Mapping the Inherent
A walking and collective mapping practice that invites participants to attune to the many forms of life, labor, collaboration, and disturbance already present within the Territory. Through slow observation, sensory engagement, and field notes, participants explore how extractivism creates physical and affective distance from the more-than-human world by rendering the Territory invisible, empty, or secondary to human concerns. The activity cultivates attentiveness, emplacement, and relational awareness by encouraging participants to move beyond detached observation and toward embodied encounters with the land, water, textures, rhythms, and agencies that sustain place.
Tools
One of the ways extractivism operates in cities and extractive regions is by displacement — reducing the physical and relational presence of the Territory in everyday life. The land remains present, yet our relationships with it often become distant, fragmented, or invisible. Forests become “resources,” rivers become infrastructure, and land becomes property or empty space waiting to be developed. Through these stories, extractivism normalizes separation and loss.
Mapping the Inherent is a practice for cultivating sensorial specificity and relational attentiveness — for deepening emplacement and countering the abstractions through which extractivism renders relations with the Territory as distant or invisible. The activity engages with conversations about extractivism, terra nullius, property, and the idea that land becomes valuable only through particular forms of labor, ownership, or extraction. These stories often erase the agencies, labors, and relations already present within the Territory, while dismissing Indigenous and more-than-human forms of world-making.
The exercise invites participants to slow down and pay attention differently. Through walking, sensing, observing, touching, and mapping, participants are encouraged to notice the many relations already unfolding around them: the work of water and sediment, the rhythms of plants and insects, signs of disturbance and regeneration, textures of decomposition, sounds of movement, collaborations between species, and the traces of extractive activity.
The walking section of the activity aims to disrupt dominant ocular-centric Western perspectives of place that equate visual mastery with knowledge and value. Participants should be invited to center embodied attunement in ways that unsettle habits of distance and control: touching mud, stepping into decomposing matters, noticing smells of rot and dryness, and moving through textures that might otherwise provoke discomfort or disgust.