Mapping of an occupation: A graphically rendered statement

Abstract

This paper offers a sociological analysis of a performative experience of mapping in New York's Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in 2011. It delineates the transformation of the declaration of the OWS into a graphically rendered "list of grievances" by the artist Rachel Schragis through a participatory process in the occupied space of Zuccotti Park. Drawing on the continuous transition between the ideas, the three-dimensional lived space, and the two-dimensional flat surface of graphical cartography, it demonstrates the ways in which the collective-performative map-making embodied and transcribed the interconnection between the perceived, conceived, and lived space-time(s) (Lefebvre 1974, Harvey 2006) within the occupied space of the OWS