Based on notes made in literature review here

Atlas Otherwise was presented in Sonic Acts Biennale in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2022. As part of a larger festival around sound and discourse, Awan’s presentation stitched together a series of conversations around how to rethink the atlas. Rather than a compendium of maps, it is a framework of spatial and cartographic knowledge production. Recent technological advances have shifted the perception through the politics of the image. Awan asks the question, what does a critical mapping practice look like?

Methodology of mapping and visualisations are tested through the creation of the discourse Awan is foregrounding. Traversing through a migratory story of moving from South Asia to Europe, Awan digresses. There is a heaviness and roughness to her voice as she sketches stories of deportation, technology of security, the global underclass, subaltern, displacement. The counter-visualisation of complex borders and mappings are supported by an extensive ethnographic research and specific tactics used to counter surveilience technologies. These stories include negotiations, bartering, corruption and bribery to survive the complexities of the typical border conditions of a constant flow of people, or is impenetrable.

The methodology of maps overlapped with new digital technologies has also revealed new spaces of extraction and intervention. The constant attempt in organising the surveillance has led to new architectures of database management, rather than intervening on the ground. New surface conditions are found, resources which were previously out of our reach are now easily accessible and put in relationship with our known world. As we expand the technologies of control, resolution becomes tinged with questionable politics.

Awan discusses specific places, such as Balochistan, a Pakistani state fighting for independence before beings clamped down by the Pakistan Armed Forces. There are many Balochis and Punjabi people running in between Pakistan and Iran, trying to move westwards on a quest for a better future. Awan navigates through mud volcanos and the flattening due to the increased dryness of land that the region experiences. There is a sense of displacement without moving, that the world is moving forward reeling from the effects of extraction, climate change and the el nino effect on our lands. Such landforms now affected by our patchy anthropocene, a term explored by Anna Tsing refiguring the map as a digital composite of our everyday human > non-human interventions. These interventions are uneven, often extraction happens much more in the global south as heavy industry begins to be detrimental to the earth. Balochistan feels this even uneveness on the thickness of the lands, as it turns dry.

Another story foregrounded by these spatial politics is the city of Gwadar, where a deep sea port was constructed due to the one belt one road investment of funds. Carved onto the seafront, it takes away the daily routine of indigenous fisherfolk and redirects their livelihood to different seafronts. The sea port connects the trade routes from Xinjiang to the Arabian sea. By mapping these connections, it draws attention to the power of space navigated through politics and debt. The borders of the sea begin to articulate the complexity of these relationships, also changing their landforms.

Mapping and modelling of the map is a volumetric space, it becomes three dimensional with layers thinking. By cutting through the crust of the earth, agential cuts, as Karen Barad writes, is to expose a thick, overlapping surfaces of material. To note the exchange and transformations which are happening to certain moments, borders, spacetime. In a way, it is also to thicken the map, which is what Awan and her team has achieved through the work of topological atlas, a research project that explores the relationship between border scapes, modes of documentation, crossing, migration and circulation. Through these regimes of control, how does it affect the spatial movement of people?

In between Pakistan, Iran and the trek and journey towards Europe, borders are reinforced through regimes and violence are shown through the work of the topological atlas. As an elaborate series of maps and images intersected with stories, topological atlas critiques the colonial mapping methodology through affective and dream-like stories, narrating the precarity undermining each border movement. Awan uses technologies to build a digital atlas, thick with stories and taken from the everyday experience of living there. The use of such technologies create a patchwork of maps, storytelling through film, the website and multimedia sites of dissemination creates a rich tapestry of stories explicitly linked to our spatial agency we navigate today.