This transdisciplinary collaboration initiated in 2022 by Circle of All Nations, Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, Carleton University (in Canada), National Association of Child Care Workers and Durban University of Technology (in South Africa) integrates approaches from arts and humanities, social welfare and cartography in art story map creation with children. Children initiate the map creation activity with child care workers, and through memory/mind map visualization, engage in geo-narrative storytelling and story map production that surface unexpressed thoughts and position therapeutic art creation in life-space work. Memory box activities are constituted as personal repositories of “safe space” aspirations articulated in art maps. Preliminary analysis demonstrates the transmutative and transformational potential of this work. We introduce the term cognitive story mapping to facilitate theorization in this zone of intersect of academic disciplines and multisectoral partners. Comparable to a topographic map that is a model of a geographical, geometric or geospatial landscape and abstraction of external space, so is the cognitive map an abstraction of personal, interior landscapes, marked by dominant and recessive issues, connections, parameters, boundaries and borders. Mapping and storytelling are critical tools of communication today, and here are presented through the lens of semiotic cartography in infographics, photoatlases, dynamic slideshows and cartoon. Evolving digital and telecommunications technology make them important Cybercartographic and cybernetic cartographic modalities. In this initiative, cartography is moving in new directions and opening new possibilities for transdisciplinary research, knowledge generation and dissemination.