this is not a narrative

2016

This Is Not A Narrative is a speculative campaign questioning how international archaeological museums construct narratives around cultural artefacts removed from their original contexts. The project explores the tension between the idea of a shared global heritage and the displacement of objects through historical systems of collecting, acquisition and colonial power.

The campaign translates this idea into a typographic system. Letterforms from different writing systems are inserted into an English sentence, visually displacing characters from their original linguistic contexts in the same way that archaeological objects can be displaced from their cultural ones.

The resulting message remains partially recognisable but becomes fragmented and difficult to read — questioning whether a coherent cultural narrative can be constructed when its individual fragments have been removed from the contexts that originally gave them meaning.