ABSTRACT
Art provides a wide spectrum of communication tools, reaching diverse audiences, which facilitates the creation of social meaning. Socially engaged art practice is configured by interrelations between technological media, social movements, and cultural industries. Cultural mapping as a systematic tool facilitates the involvement of communities in the identification and recording of local cultural assets, and recognizing and making visible the ways local stories, practices, relationships, memories, and rituals constitute places as meaningful locations. Cultural mapping techniques present methods for understanding how local constructions reveal aesthetic values from the context of the landscape. The Herbarium project provided a platform for understanding how methods of cultural mapping may engage artistic expertise and community participation, focusing on relationships between nature and culture. The Herbarium project shows how artistic mapping of local knowledge helps in the recognition, validation, articulation and making visible local knowledge, reconfiguring the day-to-day experience of local life, finding a balance between digital culture and material culture.
