Bitacora was discovered last February when I realized that I had lived in the same apartment for two years and didn’t know the names of my neighbors. Moreover, I realized that while I had not left my apartment in two days, I had emailed 7 people, gotten 3 text messages, talked to a friend from Nicaragua via internet phone, and ordered a pair of shoes from a business in New Jersey. If commerce is footloose and personal exchanges are facilitated more by technology than by geographical proximity, then how do our social networks and therefore our allegiances to people, cultural spaces, and geographical places shift? As a result of these provocations Bitacora emerged as personal, liminal spaces that indicate states of becoming as opposed to states with capitals.

In this work, I carefully notate exchanges that I have with people in my life and formulate my own terrain based upon what I know of them. After recording daily social exchanges—calls from telemarketers, texts from friends, face to face interactions with strangers working retail, etc.—I assign each person I encounter a geographical range of movement based upon my knowledge of that person and their patterns of migration. I cut these ranges out of existing maps and then connect all of the appropriated territories together by their roads and waterways. The united territory is then scanned into a digital system and printed at the same scale as standard maps. A new map is presented each day as new territories are appropriated.