Berlin’s migrant affective cartographies

Data Critica gibran@datacritica.org instagram.com Spanische, Englische, Deutsche Lautsprache Gneisenaustraße 2A, 10961 Berlin
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From a hegemonic, big-tech monopoly perspective, such as the one provided by Google Maps and the like, maps look like

Information will follow.

It offers Spanish and English with the possibility of whisper translation to German

Yes, there is one toilet on the ground floor where Barazani is.

This is a place with one big lamp, inside, with cushions in the ground, there are no trams of U-bahn close by and it can hold up to 25 people.

From a hegemonic, big-tech monopoly perspective, such as the one provided by Google Maps and the like, maps look like a functional tool that is used to navigate the territory, but are also power tools that shape our view of public space and function in a problematic way harvesting our data to gain huge profits and political power over us.

Our experiences as queer people, migrants, journalists, activists and people with hearts are not represented in these maps. I invite you to create together a collective map not of commerce and touristic points, but of experiences that affect us deeply in Berlin, linked to the trees where we lay, under which we kiss or make out, or the water bodies where we share our emotional burdens or shake them off in Berlin.

This way, we can re-shape perspectives of this territory with our own experiences, share them and build upon them in the future.

Bring a short paragraph and location of some of your affection-provoking places in Berlin, what happens there, the beauty or somber quality of them, and let’s build both a collective map of some of these experiences and a collective poem with these experiences.

In the process, let’s get to know some open-source tools to build them.

The project is part of a collective research called “Affective Cartographies”.

Gibran Mena-Aguilar (Data Crítica)

I am Gibran Mena-Aguilar, a transfeminist queer poet and data journalist from the territories currently called Mexico, and who is now based in Berlin. Since 2016 I create data visualizations and public interventions using data. In 2016 I created “Cartographies of Invisibilization”, a project based on and making a critique of scraped data from the corporate data-eating Uber company in three of the larger cities of the planet. The project shows how cartographies are a device of power. (https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/410885409). In 2018 I co-founded the ecofeminist data journalism organization Data Crítica, where I teach other independent investigative journalists to acquire, clean, analyze and publish data, since 2023 in Berlin.