Excerpt from Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability by Eyal Weizman
“Edward Said wrote critically about the imperial use of cartography: “In the history of colonial invasions maps are always first drawn by the victors, since maps are instruments of conquest.” In addition he advocated for a form of “counter-cartography” able to confront the geographical violence of European imperialism: “Geography can also be the art of resistance if there is a counter-map.”
He posed counter-cartography as a critical practice that confronts the epistemic violence of imperial maps. The range of such a practice extends from the psychogeographical representation of the daily lives of the oppressed and the charting of its multiple modes of knowledge production to the exposure of the spatial logic of domination, the removal of the privilege of mapping from the state.”
