Project Primer

I chose the object/theme pairing 'Paper/Borders'. I thought there was a lot of potential here, given the ubiquity and cultural significance of paper and the vast connotations and heavy political ideas behind the theme of borders. The first thing it reminded me of was the British Tamil rapper M.I.A., who has two tracks - 'Paper Planes' and 'Borders', respectively - that tied heavily into the two words, and the significance they played for her as an immigrant and refugee. I found a lot of my thematic ideas linked together - for example, in the music video for 'Borders', M.I.A. wore a bootleg Paris St. Germain shirt that said 'Fly Pirates' instead of 'Fly Emirates' as a sponsor. At the time, PSG's star player was Zlatan Ibrahimović, a 2nd generation immigrant, child of a Bosniak Muslim and Croatian Catholic, who grew up in the Rösengård housing estate in Malmö. This linked to a theme I'd already developed based on the borders between housing estates - I grew up in the border of two estates in Newbury - and the border drawn between social housing and private housing , drawing on the film La Haine and its depictions of the banlieue in Paris (particularly interesting as Parisian immigrants typically live in the 'suburbs'). La Haine depicts many nationalities living together in the estate which is also interesting for the border topic - what acts as the greater border, nationality or class?

I thought the Irish border, too, was something particularly interesting and personal to me, and following on from this the idea of Irish nationality and the foreign births register - inspired by a conversation I had on Thursday night about missing out on an Irish passport by one generation, and how arbitrary determing citizenship felt.

For the object of paper, I chose to focus on a variety of textures, thicknesses, and colours, because I believe its versatility is one of the most interesting parts of paper. I chose to show some important documents that related to my theme, like censuses, birth certificates and maps, aswell as some other interesting objects like the Bible (printed on very thin paper, but heavy and long-lasting nevertheless) and subcultural zines (a way of drawing borders between hegemony and counterculture).

I didn't manage to print out the picture in time, but I thought it would be interesting to also draw on the World Cup in Qatar - whose stadiums were built by migrant slave workers and which was decided by a great deal of paper (both money and the envelope held up by FIFA president Gianni Infantino). The World Cup always conjures a great deal of national pride, rivalry, and hatred, and its context this year is particularly interesting in this respect.

'Style' - Week 1

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