Undercartographies are spatial imaginations – geographies invented and inscribed at street level, that write spaces into existence, and take movement as their starting point
This site holds pieces by Tom Western – often collaborations with friends and creative communities – that make new maps of Athens. These aren’t maps in any conventional sense. Instead, undercartographies are a series of creative neighbourhood investigations, a set of spatial art-research projects around the city.
Each undercartography narrates a street or square, a district or neighbourhood, a road or infrastructure, focusing on the movements that make up particular spaces and places, and the geographical imaginations that in turn spring from them. They are playful illuminations of histories and geographies, depths and surfaces, texts and trajectories.
In response to the bordering and political closure of the city – what former Migration and Asylum Minister Notis Mitarakis called “returning the space to the Athenians” – undercartographies are a form of spatial resistance. These strategies come from below, from ways of being and knowing that exist in communities formed through histories of migration and struggle.
Undercartographies are movement-methods: modes of creative urban research that think in mobilities and hold together the multiple spatial imaginations and strategies that converge in a single place.
This site will expand with more undercartographies and accompanying pieces of writing.
Tom Western a writer and researcher, working with sound, space, rhythm, and relation. He’s based at UCL as a Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography. And he works in Athens, where he’s involved in various forms of creative and collaborative research and movement building.
Tom is a member of the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum (SGYF), with whom he runs the Citizen Sound Archive – a space for amplifying citizenship work, youth activism, community mobilising, and collective research and knowledge production.
The painting above is ‘The House with the Caryatids’ by Yannis Tsarouchis (1952)
Undercartographies 