ABSTRACT
Mapping as performance involves more than a reliance upon visual acuity, hence why a turn to non-representational theories and approaches can be useful in re-thinking the transformational capacities of cartography. Of substantive salience to cartographical studies has been the invocation of ideas surrounding performativity and non-representational understandings of performance. Given the disparate array of mapping performances in existence, it is both impossible and undesirable to generalize with regard to the politics and ethics of such earthly expressions. The ethical injunction is in how to harness the radical mutability of mapping performances without diluting them into tired political statements, or likewise into dubious representational tropes concerning the meaning of certain signs, territories and symbols. Moreover, the quite distinct provenance of each of these vignettes also illustrates the indelible, prominent and enduring role that mapping commands of past and present; a pre-eminence amongst other forms of earthly visualization that shows no sign of diminishing.
