The term so far…
I have been feeling a little lost this term, and have started to wonder if I’m on a tangent from my starting point… as though perhaps my car has been drifting on autopilot and I need to take back control of the steering wheel. This piece of writing is an attempt to get back on track, to connect what I’ve been doing this term with what I was doing last term, so that my car can be gently redirected, rather than crashed and reborn. I think I got lost this term because, while I was happy with the ideas and positions last term, I was not as convinced by the medium in which I was working. This term I sought to explore more immediate forms of communication, with a broader reach, and the forms of GCD that are more directly relevant to my activist practice. Branding is definitely this, as is typography. I was also interested in interrogating how visual media is actually, right now and continuously, shaping our collective understanding of justice, and how those powerful means of communication may be hacked to propose something new, or at least a new way of looking at things. I have also sought to place myself within existing GCD contexts.
This term I was randomly allocated the theme of justice to focus on. Previously in my work the focus on this term has been in relation to the concepts of social justice, global justice and climate justice, in particular in seeking to challenge complacency about the system and the world in which we live. I have sought to expose the historical legacy of our present injustices and crises to show that the world is this way for a reason, but it doesn’t have to be: things could be done differently. I have sought to increase knowledge and understanding about the issues I’m campaigning about in order to hopefully stimulate behaviour change. Justice meant addressing societal imbalances, that create huge inequality. That this present inequality (in terms of the distribution of wealth and resources; health and security; exposure to the effects of climate change; education and opportunities) so closely follows the lines of historic crimes against humanity such as colonialism and slavery feels to me like of the most unjust aspects of our current society. Not only has no real apology for these crimes been issued, nor reparations made, but there is no acknowledgement that the ancestors of these victims continue to feel the effects of their legacies. They are gaslighted as we continue to frame interactions between the global north and the global south as the aid and philanthropy of the former, rather than as one of continued extraction from and exploitation of the latter.
At the time of the first tutorial I was coming up to my first ever trial. In November 2020 I scaled the Houses of Parliament to hang a banner from a group called Africans Rising to the government and people of the UK, asking for an honest acknowledgement and apology for the true human cost of slavery and colonialism, and debt cancellation and reparations for Africa (among other things). I was charged with Trespass on a Protected Site under the Serious Organised Crime Act. When this term began I was pondering on the nature of justice, and a justice system, and the fact that by many global standards of justice the action I took was certainly a just one – good, right, led by morals, values and selflessness. It is something I am proud of, and was led by qualities I wish to continue to strengthen and improve: courage, care, humility. However, if I am found guilty, which is likely, this will essentially be the state telling me what I did was wrong, unfair, unjust, that the balance to society must be restored because of the bad thing I have done. That I owe a debt to society that must be repaid. I find this both distressing and intriguing, and set out to learn more about the nature of justice, its definitions, and whether a sense of universal justice is possible. I also sought to identify the barriers preventing the achievement of global and social justice, particularly where they exist (and therefore must be challenged) within the UK justice system.
Below are my musings from the beginning of this term:
I started this term by collecting statements (in the form of voice notes) on what justice means to people personally. I wanted to identify where the overlaps were, but I was more interested in the contradictions (both within definitions and between definitions). Continuing from last term’s work I collected these in voice note form; I wanted people to feel free and comfortable expressing themselves – I think many people express themselves differently (less naturally) in written responses. I also wanted to continue the themes from my previous term’s work, of platforming other voices and erasing myself – not editing the work but instead leaving in people’s idiosyncrasies, hesitations and mistakes, leaving them firmly with the authority (the role of the editor is incredibly powerful: literature scholars obsess over the smallest variations between different manuscripts of a text, as the smallest change in spelling or punctuation can potentially change its whole meaning. I wish to leave the power with my speakers).
