Looking for loopholes: cartography of escape
- Submitting institution
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Nottingham Trent University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 35 - 699060
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Cartographies of exile: a new spatial literacy
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9780415714860
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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A - Artistic Research Centre
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This book chapter develops conceptual insights around the relationship between states of exile and mapping practices, through focused interrogation and contextual interpretation of the art projects BorderXing and Status Project by Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting. Cocker triangulates ideas around experimental cartography and radical mapping (Harmon, Mogel and Bhagat), theoretical analysis of contemporary neoliberal life (Bauman, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri), with reflections on the rhetorical concepts of kairos (opportune timing) and mêtis (cunning, wiliness) (Atwill, Hawhee) to develop the new concepts of ‘kairotic exile’ and ‘kairotic cartography’. Cocker’s conceptualization of ‘kairotic exile’ focuses the possibility of a temporal as much as spatial liberation through the opportune harnessing of lapses (blind-spots) of security or surveillance within the ‘system’. She conceives the notion of ‘elective exile’ as a means of critical unbelonging, a refusal of the limiting and ‘mapped out’ terms of contemporary society with its various systems of capture and control.
This chapter departs from Cocker’s previous writing on the ‘liminal’ aspect of Bunting and Brandon’s practice (e.g. in Liminal Landscapes, Routledge, 2012) and book chapter ‘Towards a Knowledge of the Margins’, in Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation (2014), which focuses on how landscapes are activated through resistant forms of citizenship.
The publication Cartographies of Exile: A New Spatial Literacy is an edited international academic collection drawn from literature, art, ecology, and new media, conceived as a key point of reference in the emergent geo- or spatial arts and humanities. With its content written prior to the escalation (since 2015-2016) of forced displacement and humanitarian crisis, the publication’s exilic focus is prescient. Likewise, Cocker’s own chapter can be situated in relation to more recent theoretical critique of the pernicious increase in surveillance and security control (e.g. Byung-Chul Han’s, Transparency Society, 2015; Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, 2017).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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