In one workshop exercise, pairs draw ‘maps’ of personally significant places onto each others hands and arms using touch.

Both pairs have their eyes closed. One of the pair is the storyteller, they visualise a place in their mind’s eye and describe it with touch, imagining it from above and within, whilst making a journey into their memory. Whilst their partner, the scribe, documents what they feel against their own skin, onto paper using a variety of marks.

You might imagine this a bit like a human ‘Etch-a-Sketch’, where the skin is like the trackpad of a laptop or a touch sensitive screen, which is processed through body and mind of the scribe.

Once each pair has taken turns in being the scribe and the storyteller, drawing onto the same sheet of paper, they are given the chance to embellish their drawings with details, colours or written words about anything that came up for them during the exercise, or particular details they remembered about their place.

Unmapping is an exploratory process, rather than means to produce maps. The aim is in the process rather than the end result.

The drawings – or, let’s call them maps, since they are representations of places, are ambiguous, perhaps only understandable by those who made them, and perhaps not even that.

They are a meshwork of lines and shapes. Unfinished and fragmented.

Sometimes they become beautiful artifacts, and curious things to look at. In the same way that when we look at maps of unfamiliar places, we can get lost amongst the lines and imagine what it might be like to be there.

Perhaps they are just like abstract paintings, perhaps offering a doorway into another world?

But they also offer starting points for discussion, or further exploration, and they hint at how our experience of spaces is never fixed in one particular way.