This Box Hits Too Close to Home
Project details
- Year
- 2023
- Programme
- Bachelor – Graphic Design
- Practices
- Honours Programme
- Minor
- RASL: Re-imagining tomorrow through arts & sciences
“This Box Hits Too Close to Home” is a self-positioning kit meant to aid those who feel as though they are continually floating between geographies and cultures.
The internal need to position oneself in a single bubble, a realisation born from my own diasporic upbringing, is the exact practice the kit aims to reject through informed and targeted exercises – prompts. These ask for the production of physical artefacts that tell a cultural story –a narrative– not from any single location within the arsenal of a “floating” entity, but all of them.
The weight of traditions protects us.
Examining the various inputs that shaped my cultural self-expression over time and region, questioning my impulsive need to root myself into a single cultural bubble, and developing a method to embrace variety as a peace-making practice. This project introduces the confusion many “culturally-floating” people feel when faced with the compulsion to assimilate. It intercepts this process of assimilation, instead suggesting a long-term practice of cultural rediscovery.
There can be comfort in making a journey others have made before.
The kit first intercepts the faulty idea that cultural self-positioning must be limited to a single location, prompting the user to revisit places, actions, and memories of significance.
Through the production of “artefacts”, which encompass these areas of significance and are stored in segments of a larger structure – a box, a cultural narrative is constructed. One that trascends words and roots itself in materialities. The results can later be disseminated by other people, or showcased as a tactile way of conveying personal cultural significance.
This introduces and reinforces a new perspective toward the multitudes of cultural inputs a “floating” person has gathered over the course of their movement. One that can root itself in comfort toward the variety as opposed to a sense of insecurity or an overwhelming quality when trying to make sense of it.
Once, I existed in the words of my parents. But then my world expanded, and the words fell short of my reality.
Every step of this project was informed by my diasporic upbringing, and the consequent confusion when faced with questions regarding my positioning.
Lithuanian by passport, half-German by immediate family, British English by education, and US “West-coast’ian” by design aesthetics — there’s a lot to work with, and yet seemingly nothing concrete or extensive due to how these qualities flow into one-another. This confuses others because of a seemingly missing linear narrative and, in turn, leads the “floating” person to believe their positioning is flawed.
I exist in a different language now.
Pulling inspiration from Lithuania and its need to reinvent itself after occupations, and zooming in on how this mentality was engrained into a population; “Fluxus”, a Lithuanian-born artistic movement dependent on showcasing the various ways one can self-express; the “Scavenger Methodology”, a medium of collecting and conveying information and sources that have traditionally been ignored or erased by mainstream academia.
This kit, its purpose, is to externalize the process I underwent to feel at ease with the fact that I cannot root myself into a single space, and affirm that rooting oneself isn’t needed in the first place. It is also a first step toward producing a method that allows others to come in terms with their own diasporic, cluttered, or “floating” cultural expressions.
Would you be interested in hearing more about this project, its implementations, and the research behind it? Feel free to reach out via email or insta!
kristupasv9@gmail.com / @kris.vaba