17 María Mazzanti Anna Bierler Desire Paths explores urban processes of belonging through counter-cartography, storytelling, and sound. Over five days, students will engage with the city of Antwerp, investigating liminal, overlooked, or transitional spaces, also known as Terrains Vagues, a term popularized by Spanish architect and critic Ignasi de Solà-Morales to describe unproductive, vacant, and marginalized areas in the urban landscape. These uncertain spaces, neither public nor private, neither productive nor preserved, become the ground for walking, listening, recording, mapping, and reflection. Rather than being empty, these vague or leftout spaces embody a temporal and affective condition. As sites of ambiguity, residue, or interruption, they resist clear categorization and linear development. Their apparent lack of use is in fact an invitation: they open possibilities for alternative narratives and unexpected forms of belonging. These spaces may hold traces of erased pasts, displacements, or incomplete projects, while also offering room for those left out of dominant urban scripts. In this way, the terrain vague becomes a place of both ending and becoming, a threshold for imagining other ways of inhabiting the city. The workshop draws on Queering the Map as a methodological reference, offering a way to think about mapping as a political, embodied, and situated act. It also uses the idea of composting, understood as a practice of making from what is often considered dead, discarded, or obsolete. It is a way of working with remnants, whether material, narrative, or spatial, not to preserve them as they are, but to allow them to break down, transform, and give rise to new forms. Participants will be invited to engage with Antwerp’s Terrains Vagues by reimagining them through new stories, sounds, and mapping practices. By attending to what is usually passed over or rendered obsolete, the workshop aims to challenge how inclusion and exclusion are spatially shaped. The final result will be a collectively produced audiowalk or soundmap of the city, made from field recordings, conversations, and situated texts. This workshop aligns with afloat’s broader research focused on how endings —in urban, ecological, or narrative terms— can also be openings for new forms of belonging and care.
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