Blindness: Mapping the Invisible

Abstract

How do visually impaired people produce a map? What does spatial invisibility mean? Can blindness suggest a new way to ‘look’ and map the invisible? Starting from an original concept of ‘mapping’, intended as a creative investigation and a practice of space, this article addresses the question of vision and (in)visibility in a political and artistic milieu. Firstly, it brings to light the results of some interviews at the Royal National Institute of Blind People in London. By researching this particular approach to the human habitat, it tries to depict the ‘uncanny’ resources that constitute a ‘vision beyond sight’. Secondly, it shows the social effects of our metaphorical ‘blindness’. Through the study of the indigenous uprising in the Indian Red Corridor, it demonstrates the human and environmental costs of what Paul Virilio calls the ‘production of disappearance’. The production of space, indeed, entails a struggle around geopolitical, economical, ethnical and sexual thresholds of vision. Finally, in the conclusion, this short essay puts into play these field analyses to map a new kind of vision: a ‘critical eye’ able to indicate a way through the forest of the state of exception.