Making as geographical method

This chapter co-opts Rumpelstiltskin as a geographer in honour of his talent for material processuality in the context of geography’s current interests in material practices and emergent spatialities and subjectivities. It explores artistic practice (‘making’) as an explicitly geographical research method, through three analytical lenses (spatiality, materiality and subjectivity). Spatially, I argue that through making, we can map the space-times emergent from these practices and respatialize their constitutive materialities. Materially, I propose that making can open new spaces between practices to enhance our understanding of pre-reflective aspects of those practices, which can be conceptualized spatially. In terms of subjectivity, I show how making can trace the subjectivities emergent through those practices and their artistic spatialization. Cumulatively, I establish that through making, we can work with images on a more conceptual and a more implicit basis, can integrate the conceptual and the implicit, and can generate new spatialities for geographical exploration.