Archipelagos of gestures

Each shard represents one public gesture in a research-based artistic practice. A mouse click brings the visitor into the shard and into the specific gesture. A new archipelago of shards appears, containing either geolocated maps with markers and routes, or traces like images, text, video and/or sound fragments… Each of these shards is again clickable. This opens up full page maps and traces. On each level the side panels detail what is on view next to giving access to related shards in other practices and gestures.

A working prototype

Eavatea is a dynamic, ever-changing artistic form for developing, visualising, presenting, archiving and interconnecting research-based artistic practices. Often unfolding in situ, Eavatea aims to incorporate these nomadic, collective, ephemeral and trans-disciplinary practices. It offers an active form of ‘counter-mapping’, taking into account the experience of physical space, the passage of time, the encounters between people and the stories they share. Eavatea is defined as a relational infrastructure that highlights connections between practices, documents and organizations, in this way generating new unexpected links and possible interdependencies. Eavatea aims to function as an agora, encouraging new modes of collective research that could be developed through using the tool as a digital meeting place, but also as a catalyst for physical gatherings. As a collective mode of curating, the tool triggers the creation of a growing and always shape-shifting collection of knowledge archipelagos, which can be made visible for a live audience or that can be consulted or re-activated later on.

Learning by doing

Eavatea was developed by a partnership between Jubilee, nadine, f.eks. in collaboration with Atelier Cartographique. The current partnership is addressing a series of questions: how to govern and finance the tool on the long term, how to distribute and share it with other practitioners who would benefit from using this tool. Eavatea aims to evolve into a federated model of small autonomous artistic groups and organisations that fork the source code and adapt their mapping tool to the needs and perspectives of their own artistic practices. Eavatea hopes to create different interconnected mapping communities (inter)nationally that share mutual ideas and commitments. Eavatea is a digital commons, but as a tool it requires maintenance and updates. Through common ownership/authorship and subscriptions we are working on an economic model that will make Eavatea sustainable.

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Eavatea is supported by the Flemish Community (VG)