Geography
Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Sciences Po Grenoble, PACTE, 38000 Grenoble, France

I consider myself a geographer who does not belong to any particular school or sub-discipline, but I work primarily on borders. I am most specifically interested in the spatial configurations of border spaces, especially in the American continent, as well as in their political and economical issues, through an increasingly postcolonial and intersectional perspective. For several years now, I have been analyzing artistic expressions in the visual arts, land art, performances concerning works placed within contested spaces. It seems to me that these works of art interrogate, in a troubling way, the question of space representation; going beyond the question of the figurative/nonfigurative, subversive/politically correct, these artifacts actively perform place, with even more force since they interact with our imaginations. They make it possible to frame the question of representation in a different way.

During my training, I began by studying history before shifting towards geography, at a time when the work of the French historian Alain Corbin was very influential. He encouraged the interest for our evolving perceptions of the sea, of scents, of this set of representations that was characteristic of a certain modernity. In my work, the question of representation in social sciences, roots itself within the expression of mentalities, imaginaries and, thus, this question is concerned with mediation. The geography that I learned and that I teach today is purposefully constructivist, a geography in which social and spatial representations are considered as active transformers of our relationships to places. What is then a representation? At least three things at once, which is why the notion is so interesting. It is first a term that indicates a dynamic between an object and a sign designating the said object, in a more or less codified way. A number in order to designate a quantity of objects for example, or a word designating a thing. But representation is more than just a symbol; it is a collection of elements put at our disposal in order to guide cognitive processes, drifted both from our perceptions and our imagination.

Social sciences make an abundant use of representations, since they deal with material that is hardly accessible except through the representations themselves. Social phenomenon is only comprehensible on the basis of the representations that we produce of them. Moreover, quantitative data represents only one possible representation, among several (despite their name, that in French means “given”, they too, are constructed!). Spatial representations are, therefore, the geographical translation of social representation. These representations can be studied either individually or collectively: “…territory is to space what class consciousness is to social class,” wrote R. Brunet in his critical dictionary, Les Mots de la géographie, a fundamental work of the 1990s. Things are nonetheless even further complicated by the fact that the scientific practice of geography makes greater use of certain types of representation, such as maps. These documents that serve to locate phenomenon, as well as the use of mimetic illustrative photos, have long guided scientific productions, without their role being brought into question. It is now established that, no representation is neutral, and it so appears that a map expresses a specific point of view, despite its apparent objectivity. It might even be considered an extremely influential tool of power.

Representation is also a word with a decidedly singular meaning in the world of theater and dance, as a specific moment in which a work is presented, possibly upon a dedicated stage. Here, the word thus contains something it does not offer in the social sciences, namely the sense of ‘action.’ The mediation of social representations must be called into question, partly based in its semi-dematerialized aspect – the absence of bodies and practices – but also due to the way in which representations can conceal relationships of domination. The “nonrepresentational” perspective that was notably developed in the writings of Marxist geographer Nigel Thrift is based on this critique. It is nevertheless difficult to not become prisoners of our own representations, those that we continuously create and must take on. For my part, I now prefer to talk about “post-representational” methods, that is to say methods in which we attempt to go beyond mediation and to fully align ourselves with the social aspect going towards other forms of apprehension, particularly through corporeality, affect, emotions.

In my research practice, I have been able to rediscover the notion of representation, notably through the creation of the antiAtlas of Borders (https://www.antiatlas.net/news/), designed to not only deconstruct but to transform representations of borders, to readjust those lines, and to contribute to the construction of a new imaginary, different from that which currently dominates classical geopolitical approaches. The fact of participating in the conception of theatrical projects (http://www.compagnieabc.fr/) has also helped me to transform this plural notion.

Today, artificial intelligence is participating in the development of new, machine-mediated representations. In that sense, algorithms and programs would possibly be the matrix representations that provide a new scale to our representational horizons within physical and digital spaces.

More from this author:

Cédric Parizot, Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Gabriel Popescu, Isabelle Arvers, Thomas Cantens, Jean Cristofol, Nicola Mai, Joana Moll, Antoine Vion, « The antiAtlas of Borders, A Manifesto », Journal of Borderlands Studies, 29, 4, 2014, pp.503-512

Cite this item: Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, “Representation”, translated by Kieran Puillandre, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2022, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/323836