Surfacing cartographies: encountering maps at the intersection of carto-spheres and water-spheres

In a recent intervention, map artists and activists Cristina T. Ribas and Paul Schweizer from collective orangotango (2022, p. 20) proposed ‘hydrocartography’ as a way to integrate the aesthetic force and ethics of water in the ‘generative unpredictability of any cartographic encounter’. Through shared artistic practices with workshops participants, they react to ‘arid cartography [which] tends to depict water as a knowable separate element, enclosed in its rightful domains —rivers, lakes, oceans— visualized with graphic elements such as static points, lines, and demarcated surfaces’. Ribas and Schweizer (2022, p. 20) suggest that their ‘hydrocartographic project acknowledges both the world’s fluid cognition and the cartographer’s becoming in these flows’. In this artistic and militant activity, hydrologic and cartographic imagination are waved together in a highly evocative manner. To some extent, in my view, a similar gesture can be seen at play in the Interior Aquapelagos debate article by Phil Hayward and Francesco Visentin. In their piece, Hayward and Visentin elaborate on internal waterscapes in conceptual, representational and practical ways, testing the use of ‘aquapelago’ as a possible frame to grasp the multifaceted realm of inland waterways. Saliently, in doing so, they deeply engage with cartographic representations to discuss their proposal. A series of historical cartographic visuals is put together to let the reader enter the watery dynamics and complexities of the region around Udine, which is the empirical laboratory chosen for such a theoretical proposal. This response comments upon their use of maps to advance aquapelagic theorisation.