Cartography of Self

"Collage-style conceptual artwork featuring visual metaphors for mental health and performance culture. Includes cut-out graphs, poetic text snippets, and a brain-themed figure — ideal for corporate wellness storytelling and narrative design workshop
Urban dance performance in an industrial space — a woman in motion with outstretched arms, embodying themes of liberation, self-expression, and public placemaking through movement and body poetry.
Poetic collage artwork with abstract spiral patterns and hand-cut phrases on orange background. Designed for experiential storytelling and visual journaling, evoking emotional complexity and identity reclamation
A woman standing outdoors in front of a gray metal garage door and brick wall, adjusting large red earrings, wearing a black sleeveless crop top and high-waisted black pants.
Interactive storytelling activation with young participants in a group movement workshop. Captures relational design and embodied team-building practices in a dynamic arts-based setting

Culture

An agreement (conscious or not) to see the world through the same lens.

The outlines of culture frame our actions and the quality of our aspirations. They are the invisible railing that shapes the ways we move through space and the possibilities we see in a landscape. Cartography of Self is an analog theoretical poetry and performative urbanism piece in which our own body and lived experience become the lens through which we listen to culture with our whole selves.

Collaborative Performance

Movement Research 04/26/23

150 1st Ave, New York

An hour-long collaborative performance inviting the audience to drop into the feeling of a flesh-and-blood self that is dealing with its context — the narratives and the spatial barriers that influence our range of movement. This iterative performance is dedicated to the body as a site of resistance. A combination of guided movement , free flow invite the audience to break from the regular scripts of space — and invent new ways to move and engage with surroundings. The performance ends with fifteen minutes of free creative time, where the audience draws or writes down their own process of culture change.

Corporate wellness session with five women connecting in a daylight-filled creative studio. A candid moment of joy during an immersive group storytelling or narrative therapy activation.
Close-up of a tattooed participant writing a personal reflection on a sticky note — part of an anonymous letter-writing or narrative therapy exercise for emotional processing and team empathy.

Theoretical Poetry

Cartography of Self is an entirely analog auto-ethnographic exploration typewritten and rendered in watercolor and bricolage. Based on a five-month-long somatic exploration with Mary Abrams in New York — I used sense perceptions to explore how culture moves me, and invent new images, words, and frameworks to capture a value system centered on a reclaimed right to privacy. Cartography of Self captures the process of unlearning categorical thought and leaning into discomfort. Searching through the pain in my body for hints pointing to those forgotten corners of our selves - the ones deemed “uselessˮ by a culture defining value as productivity.

Scatter plot graph showing regression model of a girl who anorexic, with data points and a red regression line, titled 'Regression model of a girl who anorexic,' with axes labeled 'Success' and 'Discipline,' and the equation y = 2b + 4x, residuals.
  • Illustration of a girl sitting on a bed with a geometric mattress in a room with pink walls, abstract paintings, a floor lamp, and drawings of plants.

    Cartography of Self

  • A reddish-brown background with white text that reads, 'Can I use this body to decorate the spaces between?'

  • A black silhouette of a man looking down, with a poem on the right side of the image.

  • A page of text from a publication with the title 'Terra Incognita' written vertically on the left side.

  • A page from a book featuring a black and white outline map with a red rectangle outline, a small red figure walking along a winding path, and black handwritten text.

  • Pages from a book or article with text about wandering, play, curiosity, and exploring urban environments, mentioning Victor Shklovsky and the concept of ostranenie.