A Lunar Perspective is a piece of writing and performance that
travels through irregular orbits around Lunar House, a Home Office Visa and
Immigration building, to question our practices of bordering and othering.
Lunar House, in Croydon, London, is where visa applications and asylum screenings take place. As a front line of UK immigration policies, Lunar House is a site where the border is explicitly practiced and performed. Built in 1970, Lunar House was named to celebrate the moon landing the year before, eliciting notions of space travel and exploration. From here, A Lunar Perspective enters into an orbital journey exploring connections, real and imagined, between the body, the land, the sky, the sea and the border.
Weaving together voices from different writers and thinkers across disciplines and positions, the project steps in to understand the materiality of Lunar House as a site of the enactment of the border and steps out to consider and critique our current politics and practices of othering.
A Lunar Perspective reflects on the reality of violence at, of, for and with the border, recognising the continued practice of hostile environment policies within the UK. In exploring this violent and shifting notion of the border, A Lunar Perspective studies the role of language in its construction, as a tool of distancing and dehumanisation. Moving through and between this understanding of language as a tool, and space, of violence, the work also explores the emancipatory potential in language, connecting across works of those such as bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua and Jane Rendell and seeking to hold these voices in relation to each other to offer new possibilities of reading our relationships to the politics of traversing the border.
A Lunar Perspective shifts focus between themes of exploration, power and control, and practices of mapping, nationalism and astronomy - seeking a reflection back to ourselves to critique, question and reflect on our relationships to the border.
Understanding a map as a way of situating in relation to others, A Lunar Perspective becomes a map of words, taking language as a practice of cartography. Our languages, our words themselves, are maps of their own journeys, travelling through linguistic roots and resurfacing in partially remembered or imagined times and places. This collection of words, growing from and rooted within my own positionality, becomes a tentative, unfixed map, sloshing like water, in a state of continually shifting relations.
collection of words
“A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”
From Ursula K. Le Guin (1989), ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’
A Lunar Perspective is a project by Eloise Maltby Maland
Lunar House, in Croydon, London, is where visa applications and asylum screenings take place. As a front line of UK immigration policies, Lunar House is a site where the border is explicitly practiced and performed. Built in 1970, Lunar House was named to celebrate the moon landing the year before, eliciting notions of space travel and exploration. From here, A Lunar Perspective enters into an orbital journey exploring connections, real and imagined, between the body, the land, the sky, the sea and the border.
Weaving together voices from different writers and thinkers across disciplines and positions, the project steps in to understand the materiality of Lunar House as a site of the enactment of the border and steps out to consider and critique our current politics and practices of othering.
A Lunar Perspective reflects on the reality of violence at, of, for and with the border, recognising the continued practice of hostile environment policies within the UK. In exploring this violent and shifting notion of the border, A Lunar Perspective studies the role of language in its construction, as a tool of distancing and dehumanisation. Moving through and between this understanding of language as a tool, and space, of violence, the work also explores the emancipatory potential in language, connecting across works of those such as bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua and Jane Rendell and seeking to hold these voices in relation to each other to offer new possibilities of reading our relationships to the politics of traversing the border.
A Lunar Perspective shifts focus between themes of exploration, power and control, and practices of mapping, nationalism and astronomy - seeking a reflection back to ourselves to critique, question and reflect on our relationships to the border.
Understanding a map as a way of situating in relation to others, A Lunar Perspective becomes a map of words, taking language as a practice of cartography. Our languages, our words themselves, are maps of their own journeys, travelling through linguistic roots and resurfacing in partially remembered or imagined times and places. This collection of words, growing from and rooted within my own positionality, becomes a tentative, unfixed map, sloshing like water, in a state of continually shifting relations.
collection of words
“A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”
From Ursula K. Le Guin (1989), ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’
A Lunar Perspective is a project by Eloise Maltby Maland