Countermapping is a creative research project and practice that explores how artistic ecosystems are built across geographic, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries. Convening, dialogue, and public programming become art forms themselves. Countermapping invites artists to collectively map the cultural, linguistic, economic, and social terrains in which their work unfolds.

The project draws its name from the concept of countermapping in critical cartography, a practice that allows historically marginalized communities to reinterpret relationships to place, space, and power. Within the context of artistic practice, countermapping becomes a way of documenting and strengthening the formal and informal systems through which artists support one another that exist both within and outside traditional arts institutions.

Rather than focusing on artistic production, the project centers relationships between artists, institutions, and communities as an art form, exploring how artistic ecosystems emerge through shared dialogue and collective imagination.

Developed through the Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship at Arizona State University and later supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Arts Projects, Countermapping brings together artists, writers, and community leaders to examine how artistic communities sustain themselves through networks of collaboration, care, and shared knowledge.

The insights gained through Countermapping helped shape the development of Hootso, a public arts initiative that approaches artistic practice as forms of gathering, dialogue, and civic engagement. In this way, Countermapping serves as an early conceptual foundation for Hootso’s broader exploration of artistic ecosystems and community-centered cultural practice.