Creative cartography
QD #71 🗺️ Upcoming Quest events in New York and London - see you there?
In this weeks edition…
✷ Events coming up in NYC & London
✷ Ideas / practices / questions + more exploring MAPS
✷ A treasure trove of tantalising links!
Dear Questers,
Sam here 👋 Checking in from the half way point of our Creative Quest exploring MAPS throughout April. We have 55 intrepid Questers immersing their curiosity in this theme and it has been wild one! I never knew that maps could be so playful and so personal.
Truthfully, I find newsletter writing during Quest months very challenging. To capture all the variety of ideas and and personal explorations going on in our community is a weighty task! Its like trying to draw a moving train.
This week I’m exploring a slightly different format for the Quest Digest that breaks our usual mini essay-ish style. I hope a slightly different format is a way to capture the diverse explorations of a Quest as it happens. In their full scrappy form!
This particular newsletter is a glimpse into my personal explorations and in future issues you will get glimpses into others Quester’s viewpoints too.
What do you think of this format for mid-Quest newsletters?
Firstly… Events for your diary! (NYC & London)
✷ New York, New York!
We’re back with another event on Sun 27 Apr - this time diving into the wonderful world of, you guessed it, MAPS!
🗓️ Sun 27 Apr
⏰ 1-4pm EST
📍Now What, 45 Main Street, DUMBO
🎟️ $20 (use code QUESTER20 for 20% off)
https://lu.ma/44a2u2tf
✷ London!
We are hosting a playful picnic on 10th May. Games, snacks & conversation! Our very own team member Sparks, will be over from Portland, so lets show them a good time!
🗓️ Sat 10 May
⏰ 2-6pm BST
📍Peckham Rye park
🎟️ Free event - but please RSVP at this link
https://lu.ma/jvo0kasl
An experience that changed my idea of Maps
Last week I was lucky to be invited to an artists residency in Tuscany for a week, as part of a founding crew of imagineers working on a wonderfully ambitious place-based project - initiated by the even more wonderful Tiu De Haan.
One part of our week involved visiting the Siena School for liberal arts and learning about the permaculture garden they’ve been cultivating over the last 8 years.
There we met Bernardo Georgi, one of their lead gardeners on the project. Bernardo was one of those rare, shiny humans who speaks in gems.
At one point in our day he mentioned his history as an artist. When asked to say more… he said that his art was ‘geography.’
I’ve never heard anyone say such a thing in my whole life. Yet in a month exploring Maps it happens. Nine years in and the serendipity machine keeps on giving.
Whether it was designing wild biodynamic gardens or working on projects about urban regeneration and the dangers of gentrification… Bernardo felt at home in the edge lands, where ecosystems overlap. Maybe the most interesting parts of a map are the borderlines?
A quote:
“Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner..., things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.”
Alexander McCall Smith
A practice
For a week I tried to retrace my movements over a 24hr period and draw a ‘Day Map’. It’s something a few of us in the crew have experimented with this month. A very enjoyable (and quite challenging) activity that really got me thinking about where I went, how I got there and what the resulting shape of my day was. I would also recommend this as something to do on a trip! It’s a different way to remember a new place.
A question:
“How could we measure the scale of our days beyond distance travelled?”
After a week of Day Maps I found that simply measuring movement seems like an insufficient way to map a day. There are days where you might not have travelled all that far physically… but emotionally, spiritually, creatively you might have travelled a million miles. How might you map this journey?
I’ll be exploring this question further in the second half of the month.
A read
I’ve been face first in this brilliant book by Alice Maddicott called Tender Maps. It’s a dreamy read which explores the idea that ‘atmosphere’ is the soul of a place. Through lyrical writing Maddicott maps her memories of places through what it felt like to be there - often arriving at a emotional destination that traditional travel writing rarely does.
It’s really got me thinking about my own experiences of place and what it might mean to ‘map the invisible’ details of a place. You can bet I will be giving it a go!
Hopefully this gives you some broad strokes ideas about what it means to Quest in a day to day way. Small experiments and little additions to your every day life that make everything feel more like an adventure and an opportunity for creativity.
Let me know what you think of this more ‘tapas style’ newsletter format! What could make it better?
A round up of illuminating discoveries from our Questers this month…
🎧 Check out our communal Maps themed mixtape. It slaps!
🧐 The ethics of cartography via Psyche Magazine
❤️ What’s Your Map? is a BRILLIANT podcast interviewing different interesting figures about their favourite maps. Incredibly interesting listen.
✍️ There is such thing as the Hand Drawn Map Association. My faith in humanity is restored.
📍 GeoGuessr is an online game where you are spontaneously dropped into a random location on Google street view and have to work out where you are.
🪐 Reconfiguring Reality: An Atlas of Alternative Maps via The Marginalian
🫎 It's moose migration season! Livestream the Swedish wilderness to your desktop.
🏙️ Meanwhile Cities: temporary interventions can create welcoming places with strong identity
🚇 Mapping London: the iconic Tube map
Finally…
Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing these each week. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests - you can support by joining a Quest (next one is in July!) or booking us to run a workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email!
Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one is also deeply appreciated.
Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ
🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness
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