THE RIGHT TO THE CITY: Who has the right to move freely through the city and who doesn’t?

About the project

TRANSitar Lima is a project that seeks to create a visual record of transphobic violence, based on collective mapping sessions. Trans, transvestites, and non-binaries* who participate identify the specific points of the city where they have experienced violence or where their exercise of citizenship has been violated, through drawing, collective mapping, and body mapping.

*Detail of an art Installation* *depicting the mapping project*

To transit the world

Historically, transvestites, trans, non-binaries, and gender dissidents have been seen as abject under the colonial regime, denied and minimized in official history. As identities and bodies that escape the regimes of the cis-tem, we are constantly in situations of vulnerability, we move through a city that excludes us and violates us.

When experiencing structural violence on a daily basis, it is necessary to create, collect, and disseminate narratives that start from our own experiences and knowledge.

Goals

The main goal is to show the different types of violence that trans, transvestites, and non-binaries experience in metropolitan Lima, through collective mapping exercises and drawing.

The specific objectives are the following:

1. Build a visual archive based on the territorial experiences of the participants who live and travel through metropolitan Lima, in order to make these problems visible.

2. Generate spaces for reflection in relation to their transit through the city, based on the creation of their own narratives, emphasizing the importance of being able to build our own visual testimonials.

The project highlights the importance of artistic creation as a tool for criticism and reflection, but also for an action that questions the violence that is reproduced in the territory. During the first part of the project, collective mapping sessions were managed where one of the activities, for example, was to use maps on which we intervened (drawings and text) to recognize the places we travel in our daily lives and the violence that could occur or that we experienced there. In this way, the mapping serves as a visual resource to narrate our own experiences about the territory, to make us aware of the places we occupy.

Mapping sessions

The trans-collective mapping sessions propose that the participants use visual tools, such as drawing and mapping, to collectively rethink the spaces they inhabit and travel, locate on the map places where transphobia was encountered and re-appropriate the cartography tools to propose new maps based on experiences.

With this, it seeks to reflect on the experiences, memories, and problems that occur in these spaces. Thus, it is proposed that the visual format can be a support for the testimonies of violence. In this way, the mapping serves as a visual resource to narrate our own experiences about the territory, to make us aware of the places we occupy.

About the map

This map presents the data collected in the sessions in a visual and communicative format. The process to make this map was long and required lots of changes in order to improve the user experience. It’s important to remark that this map itself is part of the process of the whole project and represents the visual systematization of part of the collected data.

*In the United States and in other regions, "transvestite" could be a pejorative term. But it is widely used in the Global South, especially to make a distinction between them and transgender people.

The TRANSitar Lima map appeared in Shelter: An Atlas, published by Guerrilla Cartography in March, 2023.