Our bodies bear more experience than we are aware. We pay more attention to our thoughts and mental activity than to body sensors and archived experiences. The body is a bearer of social and political meaning; ability, shape, skin, gender, etc. Norms and meanings are entangled with everything related to the body. From teenagers to adults, reconnecting with embodied experiences means opening up relevant questions in relation to our identity as human beings and our positioning as artists and designers.

Giving space for self-experience and opening up a conversation with peers is a method that can be developed accordingly during collaboration. We can name it peer designing.

Counter-mapping is the tool chosen to visualize shared research with a social background.

This assignment is knitted within a feminist, intersectional approach to counter dominant discourses on the body. For centuries, the body has been typically imagined as male (Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci, 1490). This construct still affects half the population (e.g., Covid-19 research was based on the male body, and it’s unclear if it provoked unexpected effects on menstruation).

This assignment starts with an introspection where students will recognize and visually sketch a personal, biographical moment, eventually resulting in a map created in duos to visualize findings.

• A1
  Encourage yourself and students to get comfortable connecting with your bodies. Then, listen to this guided meditation for five minutes (or one you might prefer to record yourself). Afterwards, students have ten minutes to sketch their experiences whilst following the meditation.
  LINK to Soundcloud:
  https://soundcloud.com/rosa-pons-1/opening-the-archive-short?si=06162694e0d147ffaab745b0b48e20d8

• A2
  Encourage students to sketch a simple outline of their body on a shared whiteboard and locate in it the result of their introspection. Adding texts to it is also encouraged.
  Link to Draw.Chat:
  https://draw.chat

• A3
  Guide students to take a few minutes to look at all the sketches and find one that interests them, adding their name next to it. Once a sketch has a name next to it, nobody else can pick it. The owner of the selected sketch adds their name too. Use the chat to start one-to-one conversations amongst students. (This method means managing the time to find a peer and avoiding repetitions: half the students propose and the other half answer).

• A4
  Once students are in duos, create breakout rooms and open a new whiteboard in Draw.Chat. Instruct the students to copy-paste the two maps, sharing the link and starting their conversation. Find common connections, themes, spaces, etc.

• A5
  The final assignment is that the students merge their maps into one: add colors, shapes, images, texts, etc.

Articles:

• Hartnel, Jack. “The many lives of the Medieval Wound Man“. The Public Domain Review. 2016.
  https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-many-lives-of-the-medieval-wound-man
  (An article on how body mapping was used to visualize human experience and healing treatments).
• Mesquita, André. “Counter-Cartographies: Politics, Art and the Insurrection of Maps”.
  notanatlas.org
  (An article on the social function of Counter Cartographies and their value).
• Rizvi, Uzma. “Decolonization as Care.” Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice,” Eds. Strauss, Carolyn and Pais, Ana Paula. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017.
  https://www.academia.edu/31930839/Decolonization_as_Care
  (An article that describes how working with the body as an artistic practice means to engage with others and with our situation in the world allowing our experience to transform).

Mapping examples:

• Grayson Perry, Map of Nowhere (2008)
  http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/collection/artists/perry-grayson-1960/object/map-of-nowhere-perry-2008-p8194
  (An artist using the medieval mappa mundi to discuss the world through the human body).
• Michael Druks, Druksland (1975)
  https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Druksland/AE967EE4F6B23644
  (A self-portrait incorporating topography to map life events, people or institutions).
• Ricardo Basbaum, Connections, Me-You Series, diagram, 2007
  http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/b/behavior/behavior-ricardo-basbaum.html
  (Mapping personal experiences into space).
• Queering the Map
  https://www.queeringthemap.com/
  An archive of LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to space.

This counter-mapping assignment was developed by Rosa Pons Cerdà for a DIDAE training session. It is an alternative to the start of the course Counter-cartographies and (Human) Bodies created with Golnar Abbasi within the Social Practices department at Willem de Kooning Academy (Rotterdam).

Author’s Encouragement
We’ve been educated to understand the body as parts, organs, and functions, yet we’ve missed the body as a bearer of memories. Sharing this realization amongst others results in a sharing of our vulnerability. Proposing a guided meditation in the digital classroom is beneficial because students feel safer and eager to share afterwards, and each teacher can adapt and record the meditation to the goals of the course.

It is a relevant assignment in which the body is the foundation for understanding practice-based research. It offers a de-centering perspective: from me (individual) to we (collaborative) and the discovery of necessary attitudes for teamwork. It results in engaging conversations.

Students find Draw.Chat is a fun, easy app where they draw and chat simultaneously.

Prior Knowledge and Preparation
It requires EDI (Equity Diversity Inclusion) knowledge to adequately prepare the students and hold difficult conversations.

Additional Tools

• https://draw.chat
  Draw.Chat is recommended as a collaborative whiteboard, it is user-friendly and fun to work with for sketching (not for finalizing work).
• Any whiteboard could be used as a substitute if it allows sketching/drawing with peers.