Autobiographical Geographies

The Autobiographical Geographies project explores people’s relationships to place. Every person has a different constellation of places they find meaningful, and uses different unconscious ways of determining what makes a place significant. Our process engages people in thinking about those places, establishing their relative directions, and drawing them as vectors radiating from their current location. These personalized geospatial diagrams facilitate storytelling about similarities and differences in life histories, and taken as a group, form a map of the relationships of the central point and the community to the rest of the world.

This project was first prototyped at the Project 387 residency program in Gualala, California in August 2014. Images below are of those early experiments.