I gathered about 15 responses (a tiny pool in terms of data gathering) but within this there was a fair amount of variation, in terms of nationality, location and occupation. I asked my coursemates (from a range of countries, including Mexico, France, Malta, China, Greece and Ireland), some of my housemates, including one who has worked as a prison officer for the last two years, some of my fellow activists, from India and Ghana, and some people from my neighbourhood, who work in the local shops and libraries.
Many people found the question challenging, and the concept hard to pin down, acknowledging its multifacetedness. Matt’s response in particular, for me highlighted the frequent contradictions that the concept of justice creates in terms of subjectivity and objectivity. Matt said that justice is “the execution of an objective good”, doing something that is “objectively the right thing”. However he goes on to clarify that “obviously this depends on what your definition of good is, which is what your morality is based on”, which of course varies from person to person and is therefore necessarily subjective.
In their responses, people focussed in on a huge range of different types of justice, such as retributive, distributive and utilitarian; elements of justice, such as criminal, social and climate; and political/social interpretations of justice – some more libertarian, some more authoritarian. Many people spoke of justice as a retrospective thing: the idea of setting something back to how it was before the wrong happened or the unfairness developed. Obviously in this latter case, the state you’re aiming for is almost certainly fictional, or at least never existed previously, but could, hypothetically exist: an ideal, neutral state. Others said that justice was about living in a state where you could expect fairness, where you could expect that if the balance was tipped it would be reset again.
Triangulate 2
I wanted to use these to visualise and further explore how notions of justice, while apparently seeming objective and universal, can clash, overlap and impinge on one another. I tried setting them in different fonts and colours, text overlapping, so as to visualise a cacophony of voices – conversations and crowd-sourced definitions. But I’m not sure this was successful. I didn’t learn anything new. I liked the ones with two voices directly set over one another – both were legible, but you had to focus to read one or the other, and together I think they visualised a dialogue of differing opinions. This is a continuation of much of what I was exploring in the summer – how you bring multiple voices in, and platform, and visualise dialogue and collaboration in the output, however at the moment they have no audience, they are not being projected outwards, and therefore they do not engage in conversation. I’ve platformed, but how to amplify? How can I use this material to achieve my practice aims? To prompt audiences to think in new ways, and maybe spur people to take action?
Meanwhile I sought to analyse the visual language of justice in the UK. I analysed many of the logos of the key justice-related institutions. I was curious as to what the various logos sought to communicate, and why the Houses of Parliament was symbolised by a portcullis. I learnt very little from my analysis about how these institutions interpret the concept of justice. With the sole exception of the Crown Prosecution Service (which uses a set of scales to represent balance), I found that much of the imagery is there to confirm sources of authority and power, largely confirmed through connections to other higher sources of authority and power, always, ultimately, ending with the crown. There’s this constant backwards motion as the different features of the various emblems can be traced back to a certain monarch, or seat of power, or to an ancient Greek or Roman symbol, thus grounding the logo in the context of the historic progression and advancement of European civilisation. I used the catalogue form to break down the logos into their constitutive elements, and catalogued these as well, and through structuring the sections chronologically, and a key on each page I sought to recreate for the reader the journey I took for each logo, turning through the pages as I traced the elements back in history.
In doing this I sought to explore the visual system of the dominant form of justice, and what it communicates to people about the nature and definition of justice. I thought perhaps it would form the research to enable me to hijack these systems and use them to communicate something different. Instead of a justice system that is most concerned with communicating absolute authority, power and strength, history and tradition, what would it look like to create a visual system that communicates fairness, equality and a sense of higher good? Essentially I guess I’m talking about branding a fictional utopian justice system. In a speculative future of abolition, truth and reconciliation commissions and reparations, what would the justice system look like? What would the seal/emblem of its authority be? What would the values at the heart of it be, and how would it communicate those?
Or maybe this project is more of a direct continuation of the questions I was asking in the summer: how to communicate complexity, nuance and depth in places where the conversation is reductive and oversimplified? I think the legal system is taken for granted as being there to serve a “universal higher good” as Matt put it, and yet there is so much injustice in the world that the legal system is not challenging, and in many cases it upholds unjust aims. It is in service to corporations and money and property. I want to communicate that we should take none of this for granted, to inspire people to challenge their assumptions about it, and start imagining and demanding alternatives.
