Utopian cartography and political imagination in Palestine-Israel

As an archive of geopolitical change, as well as recent regional history, maps provide a helpful representation of the land, and yet, they have another, less visible function as the locations and roads have counterpoints: omitted place names and roads that close for some, but not others. Maps present a record in flux, and in the case of Palestine-Israel, the cartography has been drawn by many hands: from the lines demarcated by British Mandate officials between 1918 and 1948, to the borders constructed by the Israeli government since 1948, and onwards to web mapping platforms that reflect the diverse ways that space is represented and read.

There is a rich corpus on the significance of mapping in Palestine-Israel (Sharif 2019; Antrim 2018), but less has been written about the maps drafted by Palestinian artists who imagine an alternative cartography of the region. Drawing on J. Brian Harley’s understanding that maps are value laden (and therefore never value-free) (2009, 129), this paper considers how maps have been given another purpose, as artists engage in acts of remembrance, such as in Bisan Abu-Eisheh’s Sorry, Your Search for ‘Palestine’ Produced No Results (2013), and imagine spaces free from blockages, as portrayed by Mohammed Abusal’s A Metro for Gaza (2013).

Reflecting on these works and others, the paper unpacks how artistic representations of geopolitical cartographies are evolving, as well as what they can tell us about how power is visually represented and its implications for our understanding and knowledge of contested sites.