This article describes and discusses the process and outcome of designing a memorial map dedicated to the victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It begins by reviewing the different roles played by posthumous mapping over time, including (1) commemorative mapping – to foster transmission of memory and to strengthen feelings of belonging to a group or a nation; (2) casualty mapping – to study past tragic events, as well as to call for action during ongoing crisis; (3) testimonial mapping – to denounce atrocities and demand justice; and (4) grieve mapping – to support survivors throughout their mourning process. The map memorial presented in this article draws on this diversity with a particular focus on humanizing the map and the mapping process to counterbalance the dehumanized consequences of the event being mapped. It takes the form of a white, embroidered textile map that symbolizes burial shrouds, onto which friends and relatives of victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda are invited to pin their names. This textile map has been presented at commemorative events in Canada and Rwanda, gradually accumulating hundreds of names and transforming into a living memorial. Instead of revealing a clear geography of the horror, it emphasizes the deep human void left in Rwanda by this genocide, as well as the enduring bonds between the living and the dead. It supports the ongoing necessity for survivors to mourn and remember while exposing the chaotic geographies of the victims of this genocide. It also reveals some of the multiple blanks, absences, and silences that made this genocide possible to unfold but impossible to forget for the survivors and their descendants since then.
Maps are now increasingly being used in the humanities and social sciences to represent memories, whether through participatory research projects, with a view to sharing knowledge through citizen-led awareness-raising and educational initiatives, or within a political context such as the struggles for the rights of indigenous people, migrants, exiles, or refugees. In line with these approaches to representing memory, this article traces the cartographic process of a collaborative project that led to the creation and self-publication of an atlas. This work began as an individual endeavour and soon became a collective effort carried out in Quebec between 2019 and 2023 at Concordia University, drawing on a corpus of Rwandan life stories archived at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling in Montreal (COHDS-CHORN). This article highlights how, following the identification of methodological limitations concerning life stories, a deeper exploration of these narratives over the long term fostered an open, creative, and inclusive cartographic process, enabling the project to adapt to the living memory of the storytellers.
This article examines how family memory unfolds through cartographic practices that are intimate, fragile, and performative. Drawing on four student projects produced in the Humaps Lab at the University of Padua, it argues that mapping functions less as a locative representation than as a gesture of care and storytelling. The works analyzed—a sonic map of diasporic trajectories, a digital genealogy of family migrations, a body-mapping technique, and a cartographic storyboard on maternal lineages—translate fragments of personal and family memories into multimodal cartographic archives. These amateur mappings foreground incompleteness, postdigitality, and postmemory as constitutive elements of cartographic knowledge. Rather than fixing histories, they keep them in motion, provisional, and dialogic. Situating these practices within the cartographic humanities, the article proposes that the class can operate as an atelier of memory mapping, where students learn to inhabit the map as a living performance, a situated act in which spatial representation, storytelling, and embodiment unfold together.
The authors write as two colleagues whose complementary courses on the geography of memory and spatial storytelling have sparked numerous conversations over the past few years. Through dialogue, they unravel how cartographers and geographers of memory might learn from one another. More specifically, they reflect on their respective disciplinary traditions and engagements in cartography and geographies of memory across three thematic areas: form, methods, and politics. The authors then outline three thread lines – genre, mediation, and constellations – that run through their dialogue. In sum, they envision their contribution as a wider engagement with the politics and practices of geographical knowledge production offering three small insights: the authors bring the geographies of memory and critical cartography into teaching and research through dialogue, illustrate the value of collaboration and everyday conversation as a critical part of geographical knowledge production, and model an alternative form of academic publishing that expands the genre of academic writing.
