Mapas Parlantes: collective visual methods to map and re-/construct urban memories

Abstract

This article reflects on the generative potential of visual methods to collectively construct and re-construct intergenerational urban memories related to five social and physical spaces that have been shaping, and are shaped by, the Chilean community in Vienna, Austria. The article draws from the research project 'Alltagsgeschichten (ver)orten / Mapas Parlantes' (Locating everyday stories/Talking maps), which aimed at documenting place-based historical narratives of Chileans who arrived as refugees in the 1970s and 1980s fleeing Pinochet's dictatorship. The five spaces were investigated by the Collective Viena Chilena through participatory mapping walks followed by focus group workshops with sixteen members of the Chilean community. They were designed, implemented, documented, and communicated using visual methods such as drawing, photography, video-making, and zines production. To explore the generative potential, the article reflects on three types of 'bridges' that were built through the visual process and its outputs, which were maps, zines, two short videos, and a public exhibition: (1) scalar bridges between personal micro-histories of the protagonists and the collective histories of a place, as well as between solidarity practices of the Chileans in Austria and in Chile; (2) temporal bridges between different generations of Chileans; (3) methodological bridges, as the process articulated interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives of the Chilean community and the Collective Viena Chilena. Together, these bridges contribute to a visual critical pedagogy, constructing and re-constructing living memories of how everyday urban spaces reflect and archive experiences of exile, migration, and transnational solidarity.