Paper short abstract:

The recent trend of cartographic art practice contribute to the expanding possibilities for dialogical and collaborative anthropology. This paper explores the possibility of applying the methods to exploring various configurations of the future in the context of a wholesale market in Moscow.

Paper long abstract:

The recent trend of cartographic art practice and its experimental appropriation of various techniques and media (such as mental and biomapping, geo-positioning systems as well as sound and video) contribute to the expanding possibilities for dialogical, collective research and collaborative anthropology. Pace Latour's dismissal of totalities, the various forms of mapping, developed by some critical geographers and artists, renew the prospect of imagining wholeness(Jameson 1990), but now as complex Deleuzian assemblages of human-and non-human compositions, asubjective affects and subjective emotions; machinic assemblages and collective assemblages of enunciation or cosmograms (Tresch 2005). This paper-in-progress will present some preliminary results from the art based research with migrant, racialized workers in the markets of the post-Soviet capital. Often accommodating all kinds of traders, beggars and workers, the large wholesale and retail centres in Moscow have been hetero-cultural laboratories of migrant everyday space making and places of incorporation (Glick Schiller Caglar 2011) even as the official Russian media routinely portrays them as "dark" places of crime, drug trade and prostitution, counterfeit textile production and clandestine homes for illegalized workers from Central Asia. In many respects the market-halls have become one of the city's "internal borders" (Mezzadra Neilson 2013); the places of frequent police raids and a machine of striation and differential in/ex-clusion. Exploring the everyday power relations in one of such borderland markets, I will explore the methodological and theoretical implications of attempting to collaboratively map the future of some of the actors in such a place.