Experimental Geography
Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism
Nato Thompson and Independent Curators International
“What could be more delightful—and unsettling—than turning loose a group of contemporary surrealists, disguised as vagabonds and artists, in the ripe fields of the hyper-real? Experimental Geography isn't about space; it is about terminal strangeness.”
—Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear and City of Quartz
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A photo of a secret CIA prison. A map designed to help visitors reach Malibu’s notoriously inaccessible public beaches. Guidebooks to factories, prisons, and power plants in upstate New York. These are some of the more than one hundred projects represented in Experimental Geography, a groundbreaking collection of visual research and mapmaking from the past ten years.
Experimental Geography explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether). This lavishly illustrated book features more than a dozen maps; artwork by Francis Alÿs, Alex Villar, and Yin Xiuzhen; and recent projects by The Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Raqs Media Collective, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.
The collection is framed by essays by bestselling author Trevor Paglen, Jeffrey Kastner, and editor Nato Thompson.
PRESS AND REVIEWS
Nato Thompson discusses Experimental Geography
—KPFA's Against the Grain Link
"Living in cities, we need a new way to think about how we move and what we notice... This strange, exciting book offers just that—a new way to notice public space. It is the brainchild of Nato Thompson: the results of his fascinations with urban planning post-Katrina, abandoned or unnoticed urban landscapes and public art."
—Susan Salter Reynold, Los Angeles Times Link
"Another step in the ongoing quest for social energies not yet recognized as art, Experimental Geography brings together a significant group of artists and collectives looking seriously at land use—urban and rural, local and global. Leaving behind the earthworks of the past, and reviving the line-blurring process that defined art and lived experience in 1960s conceptualism, much of this work is not about geography but exist within geography, exploring the politics and infrastructures that can either change or stall the world."
—Lucy Lippard, author of The Lure of the Local
Interview with Nato Thompson
—ART 21 blog Link
"We know that a book touting 'radical approaches to cartography' may not set your pulse racing, but the playful and probing diagrams in Experimental Geography—including a map of the last half-century of arms trades that scribbles out just about the entire globe—ought to at least get your mind melting."
—Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago Link
Feature on Experimental Geography
—Christian Science Monitor Link
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Experimental Geography
Nato Thompson and Independent Curators International
Arts and Photography/Current Events
168 pages / paperback
$29.95 US / $32.95 CAN
ISBN-13: 978-0-09-163658-6
Published: January 2009
A traveling exhibition of Experimental Geography, appears at the following venues:
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
DePauw University
Greencastle, Indiana
September 19 – December 12, 2008
Rochester Art Center
Rochester, Minnesota
February 7 – April 18, 2009
The Albuquerque Museum
Albuquerque, New Mexico
June 28 – September 20, 2009
Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
October 10, 2009 - January 31, 2010
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
February 21 - May 30, 2010
Museum London, London, Ontario
October 9, 2010 - January 2, 2011
The James Gallery, The Graduate Center at CUNY
New York, New York
June 24, 2010 - August 27, 2010
Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Quebec
January 21 - April 1, 2011