What is The Cultural Mapping Project? What is Cultural Mapping?
These are two questions I daily try to address in various forms of communication. Sometimes I am more successful than others. I managed possibly the most succinct explanation so far in the PDF I made today which you can view or download at the bottom of this post. Here are some excerpts from the text…
The Cultural Mapping Project: an innovative project connecting New Zealanders to our evolving cultural heritage and strengthening our cultural identity and awareness. This project is actively inclusive, informative and encourages participation through community, group and individual mapping processes. These processes result in many different map forms and each informs the overall mapping project’s exploration of how New Zealanders see New Zealand.
Cultural Mapping: a process used by organisations such as UNESCO* to map intangible or qualitative cultural assets which produces an informed perspective of the current cultural climate which assists planning for the future.
There are two key steps involved in the process of cultural mapping:
Step 1: Engaging with individuals and groups to identify aspects of their culture that are important to them.
Step 2: Facilitating an expression or representation of those identified aspects.
Cultural mapping is an innovative process for strengthening and connecting communities by celebrating cultural identity through engaging, participatory activities, applied to gather qualitative information about our culture that may otherwise be lost. It is a way to support art forms and other cultural traditions by creating visibility for and documentation of them by the people who practice them. It is also a way to create visibility of the diversity of cultural contribution in New Zealand.