Affective Cartographies: Mapping the artistic-bodies of Southwark's Outcast Dead

This project attempts to expand one of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's stated principles of their
'rhizomatic' image of thought, cartography, by using it as a lens through which to examine the
community project associated with a much-overlooked site of historical and spiritual importance.
Following Deleuze and Guattari, cartography is considered here not as the systematic rendering of
the physical world into representation, but as a mode of apprehending multiplicities of information.
The map elucidates geographies which may be visible, listenable, touchable, traceable, imaginable.
The site in question is Crossbones Garden of Remembrance in Southwark, a once-forgotten
unconsecrated burial ground, reclaimed as a memorial garden for the 'Outcast Dead'. The particular
intertwining relations mapped here, memory and affect, are situated as the lifeblood of the site. This
concerns memory and affect as embodied in the material elements of the site, and crucially, the
flows of memory and affect attached to performance and kinship. Refiguring the map of a territory
in this way sets out to challenge the framing of performance and materiality as bound to a particular
place or time, instead attempting to pin down the traces of a creative practice as they are carried by
bodies. In this way, the performance does not meet some finite resolution; rather, the frame
self-breaks into many more, mapped by flows of memory and affect.