Month: May 2025

Uploading here as well as Moodle to record my progress.

Video essay available through UAL Onedrive: MEcob_PositionsEssaying_final.mp4
Uploaded privately 28th May 2025, please contact me for access at m.ecob0820231@arts.ac.uk or mecob@hotmail.com

Tutorial 1 notes 270525

– Group liked the red dot device to follow narrative within latter part, as a storytelling device it worked.

– Liked Mum’s voice, could I add kids voices for their questions?

– Visual jumps between multiple lots of stuff on a page, section 1 and then into reference pages.

– Too many different visual languages? 

– Tutor – overall really nice, not sure about overlapping audio point. 

2 thoughts about the dot device, this project is about FINDING the message. Is me reading enough? Does it need highlighting? It’s about engaging with the document and finding the sentences. Not a big thing, something to think about. 

– Discussion re context of video essay, where we are supposed to show to the work and explain it. Is there a halfway point? Slow down

– Perhaps show someone who hasn’t seen the work?

– More crucial thing to do is to NOT emphasize the content, bit the speed needs looking at. Longer transfers between the page turns, therefore take out to earlier content. 

– Could I echo the hidden thing more elsewhere?

– Density of images – could 

–  Using the passport as a frame is a really strong idea. 

– One project a spread o page, free the whole thing up a bit

– Narration is really strong

– Pace of it is good.

– Very sincere script.

– Beginning – make one spread with the passport destruction vid, fill up the page! 

– Do something interesting with the references, in stamps or set as page 1 text – same face and colors.

– ESSAY: good feedback, print it in the same passport format. Augment the script from the video. Shoot it. As spreads. Use the typeface in the passport now?

POINTS TO TAKE FORWARD

– Consider red dot, beef up HIDDEN in text.

– Take a step back, look again and see how you can free up the feel to it.

– Record kids voices.

– Look at captions as typeset

Final tutorial presentation notes

Issuu edition of final iteration (some information has been redacted for ID protection):
https://issuu.com/mecob/docs/lastiteration_forissuu

Final presentation available here in an interactive pdf:
https://artslondon-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/m_ecob0820231_arts_ac_uk/EWYKzeT3vfREskIGMIFc4f8BVgOrbjiWOP_Q7tjGgrgtlw?e=DP62uS



Presentation notes:

Final tutorial notes 200525

– Authentic passport favoured

– Really gone for the “hidden” aspects, true to the aim of hidden colonialism

– Tutor likes the fact that you don’t know what an original stamp is versus what I have intervened with

– Hints that I’ve intervened adds depths to the work, for example the augmented cover

– Elements like that work in its favour, it says something is happening here

– Groups agreed that the “hints” I’m the passport add a level of depth

– What about the story I’m trying to tell? Explained it fully to the group, went through the text in each, explaining incidental changes to the stamps. Emphasized feedback taken in last week to the end matter of the passport.

– Same story of hidden colonialism.

– Tutor: emphasized paying attention to an object in order to understand what it’s doing. A valuable act. Outwith the passport, more about the way we receive and engage with information. This document requires a slower pace of engagement and a more in-depth engagement to really understand it. That’s special and worth celebrating and fantastic (!)

– Original passport most successful because of authenticity, you really have to find the hidden details. Other iteration is more of a comment on passports and beaurocratic documents. 

– Doing something more with the passport, deeper, more intentional way compared.

– Gayatri – using an original passport is more metaphorical. Layering is impactful.

– Group discussed widening understanding of what is IN a passport, we take these documents for granted.

– Discussed ‘KNOW-SHOW’ and materiality (Gitelman), but also that passports act as a bridge between one thing and another. References are generally “bad” or comments against power structures. ME emphasized inherent responsibility in documenting and the GCD involved. 

– ME raised ‘what is a document?’, is there way of brining that into practice

– Tutor – something everyday and mundane has power and meaning.

– Victoria – never paid attention to the detail and what it represents. Official document of identity doesn’t show who you are. Is there something about family and narrative over time?

– Next steps? Appraise all of the documents with slow attention, perhaps cross into a new medium that isn’t the typical use of paper.

– Tutor: You’re doing something “subversive”. The act of defacing a ‘valuable’ document, is subversive, adding things that you shouldn’t be adding, ripping things, interjecting with existing stamps are all subversive acts. The way you talk about this project comes from a subversive lens, describing something I don’t like. The document supplies a lot of privilege but the user dislikes it and what it represents at the same time. Reflecting on the other work made in this class, the act of ‘unstamping’ and taking away is subversive.

– Adding more than subtracting to the passport, thereby changing the original.

– ME to reflect on subversive angle. 

– Tutor: Richard Turley reference, Bloomberg Business week examples, known for subverting something dry and expected into something else. Interview magazine, primarily working in print. Recommend looking at him – how he uses the visual languages he uses to subvert, playing with the unexpected.

– Can the passport evolve without offending, be improved, in the context of my family (empire/colonialism). Subversion is a power, why not use documents to do it?

– Victoria – passport through time, family, parents, referenced other work in previous projects. Our personal stories change and evolve over time.

