Drawing Encounters of an Intertidal Landscape: Autotopography as Counter-Mapping Practice

Abstract: Drawing from autobiographical writing, autotopography suggests an entwined co-production in the writing/drawing of self and place. I wish to forward the autotopographical as a form of counter-mapping through the intermedial crossings of drawing and writing, and self and theory, putting bodily perspectives with/in the landscape into productive tensions with cartographic practices of seeing. This paper presents an autotopographical rereading of the Book of Tides (2021), a year-long project where I researched, surveyed and drew to think with the illegible margins of an intertidal coast in Singapore—lost to the map's ways of seeing. The visual-textual intersections expose a situated politics of seeing in mapped space, yet open speculation through a more embodied and personal coastal imagination for the island-city.