How might critical artistic mapping reveal the relations of power that dominate a region?

In conversation: Derek Hoeferlin, Monique Verdin

What traces in landscapes and ancestral memory can we follow in order to make visible what is otherwise taken for granted or deemed irrelevant? This recording documents a conversation between architect Derek Hoeferlin, based in St. Louis, Missouri, and interdisciplinary storyteller Monique Verdin, based in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana—who have two very different approaches to practice that overlap through a shared interest in mapping. They explore how the restructuring of the river system over the last 150 years—via infrastructure such as locks and dams—interrelates with the installment of the systems of socio-economic, racial and epistemic oppression that have come to define US society. How can spatial representations help make visible such different forms of power? And what personal, situated ways of witnessing violence find their way into maps, despite their supposedly “removed” perspective?