Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 40
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Aesthetic story maps
Rist deepens my understanding of how story geographies can share alliances that
flow across multiple sites of identity. Her decentered spaces remind me of
Michael White’s discussion of archipelagos and trauma, and our ability to traverse
varied locations of meaning. Whereas trauma often reduces access to what
clients hold dear, a spatially diffuse conception of identity provides expansive
places to stand (White, 2004). Combs and Freedman (2016) use a decentered
spatial organization to describe narratives of identity as “relational, distributed,
performed, and fluid” (p. 3). How “our moment-by-moment sense of ‘self’ is
located in different places—in other people’s memories, in hospital records, in
anecdotes that get told and retold over family dinners...” (p. 3). Art invites novel
spatial and organizational strategies that affect identity within a story’s
geography.
Pipilotti Rist’s environments demonstrate mapping as a nomadic act. The
transdisciplinary author Peta Mitchell (2013) writes about postmodern
cartography, “The map is no longer a metaphor for representation, signification,
and being but for affect, intensity, and becoming” (p. 88). This also describes the
uncharted events in the narrative conversations I celebrate.
A map and a picture frame share much in common. Both create a world picture
through artificial boundaries. Both evoke a Cartesian dualism as a truth claim,
producing a panoptic ownership of space as a demarcated object, with the viewer
as master of knowledge. Mitchell writes that, in the Enlightenment, maps began
to be about the 'claiming of territory' as real. The whole world became mapped
and like a 'closed space’ (2013, p. 54). Maps can colonize, defining what belongs
within seemingly naturalized organizational systems and eliminating external
variables such as culture, difference, and change. Similarly, all stories colonize,
reducing our thoughts to simplified versions of vast experiences and linking
multidimensional moments into cohesive structures that often subjugate the
marginalized, the ephemeral, the contradictory, or the partial. Our “knowing” can
imprison our understanding. Whether a map or a story, representations displace
alternative accounts (Mitchell, 2013, p. 54). Avoiding the generalities of a
Breaking the Frame: Aesthetic Encounters with Narrative Practice – Part Three
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2026 Release, p. 25-51.
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