05/11 ’25
Subjective Mapping: A Methodology of Participative Cartography
🕐 Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 6.30 pm
📍John Cabot University, Rome 🇮🇹
🔗 RSVP forms.office.com/e/Y0fqLkBcEu
🙏🏻 Anna Gorchakovskaya, Chi Garlanda
The Department of Communication and Media Studies is pleased to announce an open lecture with designer and researcher Annelys de Vet: Subjective Mapping: A Methodology of Participative Cartography.
In this lecture, designer and researcher Annelys de Vet presents Subjective Mapping as an artistic research methodology that reclaims mapping as a tool of empathy, resistance, and situated knowledge production. Drawing on over two decades of practice with the Subjective Atlas series, she explores how collaborative cartography can unveil lived realities, amplify marginalized voices, and cultivate forms of local agency often silenced by dominant representational systems.
The Subjective Atlas of Palestine will serve as a key case study to reflect on how design can operate as both a political and poetic act—foregrounding personal narratives as counter-maps to imposed borders and geopolitical abstractions. Through this lens, de Vet traces how subjective mapping evolved from a participatory design practice into a rigorous artistic research methodology: one that connects people through drawing relations, guiding associative thinking, and opening up more contextual and relational ways of understanding place.
The lecture will reflect on the ethical and pedagogical dimensions of working collectively and cross-culturally, considering how artistic research can foster solidarity, resist colonial epistemologies, and generate affective forms of knowledge. By situating mapping as both a method and a mindset, de Vet invites participants to rethink how artistic practice can become a means of learning from, rather than representing, the world.
This event will be held at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 5, in Aula Magna Renella, New Campus. 🔗 RSVP forms.office.com/e/Y0fqLkBcEu
The event is followed by a workshop on November 7 at 10am in Aula Magna Renella (New Campus).
Throughout the workshop participants will engage with subjective counter-mapping as a tool for decolonial practice and alternative storytelling. Together we will explore the map as a creative instrument for understanding relationships between actions, thoughts, space, power, and politics. In a shared exercise, we will imagine what a Subjective Atlas of Rome could look like.
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