There is perhaps no more art historical term than landscape. A composition of nature for the purpose of viewing, it has long roots both in Chinese and Dutch traditions of painting. Panoramic, uplifting, pleasing and picturesque, ruined, meditative, or imperial, the contemplation of landscapes implies a necessary distance—a perspective, if you will—between the viewer and the viewed. But how do we visualize topographic experiences that demand different forms of sensory engagement? That must be understood, for instance, by being walked; that are called into being by actions; that are apprehended through an interaction of energies rather than scientific observation. Among these are the objects, places and spaces considered sacred whose innate and ineffable meaning is made manifest only through pilgrimages, anointments, cleansing, chanting and other modalities of individual and collective participation.
In the Himalayas, Kailash is probably one of the most potent among these. Called by various names—Kang Rinpoche, Meru, Kailash—the mountain and its surrounding areas are mythic, sacred to many religions, the source of many of the region’s major rivers and the home of significant animals, plants and spirits; it is thus a locus of considerable ecological and cultural diversity in a region of political contestation. The power of Kailash is both created and reflected through a series of repeated performances of pilgrims—acts of circumambulation, the kora or parikrama. It also filters into the everyday lives of those who live in the region as well as into far-flung imaginaries through prayer, invocation and religious kitsch.
We might call these cartographies— aesthetic, somatic and spiritual technologies that trace and materialize realities in space in much the same way as other mapmakers drew the charts that determined an orientation in the world. Participation is the key to the mapping of such sacred sites—a participation that means not only the full involvement of the self, but also the reciprocal engagement of the place or object. The compass of the qibla that orientates the Muslim to Mecca physically reinforces an ongoing relationship. The Hindu darshan is not an act of viewership—gazing on the divine—but a tactile one of collision, opening the space between the divine and the devotee.
What might we learn from cartographies such as these that resist the mastery of a terrain? Can we conceive of modes of drawing/mapmaking that manifest entanglements (social, political, sacred/secular and ecological) rather than delineate boundaries? Can a map be more than a diagram that fixes relationships and renders navigation just a movement between points? In what ways could a map be a registration of mobility, even serving as an impetus for other transformations?
I invite participants to explore these questions using Kathmandu as our field of inquiry. The idea is more to turn the notions of cartography, geography, sacred and landscape around or, in fact, on their heads to see what it might produce in visual, aesthetic and conceptual terms. The focus is not on any mountain in particular.
Concept Note by Radhika Subramaniam, The New School
February 25, 2016