Our team decided to reflect on the topic of taboo, as part of Justice, Misinformation and Equality. We found it a compelling topic due to its permeating quality, whilst it affects people on a universal scale we recognise it is silent by nature which gave us an interesting proposition to work with.
Our natural inclination was to take a personal approach to the topic, and our methodology merged both group work and individual work in order to cultivate meaningful and critical responses to the topic. Much of our process hinged on conversation as an explorative tool to excavate our feelings, ideas and personal experiences with taboo. We wanted to work with a medium that similarly departed from our ideas with this same kind of attention. As a result we decided to create a collective publication, compiling our individual responses in a way that would be both cohesive and accurately represent the range of aesthetic choices appropriate to our chosen areas of discussion.
The taboos explored in our publication all fall under facets of identity that reflect the range of people in our group. Our responses include black female hair, masculinity, family dynamics, heritage and citizenship.
We decided to work towards an unconventional kind of publication, inspired by artists’ publications and editions, that are devoid of traditional qualities such as binding and pagination. We thought this would be a suitable material choice for our project as there would then be no hierarchy of content and it would also give us lots of freedom in terms of dimensions, materials and other stylistic and aesthetic considerations.
An important discussion we had during our process was how we could mediate levels of opacity in terms of the legibility of our responses. By nature, taboos are difficult or uncomfortable to discuss so it was important for us to explore as a group, and on an individual basis, how we might either disturb this or play up to it. As a result, you will find in our publication levels of transparency in the ways we have chosen to explore our individual topics, and this will also depend on how a viewer might also relate to any of the taboos discussed.
There is a range of mediums in our publication, spanning postcards, stickers and posters, likewise text and image are used very differently across each of our responses. We are pleased to present a range of experiences which are universally, critically and aesthetically engaged. Our publication is a representation of different identities and experiences, and reflects an internal conversation between a group of people which we hope is externally relatable and comforting to our viewers.
