Lee Rodney

I’ve lived on the Detroit-Windsor international border between Canada and the U.S. for several years. This divided place between two countries is also a point of connection in the Great Lakes waterways and it’s long been regarded as a place of transition by the Anishinaabe and Huron-Wendat peoples. This liminal place has made me attentive to the ways that spaces are partitioned, designated, shaped, and marked; how space is colonized, gendered, monetized, and appropriated as national territory; and correspondingly how we are positioned as insiders or outsiders, as belonging or not.

Through my work, I seek to locate multiple, marginal or conflictual histories through participatory mapping and relational media practices. These are grounded in embodied, ecological, feminist, and decolonial perspectives on space and place.

My research projects draw out the shifting relationship between power as it is encoded in the built environment and the variety of pathways or social trails through which we find a sense of agency, recognizing the flows and temporalities that can be sensed through movement. 

Focusing on urban ecologies (including suburban and “rurban”), I am attentive to the ways that walking privileges modes of attention and experience which are in danger of becoming lost. Like many others who engage in walking, peripatetic and mobile practices, I value ways to slow down and the perspective afforded by pedestrian means—not simply walking but also the “pedestrian” sense of what is prosaic or easily overlooked.Simply put, when we move slowly we can practice the “art of noticing” (Akrey, Ng-Chan) and how a sense of place can shift with each pace or glance.

In the last decade, I’ve worked collaboratively, drawing from the diverse subjective experiences of places that people share with me. Whether I’m working individually (Border Bookmobile 2010-13) or in tandem with artist-research collectives (Buoyant Cartographies 2018-19), I use peripatetic sensibilities and attempt to document fleeting experiences as notational elements that challenge assumptions put forth by public histories and official maps.

Working within the IN/TERMINUS research group, our projects draw upon a multiplicity of voices and impressions of places that are not captured in the commercial blandness of Google Maps or other GIS systems. Spaces that are bordered, in-between, or contested in some way pose difficulties for both conventional mapping processes and newer mapping technologies. On the contrary, we value the shifting, sometimes vague nature of immersive geography and participatory mapping which can loosen the Cartesian grip of planned spaces where speed and efficiency are engineered and encoded into our cities and networks. Our projects encourage a combination of media and layered contributions to indicate other temporalities, ecologies, and ephemeral or fleeting boundaries. These foster conversational and affective geographies which sometimes lead to deep maps of seemingly shallow things. Yet in the process, they yield insights into our culturally produced expectations of stasis in maps and the cartographic will to fix time and place against the current of change.