Mapping Footprints Lost Geographies in Australian Landscapes

In the field of participatory locative media practices the research aims to construct an experimental ground on which to problematize the process of mapping contemporary Indigenous memories of an Australian urban landscape within the cultural, spatial, social and technological issues that arise from collecting, classifying, re-situating, enacting and reinterpreting on territory archives of local narratives belonging to a community. Due to a lack in the locative discourse of a critical investigation of the implications involved in a participatory locative media process of mapping, problems explored by the research concern relations between location and memories, involvement of the community, role /position of the cartographer, social, spatial and technological implications of assigning geo-data to meta-data and reenacting a living archive by participants. In the framework of qualitative methodologies, a creative research practice is the laboratory where to approach the research problems by developing phenomenological and auto-ethnographical research methods. The significance of the research is found in the development a location-based repository of memories belonging to contemporary Aboriginal authors through an enhanced landscape-based medium enabling experiential ways to integrate geographic narratives with cultural, environmental, social and political contents in a pervasive media context.