Position through triangulating

/1/ Studio work

funny – so I re-shared it thinking that everyone new all the wrong doing that happened in africa in the name of the Queen. That’s when one of my ‘friend’ reacted to it that I realised that actually, people from the west seem do not see the full extend of the story. Therefore, I decided to focus on News articles in relation to the Queen’s death and Africa.

I started my work by looking at other news articled that would have a less bias views on the Queen -and thus Britain- relationship with africa. That’s when i found a Time article.

I thus decided that my research question would be:

how to use deconstruction and materiality of language as a tool for critical analyse and translation of bias Historical perception from the West about of Black History?: An experimental publishing and type approach.

So i decided to play with these two articles using deconstruction and the techniques of printing/tape/removing/overlaying that i developed in the first part on the unit.

Feedback & reflection

• could be interested to have a look on how the informations is distributed and how to deconstruct it
• be more thoughtful about the experiment, in terms of which part is removed / what is shown
• think about how to curate it

Reflecting on the feedback, i decided to push my iteration further and in a more specific/thoughtful manner, still playing the deconstruction of these two articles and my home printer.
I also thought that i should somehow find the balance between legibility and visibility as the text is still quite important and needs to be read somehow.

Thus, I decided to also have a play with the letterforms and type of the title, and not only the body of the article, as well as including images in the process. Trying to create new narratives, ‘reshaping’ the content.

Feedback & Reflection

• the last experiment was quite well received so i designed to continue with this route for the following week
• the idea that maybe i should look into more articles, to have a bigger overview/position about the subject
• having a reflection about the macro and the micro aspect of my deconstruction process

Reflecting on the feedback, I decided that i wanted to explore both the macro and the micro aspect of my deconstruction process, there for working on two pieces: one that would be more bold, visual, powerful and where visibility clearly overtake the legibility, and a second one, more on the micro side that would be and extended version of the ‘deconstructed’ article. I decided to look into 5 articles from different source from the UK and the US.

Here are the iterations made following this idea

What is next now if thinking of the form in which I will present the work. I decided to make a small publication, having the macro level of deconstruction as the cover and the have the inside as the article, I kept the length of my initial experiment to reflect the idea of scrolling, referring to where i found these inputs (online).

Final form

explanation behind the final piece, extract from my final essay:

‘My current work is somewhere at the cross-path of all the references developed previously. I aim to use deconstruction as a mode of research and a manner of questioning what frames the nature of the content. I want my practice to be a critical response to existing content and here in particular, the western view of Black History, in the relation to a recent event: The Queen’s death and the questions it raises and issues within the way History is told. The idea is to restore some kind of truth, as unpleasant as it can be for the West, and here Britain.

I worked with five different news articles on the Queen’s death, its impact, and her relationship to Africa. A few of them have already been quoted in the previous section. 

The intention was to use the material aspect of language and the concept of deconstruction as a way to re-shape the content, opening it to a new perspective. I mixed quotes from these different articles together, in order to give an overview of the situation as well as compare these different views. Two of these articles (BBC and Daily Mail) have more of a ‘savior and friendly’ vision of the Queen (and the monarchy is general) and her relation to Africa. Whereas the 3 others show an position that is towards historical facts, and the way people from the continent and the diaspora are reflecting and experiencing this death, looking at articles within Britain and the US written by POC. 

In this work, deconstruction and the materiality of language are explored on macro and micro levels. 

The cover is more on a macro level. It plays with the new’s article titles, and the materiality of language is more provocative. The letterforms are bold, big and impactful. 

The micro aspect of the work is within a deconstruction and reconstruction of the news articles. This part is made to be experienced in a ‘slower’ way. 

Starting with the macro level, the reader ‘opens’ the door to the critical analysis of these article. It is a hint, a first taste, of what is to come in the micro side. This last one goes a step deeper in the translation of the content and the thematic. Both of these levels of reading put the reader’s mind to work in order to deepen its engagement with the piece. Moreover, the typefaces used are the same used in the original article, to evoke the source material as well as the different voices. 

For the cover, the process behind the deconstruction follows a systematic approach of removing some parts of the titles using tape and a home printer. The tape is placed on a grid of 5×5 (in relation to the number of articles used) and the coordinates are picked at random. The title is then printed over it and the tape is removed. These deconstructed titles convey the idea of missing elements within the western perception of Black history. Here, even if barely readable, the text as material conveys the concept. However if ‘read’ long enough, one can start to recognize the letterforms and the creation of words. 

The reader has de ‘decode’ the cover. This is the first step to the engagement process with the work and its theme. Additionally, these titles are overlaid to recreate a new ‘visible’ title (instead of legible) of this deconstructed article. Concerning the form of the book for this first level of reading, the different elements of the cover are printed on see-through paper folded on top of each other. Once folded, the reader has the full visual of the cover, once unfolded, it reveals a part of the process behind it. The form of the book here acts as a key to understand the intended critical approach on the input, emphasizing on the how. Additionally to the typographic approach, there are some images from the Mau Mau’s tragedy, that went through the same deconstruction process as the text, in order to catch the reader’s eye. The cover follows the idea of uncreative writing that the how should be prevalent and leading to the what. 

In the second level of reading – the micro – (inside of the publication, that I called the article) is created by a deconstruction of the content extracted from these different articles. 

It starts with the BBC article, as it was the starting point of this project. I deconstructed the article into individual sentences taken from selected parts of each article, thus utilizing deconstruction in a way to analyze and reshape this content. Then, attached to the first sentence, a next one is placed, excerpt from a different article. The connecting element between the two sentences is a word repeated in both sentence. This process continues until all the sentences selected are used. Here, a play with the materiality of language can be seen alongside an importance to details and language in itself. Language and its materiality are prevalent here; the connecting words are use for what say as much as how they say it, the visual aspect of the word is part of its essence as a connector. To emphasise this process and concept, the printed format see the connecting words printed in a different colour, scattering the page with glimpse of colour that evoke a third level of lecture, if only these connectors are read. The words used as connector, for the major part of them, are important thematic that I want to put through within the work such as ‘empire’, ‘commonwealth’, ‘queen’, ‘British’, ‘African’, ‘colonial’, ‘monarchy’, ‘abuse’, ‘slavery’… 

Additionally, this article is printed on a long page. The length represents the idea of scrolling through, referencing where the input was taken from – online News websites.’

/2/ written piece

here, i decided to look into Uncreative writing: managing language in the digital age. Goldsmith, K.