Mapping traces of Pilgrimage

Three weeks ago, on Tuesday, our Knowledge at Sea community arrived in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands. This is a sister/brother community to the Åland Islands, which I come from, and which I visited last when I was still a young teenager. Eduardo Abrantes has been there more recently, doing some artistic work with the local communities. So, even though we did not know for sure whether the passengers would be allowed to go out of the boat, once this became clear to us, we were happy to accommodate the ”classroom” to this encounter.

Continuing with the theme of reading landscapes instead of texts, and also the idea of making a travel report or story of pilgrimage, we asked the community to take note of what they observed through all their senses. Inspired partly by the work of Sami religious scholar Jorunn Jernsletten (Landskap som tekst og handlende subjekt) and Emma Göransson Almroth’s writings, we wanted to investigate what kinds of relationships could be mapped out when attending to not only the majority and dominant scientific voices, but minor gestures and diverse ways of knowing.

Once back at Smyril Line we listened to each other’s storytelling and created traces of the shared experiences. Pre-modelling an Almanack of Transdisciplinary Gnoseology (a concept Eduardo and I will develop further in our new research project), we also experimented with how different kinds of knowledge can be put together in something that does not reflect a ”flat plane” with one dominant way of knowing taking centre stage. As a tool for transdisciplinary work, we want instead to give space for both many different ways to tell the story, and for making a wide variety of connections between the various forms of sensing the world. This de- and reconstruction of the map is something I learned from a special issue in Cartographica and the article: Decolonizing the Map: Recentering Indigenous Mappings by Reuben Rose-Redwood et al.

I continue to be grateful to the participants from Skärgårdshavets Biosfärområde, Kimitoöns kommun | Kemiönsaaren kunta | Municipality of Kimitoön, Åbo Akademi University, Trinity College Dublin, Eötvös Loránd University and CHARM-EU network for working with us to make this happen and Stiftelsen för Åbo Akademi, Svenska kulturfonden/The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland and Nordisk Kulturfond for making it possible!