‘Wind tugging at my sleeve
feet sinking into the sand
I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean
where the two overlap
a gentle coming together
at other times and places a violent clash.’
From Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinters / Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987), 1.
A Lunar Perspective is a piece of research, writing and performance that travels through irregular orbits around Lunar House, a Home Office Visa and Immigration building, to question our practices of bordering and othering.
As a front line of UK immigration policies, Lunar House is a site where the border is explicitly practiced and performed. Built in 1970, Lunar House was named to celebrate the moon landing the year before, eliciting notions of space travel and exploration. From here, A Lunar Perspective explores connections, real and imagined, between the body, the land, the sky, the sea and the border.
Weaving together voices from different writers and thinkers across disciplines and positions, the project steps in to understand the materiality of Lunar House as a site of the enactment of the border and steps out to consider and critique our current politics and practices of othering. A Lunar Perspective reflects on the reality of violence at, of, for and with the border, recognising the continued practice of hostile environment policies within the UK.
Understanding mapping as a way of situating in relation to others, A Lunar Perspective becomes a map of words, taking language as a practice of cartography. Our languages, our words themselves, are maps of their own journeys, travelling through linguistic roots and resurfacing in partially remembered or imagined times and places. This collection of words, growing from and rooted within my own positionality, becomes a tentative, unfixed map, sloshing like water, in a state of continually shifting relations.
‘A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.’
From Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, in Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1989), p. 169.
My research and practice explores our relationships with and between language/s, bodies (human and non-human) and spaces. I often collaborate with others, weaving ideas, approaches and disciplines. I studied an undergraduate degree in Architectural and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where I also studied MA Situated Practice, graduating in 2019. While studying Situated Practice, I took the Site-Writing module which shaped, and continues to shape, my practice.
I performed A Lunar Perspective last year in a series of intimate readings in a disused observatory space at UCL and exhibited my work alongside other MA Situated Practice students at the Bartlett sites across London. An excerpt from A Lunar Perspective will also be part of the upcoming Cartographies of Imagination publication in 2021. I have collaborated with other MA Situated Practice students for a performance at the Royal Academy of Arts and for a workshop at the De La Warr Pavilion with members of the Hastings and Rother Refugee Buddy Project. In 2020, I collaborated with artist and architect Shivani Shah to design and facilitate an elective module on performance as a research tool for architecture students at the School of Environment and Architecture in Mumbai. I have also been collaborating with Ignacio Rivas to create a series of audio performances exploring relations between our bodies, cities, nature and technologies. We have shared our audio performances as part of La Escuela Nunca y los otros futuros, a project created by TOMA, and as part of the Chilean Conexion festival in Berlin in collaboration with Mathias Klenner.
My current practice moves between outer space, the oceans, practices of mapping, colonialism and exploration, to explore how we can question and re-imagine the border through porous, collaborative and unfixed language, movement and conversation.
Through my practice I care about the deep connections and relations that surround us. Learning with practices of site-writing, and growing from my own position, I enjoy writing, observing, and listening to the relations in and between our spaces, bodies and languages, stepping out to find connections and relate with others.
Jane Rendell, ‘Alien Positions’, in Site Writing (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 244–7.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinters / Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987).
Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, in Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1989), pp. 165–70.
