Unlike maps that chart colonial matters, map-making is a tender practice. Maps can be private communication matters, self-written poems, and writings of personal memories. Have you ever identified yourself with a geographic place? Imagined yourself as a river? A cliff? A beach? Have you ever recorded a memory on a map? Did any map whisper a poem to you?

‘A Tender Map-Making: Imaginary Island’ is a ruminating map that experiments with layering and personalization as map making tactics. It explores novel ways of cartographic imagination with intimate collectivity.  The artwork is a collective of this experiment, charted and imagined by 20 participants living on 3 continents, from various backgrounds: artists, architects, game designers, planners, social scientists, students, educators, and fantasy book lovers. Given a base map of an imaginary island composed of 9 plates, participants have curated and layered their geographic places with emotional translations by drawing, delineating, meditating, and place making. 102 plates of the imaginary island were designed and crafted during a week. The plates of the map are assembled digitally as a video-art.

* ‘A Tender Map-Making: Imaginary Island’ is a drawing workshop designed and run by Gökçen ERKILIÇ within the Dirty Drawings no. 02 curated and designed by Bilge BAL, between March 11-18, 2023.