To describe the relation between a landscape and its inhabitants; a relation that transforms a non-place is what chorography does. (chora coming from the Greek word khonos meaning 'place' and graphy from graphein, meaning 'to write', 'to scribe'.) Chorography or 'to write a place' as opposed to the 'to write a land' , as closely connected practice of geography offers, not only produces something quite different, but also demands a whole other type of technique and approach in its process of mapping. Whereas the practice of making geographical maps produces fixed, descriptions of an area throug a measured and mechanical drawing proces, chorographical descriptions of an area ask for a social engagement from their maker. Closely also linked to topography. Chorography includes a strong aocial aspect, concering itself at once with the present and the past of a place and its inhabitants. In terms of mapmaking, geography represents a landscape as physical and abstract facts, topography as varying surface features and chorography as a temporal, historiographical relationship between the landscape and its inhabitants. But what do you call it when the landscape begins to inscribe itself onto the cartographer?
Deidre M.Donoghue
When the landscape begins to map the cartographer.page 54 of P.A.I.R. Chorografie 2010, PeerGrouP
When the landscape begins to map the cartographer.
"Death is apparently not a failure of life but a mode of functioning as intrinsic to life as reproduction."
Bateson, M.C., (1993) "Into the Trees", in: M. Katakis ''Sacred Trusts Essays on Stewardship and Responsibility''. Mercury House, p. 2
Itinerancy
is it possible to find a dwelling, a place within the world, while moving across it? We are fixated with property claims and the possibility of embedding ourselves and of finding our identity in our surroundings. But if identity itself is fluid, the identity of place as much as that of ourselves, is it not natural to be in a constant state of movement rather than standing still? In a world of global exchange, perhaps we are all of us always moving.”
Tacita Dean, PLACE
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the intimate landscape of one's childhoud, that patch of ground we know in detail we will never know anywhere again. Site of discovery and putting names to things, people and places. Working with difference and similitude. Favourite places to avoid. Neighbours and there stories. Textures, smells. Also of play, imagination, experiment. Finding the best location for doing things. Creating worldsunder our own control, fantasy landscapes. A place of exaggeration and irrelevance. Of making rules and breaking rules, of learning to distinguish between 'do' and 'don't do'. A place of improvised responses, rules of thumb - where as Ned Thomas said (Thomas, N. 1991. The welsh Extremist: Modern Welsh Politics, Literature an Society. Talybont, Wales: Y Lofla. 86) 'the child first learns everything which is of real importance, history and geography'.
Y filltir sqwar (the square mile)
Pearson, M. & Shanks, M. Theatre/Archeology. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 139.
WALKING
Walking then is a spatial acting out, a kind of narrative, and the paths and places direct our choreography. This regular moving from one point to another is a kind of mapping, a kind of narrative understanding. Paths link familiar places and bring the posibillity for repeated actions. Differents paths enact different stories of action. Walking is like a story, a series of events, for which the land acts as a mnemonic. And we are aware that our ancestors have also walked these paths no more so than in australia where features in the landscape - often invisible to the uninitiated eye - mark the sites of ancestral acts (Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of landscape. Places, Paths and monuments. Londen: Berg. 37).
SONG
To travel across such a landscape is to remember it into being, it is sedimented with human significances. And the pathways are song-lines, long narrative excursions which remember places in song. To travel the land is to sing the world into being again (Thomas, J. S. 1999. Understanding the Neolithic. London/New York:Routledge.35).2
Yet we tend not to roam endlessly: we stick to a patch; we become familiar with it; we grow attathed to it; we begin to feel 'at home' there. Our human activities become inscribed within a landscape such that every cliff, large tree, stream becomes a familiar place. The landscape then becomes emnedded with memory. 'Daily passages through the landscape become biographical encounters for individuals, recalling traces of past activities and previous events and reading of signs - a split log here, a marker stone there' (Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of landscape. Places, Paths and monuments. Londen: Berg. 27)1
Pearson, M. & Shanks, M. Theatre/Archeology. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 138.