Maps to Minds

By Adele Ardent Eden

Wild Rivers, NM

September 11, 2017

Throughout this trip, I’ve been very interested in the myriad thoughts, preconceptions, and preoccupations that get in one’s way when it comes to seeing the non-human clearly. In Cunningham Gulch, near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, I tried to record the intrusive thoughts that kept pulling me away from the present moment and place, with the hope that I might somehow allow for the chance to wipe these (irrelevant?) thoughts away from my internal lens.

In this related work, conducted at the Little Arsenic campground and surrounding trails at the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, I approached questions of perception in another way, by asking members of our group to trace a view of the landscape which I could then use as a map to locate the exact location they used as a viewing-point. As I climbed and circled around in search of these locations, scrambling over rocky terrain, I was in constant engagement with the versions of the people I had created in my mind, trying to connect what I “knew” about them—how they acted, how they felt, where they might go, and what they might do—with the world around me.

One of my frustrations in contemplating these landscapes is that, while breathtakingly gorgeous, they threaten to remain mere beautiful backdrops, “things” which I have no real relationship with. In part, this project was meant to seek a sense of connection to place by co-opting the connections that others felt, while also trying to get a “true” sense of the place by looking at it through a literal handful of viewpoints. I found it interesting (and not a little disturbing) how much more engaged I felt in the land after adding an additional layer of human intention between me and the natural world: There are certain very specific places that I had my own attachment to, where I spent considerable time conducting my own work. Yet, in examining the sweeping vistas or details of the spume around the river rocks, I spent far longer than I would have otherwise in looking and thinking about the life-histories of the plants, rocks, landforms, and creatures: I spent time considering that this rock formation wasn’t as wind-sculpted and water-ravaged as the one depicted on the map, or that this dead tree had likely been dead longer than the one depicted, as it had lost more branches.

Map” by Paul Ross. Photos by Adele Ardent Eden

In retrospect, I thought more about these histories when looking through the maps than I did for the areas that I “used” in my own work simply because I was coming to these places needing from rather than doing to. I “needed” these places to communicate information back to me, as I was constantly asking “here, or here?” through my actions as I moved around, rather than declaring “I’m making this happen!” as I did with my own work.

Map” by Melisse Watson. Photos by Adele Ardent Eden.