Critical Contexts:
Lauren Williams takes a similar, though far more forceful, starting point, in her project “Making Room”, an installation that seeks to transform the home from a site of carcerality into a space for abolitionist imagination, which she discusses in her Oct 2021 Futuress article of the same name. She opens with a classic discussion on the near impossibility of imagining a world without police, prisons, or capitalism, and asks the question: “What will it require to unsettle our trust in a set of institutions that never served us?” She argues repeatedly, with much evidence, that the system is working just as it has been designed to work (and therefore cannot be ‘fixed’ by reform), and writes that “Design is at best complicit and at worst a key facilitator” in the gentrification and policing that “erases, subdues, and makes Detroit palatable and decipherable as a frontierland.” She argues that future visioning and speculation are spaces reserved for those in power: economists and those with capital and the power to shape, invest and ‘develop’. She quotes Arjun Appadurai, who writes that the future has “been more or less completely handed over to economics.” She also articulates many of the challenges I have encountered in my work:
I’m terrified by the certainty I feel obligated to convey in this room but can’t grasp in my own imagination. I’m afraid of the pressure, the inherent certainty embedded in an idea once rendered into an object that we can hold onto, turn over, toss around, believe in, and dispute. I also know that this perceived certainty—meant to be taken as evidence of the possibility of an altered reality, not a prediction—breeds a sense of believability that I urgently need to construct because nothing about abolition feels certain, beyond the fact that we desperately need it.
I so recognise the conflict between certainty (that we need change and action, and urgently, and that I understand some of the problems and want to shout about them as loudly as I can) and uncertainty (the complete lack of knowledge of what comes next, what a world without these injustices would look like) – and of course the knowledge that of course I don’t hold all the answers, and we must create open dialogues and collaborations, that I must bring people into the debate, in order to move us further towards a vision of justice and equity. This uncertainty was also what led me to Sara Ahmed’s concepts of slowness and hesitation last term.
Williams’s aims are very similar to mine, and may perhaps provide a guiding light for where my project moves next. She describes her work as “a provocation, not a vision”, that “makes room for critical conversations around what stands between us and abolition”. Similarly, in the ongoing aims for my practice, I have identified that I am seeking to “forge more attentive and open structures to provide opportunities for others to be heard” (Ellen Lupton on Sheila Levrant De Bretteville). My work is grounded in my activism, therefore everything I do is done with the intention of inspiring people to change their behaviour and take action. In both Williams’s and De Bretteville’s models, it is about bringing people in, providing provocations and invitations to co-create alternative realities and futures. Williams’s work is also explicitly about research, about researching “what stands between us an abolition”. Similarly, I set out “to identify the barriers preventing the achievement of global and social justice”. The rest of her aims provide even more inspiration for new directions and questions to ask myself:
- to change, or at least challenge, the course of our present and future by imagining an alternative telling of those moments in time.
- to see what new questions and possibilities we can raise, open, debate, and refine
- to inspire recurring, divergent, recursive, living reflections and provocations that shape what might take us to abolition.
Other GCD Contexts:
Collaborative Making:
- Queer Typography
- the process is the medium
- A range of collaborative typography projects
- collaborative making (in traditionally individual and controlled spaces)
- end of designer as sole genius author
Logos & branding:
- Black Panther logo (Futuress) – collaborative women-led logo design, branding of a movement, death of the single lone author-designer
- link this to designer as author
- Freckles’s reference: how to design a logo/symbol for a movement
Imagining alternative worlds:
- Making Room: Abolitionist imagination (Futuress)
- challenging thought processes that are fixed in place, that accept the status quo, that think you can reform fundamentally problematic institutions
- creating the space for imagination and speculation about possible alternative futures to take place
- Dave Harvie, everything for everyone