Programme
AREA Chicago [Art/Research/Education/Activism]
Daniel Tucker and Dave Pabellon
USA
SITES OF RELEVANCE: NOTES FOR A PEOPLE'S ATLAS OF ZAGREB
Documentation exhibition:
16 - 20 June 2007
kk booksa, Marticeva 14d 
opening: 16 June 2007 at 8.30pm
Publication release:
20 June 2007 at 7pm
former cinema Central
Help to complete this map. Help to write the histories that inspire you. Help others not to forget.
Calling all mapmakers, radical historians, informal researchers, and citizens with a good memory!
Because maps are never finished and only tell part of a story. Because they are visual tools for sharing with others. Because they can be produced by many people and combined together to tell stories about complex relationships. Because power exists in space, struggle exists in space, and we exist in space. Because we cannot know where we are going if we don't know where we are from.
Notes for a People's Atlas presents maps of the blank outline of the political 
border of the city, as a call to citizens, mapmakers, and social movement researchers to help chart out the histories of local struggles. The maps will be distributed through several different methods to participants who will be encouraged to mark their interpretation of sites of relevance in the place where they live, work, and play. We want to tell of important, contested, and lost histories of Zagreb and to collect maps which situate those histories in the geography of the city.
Residents of Zagreb have inherited a deeply ingrained tradition of activism and political struggles from the city's/region's past, and there is an ethic of continuing those struggles rather than viewing ourselves as autonomous agents. What if there was a map of the city of Zagreb that told the stories of locally based nodes of international solidarity and social movement work through time?
The editors of the AREA Chicago Art/Research/Education/Activism journal will translate their techniques of critical cartography and activist research - working with researchers and local historians (like you?) to create 
maps based on Zagrebians' connections to local and international struggles through the spatial lens of a project always in progress. The process may involve individuals going out into public spaces and collecting maps from strangers or more focused interactions with specific local groups to take on mapping a specific time period, group, neighbourhood, or a working process/approach over time and through space. The collected maps will be displayed in the UrbanFestival headquarters and then kept in an archive which will remain in Zagreb. The archive will be maintained by local groups or individuals devoted to the process and willing to maintain the efforts on an ongoing basis.
AREA Chicago Art/Research/Education/Activism is a publication dedicated to researching, supporting, and networking local social, political, and cultural movements. Addressing complex topics through the lens of local cultural and political work, AREA Chicago has explored the following: privatisation and welfare cuts, local food systems, the history of social movements and the concept of solidarity and the impact of the criminal justice system on Chicago communities.
Dave Pabellon works on relating graphic design practice to social empowerment in a formal university and unconventional classroom environment. Through his projects he seeks to find relationships of community and geography through the tool of graphic design.
Daniel Tucker works as an artist, researcher, and organizer in Chicago, interested primarily in public space and the history of social movements. He has exhibited internationally with his many groups and collaborative projects.