Artists and cartographers Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat lead an informal conversation about the use of mapping in the cultural sphere, examining several of the maps in their recent collaborative project, An Atlas of Radical Cartography, a collection of ten maps and ten essays addressing social issues from globalization to garbage collection, surveillance to extraordinary rendition, statelessness to visibility, deportation to migration. It pairs artists, architects, and designers with writers to explore the possibilities of the map as a tool of political agency. The discussion focussed on how mapping can be used to define the borders of conflict, contestation, and power between communities in a specific geographic area, as well as how it can alternatively be used to rethink, resist, or subvert these same borders.

Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist who works with the interstices between art and cultural geography, inserting and distributing cartographic projects into public space. Her projects have taken place in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Wood River Valley, Idaho. She is co-editor of An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2007) and co-curator of the traveling exhibition “An Atlas.” She also co-curated “Genius Loci,” an exhibition of conceptual mappings of Los Angeles at Sci-Arc, Los Angeles and the California Museum of Photography, Riverside. Her work has been shown at the Gwangju Biennale; P.S.122, New York; Gallery 400, Chicago; and Overgaden, Copenhagen.

Alexis Bhagat is a writer, sound artist, and activist. He is co-editor of An Atlas of Radical Cartography and co-curator of the traveling exhibition “An Atlas.” He is the co-editor with Gregory Gangemi of Sound Generation (Autonomedia, 2008), a collection of interviews with contemporary sound artists and composers. He has organized concerts, discussions, and “listening lounges” of sound art and phonographic work in New York, Japan, Vermont, and Delhi, India. Since 2002, he has been a director of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, a grant-giving body supporting radical writers, and regularly writes a column “On Words and Revolution” for their journal, Perspectives.

Elise Youn is the Hub Fellow at the New Museum. Mapping Power in the City is part of a series of informal events organized by Youn for the Museum as Hub inaugural presentation.