“Si jamais j’oublie”: Mapping Family Memories through a Pedagogy of Care

This article examines how family memory unfolds through cartographic practices that are intimate, fragile, and performative. Drawing on four student projects produced in the Humaps Lab at the University of Padova, it argues that mapping functions less as a locative representation than as a gesture of care and storytelling. The works analyzed—a sonic map of diasporic trajectories, a digital genealogy of family migrations, a body-mapping technique, and a cartographic storyboard on maternal lineages—translate fragments of personal and family memories into multimodal cartographic archives. These amateur mappings foreground incompleteness, postdigitality, and postmemory as constitutive elements of cartographic knowledge. Rather than fixing histories, they keep them in motion, provisional, and dialogic. Situating these practices within the cartographic humanities, the article proposes that the class can operate as an atelier of memory mapping, where students learn to inhabit the map as a living performance, a situated act in which spatial representation, storytelling, and embodiment unfold together.