Ma-tt-er’s Material

Mapping Guide
Ma-tt-er’s Material Mapping Guide is a navigational tool to chart
and plot the materials that make up your practices, places and
landscapes. This guide will encourage you to wander, getting
lost is encouraged, as well conduct intentionally navigating a
place or space by relating to the materials that make up your
and/or our world.
The guide focuses on four primary material categories:

Native materials are indigenous to the land.

Local materials are citizens, but are not native to the land.

Migrant materials are voyagers that are visiting from other lands.

Cosmic materials are spirits and omnipresent to any land.

Native materials Local materials Migrant materials Cosmic materials
[indigenous] [citizens] [voyagers] [spirit]
The Material Mapping Guide supports us in a process of beginning
to consider materials as fellow citizens, guiding us to form
kinships to the non-human world. Our roles are merely guardians,
stewards and caretakers of the land and the planet. This simply
begins with understanding what surrounds us daily to help us build
those interpersonal relationships with ourselves, others and the
world at large.

We’re not making a map of resources for people to extract from the
land, this material mapping guide is more to form kinships to the
place each mapper resides within to shape a relationship of care
and respect.
Potential Methods
Mapping as a storytelling device:

Treat your material map very much like story. Every single map tells
a story of a place, object, experience and history.

Your material maps can begin to tell the story of the birth, life, death
and rebirth - the journey of a single material and how it
connects to your practice, place and landscape.

These maps will become spaces of transformation that are rooted

in a place that can be deeply storied.
 Trees
Fruit
Herbs
Earth

Grass

Plants
Clay

Native materials
[indigenous]
Plants
Herbs

Invasive species

Trees

Local materials
[citizens]
 Digital
Imported

Packaging

Invasive species
Migrant materials
[voyagers]
Emotions
Values Energy

Senses
Systems

Atmosphere
Immaterial
Cosmic materials
[spirit]
Potential Tools
This guide can be mapped through multiple mediums:

• Sound
• Scent
• Vision
• Touch
• Taste
• Intuition
• Instinct
• Oral storytelling
• Movement

Consider your internal compasses as well as the physical compass

that is available to you.
Potential Considerations
A material’s journey, past, current reality and speculative future.

Mapping material migrations:

• Mapping where your material was born.

• Mapping where your material is currently living.
• How far the material has travelled to arrive at your destination?
• Where might the material might travel to next? (speculation?)
• Will the material settle in one single place?
• Will the material be in constant migration?
• Where might the final destination of the material be?
• Mapping the immaterial as well as material.
• Consider indigenous language, local terminology to the naming
of your materials and expression.
We are constantly migrating, and so is the material world. These
maps will be living maps and have the ability to live and migrate
along with yourselves and your practice.
Australian Aboriginal symbology.
Potential Inspirations
Australian Aboriginal sand drawings
Ellen Harding, Solar System Quilt, 1876.
Material Impura, Lorenzo Vitturii.
The geometry of geology, by Vicente Guallart.
Trees rings showing immigration for 1830-2016. Each dot corresponds to 100 immigrants.
Man as a being of sense and perception, Rudolf Steiner.
Planetary dance score by Anna Halprin.
Potential References
Sounds of the Forest

Scent maps

Inuit Emotional Maps

Australian Aboriginal mapping

Modus (written maps)

Decolonial Atlas

Mapeo: Map from the middle of nowhere

Counter Mapping

Collective Cartography

Incan Empire Story Maps

Simulated Dendochronology of U.S Immigration

We wish you well on your material mapping journey.

If you take part in the material mapping guide

process we would appreciate it if you shared your
journey with us and credit us in the process.

Feel free to tag us on Instagram @ma_tt_er and @british_design

“Try to leave the Earth a better
place than when you arrived.”
- Sidney Sheldon
Bon voyage!