Event

Infinite City: Mapping Trees, Love, Time, Butterflies, Crimes, Salmon, Zen and Practically EverythinPost an Event »

Headlands Center for the Arts

November 21 - November 22, 2010

Info

http://www.headlands.org/
(415) 331-2787

944 Simmonds Road Sausalito, CA 94965

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What makes a place? Rebecca Solnit will talk about mapping twenty-two of the countless versions of San Francisco (or any city), about cartography, geography, imagination, and the coexistence of many worlds in one place and then focus on one particular map, which pairs the topics of salmon migration through the waters of the Bay Area and the migration of Soto Zen Buddhism throughout the region and beyond. The talk is based on Infinite City, Solnit’s brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, a collaboration of maps, essays, and other forms of information with cartographers, artists, writers, researchers, and local scholars, some of whom will be on hand to join in discussion. Large-scale projections of all the maps will be on view throughout the afternoon. Copies of Infinite City will also be available for purchase. Rebecca Solnit is an activist, historian and writer who lives in San Francisco. Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, her thirteenth book, due out from UC Berkeley press in November, was made with the aid of cartographers, a designer, and 27 artists and writers, along with local experts on everything from labor history to butterfly territories. Her twelfth book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, came out in 2009. The previous eleven include 2007's Storming the Gates of Paradise; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art; River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A contributing editor to Harper's, she frequently writes for the political site Tomdispatch.com.