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Repeating Movements
2021 edition of 3 10" x 12" (25.5cm x 30.4cm) 10 sheets plus printed glassine wrap Papers: South Bank book smooth plus outer wrap of glassine A commission from the University of Oxford's Centre For Digital Scholarship ‘Repeating Movements’ is a print series and film that uses data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to represent the locations of people who have “fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country”. Specifically, the UNHCR statistics are for people from Afghanistan and the totals in each country of destination, as of 2020. I have turned the figures for each country into a percentage of the total and this is used as the source figure for repeat printings of a matrix of metal type circles onto a single sheet of paper for each destination country. For example; Pakistan has 56% of the worldwide total of Afghan refugees, so the matrix was printed 56 times on that sheet. Iran has 30%, Germany 6%, and so on. There are ten prints/countries in the series, representing the ten countries worldwide that accommodate the most refugees from Afghanistan.
The printing was filmed through time-lapse photography and edited into a short film of the process. The simple, basic effort of repetition is intended to reflect the statistics and their impact on the ground. At no point should it be forgotten that these figures represent individual lives: mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, nieces, grandchildren, grandmothers, grandfathers. |
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