Conclusion:

– Very pleased with this project, its execution and criticality. I believe it has considered references coherently, whilst allowing for a process that evolves. 

– In Positions through essaying, I intend to map this journey visually and use it as an opportunity to break these methods out from paper-based documents into moving image, building on my moving image experiments in Positions through iterating (birth certificate).

Following on from the passport dummy from tutorial 1 (above), which I used to flush out questions of identity through making, I nominated the hidden colonialism in my British identity as a subject to concentrate on.

References within the writing component such as Jana Traboulsi’s Sorry for Not Attending, Khlaed Jarrar’s State of Palestine and Amak Madmoodian’s Shenasnameh highlighted subversion of the passport using often simple methods of GCD as a route to investigate. These projects all reimagine identity documents as an act of protest against power structures, sometimes reclaiming or creating new space and circulating beyond just the document.

Questions of monarchy, climate change and colonialism arose from iterating the first passport. What stuck out to me was the colonialism and a thread began to emerge regarding hidden colonialism within my national identity and how that has been highlighted by traveling. Living in Cyprus, for example, where the British were complicit in the break up of the island, brought questions whilst living there. Or whilst visiting the Parthenon Museum in Athens, my kids asked ‘where are the missing pieces, Daddy?’.

The passports stamps I had subverted with Carbon emissions became the most interesting avenue. Could I make the stamps, could I involve text and connect the stamps with a narrative? Was there something about the HIDDEN nature of the subjects I had chosen.

Taking a cue from The Conditional Design Manifesto and my own wish to be process-led rather than outcome (this is developing), I started iterating around the stamps ideas. Firstly digitally, and then by having stamps made, it became clear that rather than facts regarding colonialism or singular memories from my childhood (a very interesting exercise), a linked narrative had to be the content.

After researching texts, I wrote the following myself:

I was a grown man and a parent
Before I noticed the shadow in my Britishness.
I moved to a place where years ago,
a Brit drew a line in green pencil
that divided land and families.
It turns out that “we” had drawn other lines
In other places too.
Whilst we were traveling around
my kids started asking questions like
‘Why do the Egyptians have pounds?’
‘Where are the missing pieces of the Parthenon?’
‘Was Petra before the British Empire?’
But it was really me asking questions of myself.
So I told them that our country invaded places,
taking other peoples stuff,
and actual people too.
When I was their age I never questioned
why every map had the UK at the centre,
or why lots of it was in reddy pink,
or why there was something called the Third World,
or the Middle East,
or the Far East.
I do now.
My Britishness is complicated.
I’m trying to be a good human
despite the colonial history of the place I was born in.
It’s still there, under the surface.
Maybe I can help change it.
I guess that starts we my and my kids.
The world comes later.

Then, I hid the text within a set of specific stamps from two expired passports, each time the text linking to the stamp and its location. Over the passport, the reader has to find the hidden story within it….

I printed and hand-bound a dummy of the passport, enclosed within a foiled cover (taken from a greetings card). I added copies of visas, a passport photograph. The result is a subtle, narrative driven statement of realisation of my hidden colonial inheritance.

In May 13’s tutorial feedback included:
– Well resolved, could spend the last week finessing the execution and being clear about the intention.
– Investigate under further using CSM Publications workshop
– Could rework the end matter to hide the text, if the premise of this is to be hidden, this feels obvious.
– Perhaps stamp the whole thing using customized stamps, but be aware of cost. The stamps that were purposefully made have a more authentic feel to the output and the act of stamping reflects the theme of reclamation of my opinion in the publication.
– Make the new iteration at actual passport size rather than 105 x 148 (postcard size), the replication of the format will help the hidden theme.

Following a successful tutorial, I approached Publications who showed me various past projects which attempt to replicate passports. All of them felt home-made, which I have achieved without the aid of the workshop. The passport needs to look authentic, so two strategies have emerged at this point:

1) repurpose a passport cover from an expired passport, reprint the insides and bind it using endpapers, sew along the spine using a sewing machine. Buy a typographic stamp and work INTO the original stamps where possible, thereby achieving natural authenticity, repair passport cover.
2) recreate the above dummy, but using the reclaimed passport cover and commissioning hand made stamps, stating it myself, this will be expensive but worthwhile.

Writing component drafted on time and is directly informing the work.

With Esther McManus

Takeaways:
• Consider a publications from the text as a prompt, its form, flow, production all stemming from that
• ITERATE and PROTOTYPE, the group discussed and tested each idea as we went
• Final product was worked on by the whole group
• Key change in pace between standard book binding and then a fold-out map like section reflecting a change in the text
• Beautiful text source: Flat-Packed History: Disassembling simplified narratives and recovering anti-imperialist histories in Northern Ireland by Gráinne Donahue
• Text has relevance for current enquiry in Positions through contextualising – imperialism, colonialism, British Empire, education, identity
• Esther kindly looked at my project and suggested references and how I might develop it

Notes:
• Where is my practice guiding me?
• Artspeak!
• Immediacy and detail in your bio
• Confidence not ego
• Define the parameters of practice “this is my position”