labels, icons, and lines function as symbols that indicate one’s relationship to the land. They explain events such as massacres and aerial bombings, or details about the site itself such as polluted rivers or trails that have been fenced off by developers. These workshops illustrate how cartographic representation of displacement, development, or dispossession can be rewritten by personal narratives.