The Global Grad Show seeks to highlight thoughtful designs that are more striking in concept or provocation than in form or technicality.
The Global Grad Show seeks to highlight thoughtful designs that are more striking in concept or provocation than in form or technicality. These are far removed from being actual design products and closer to being ideas and though-leaders that challenge certain well-accepted notions.
Society has long questioned the premise of a nation-state as a physical entity, exploring the arbitration of national boundaries as a reflection of complex colonial histories, forced divisions and border conflicts. Yosra Gamal, a graduate from the German University in Cairo, takes this a step further by not only literally redrawing the map, thus proposing an alternative view of the world, but also making it relevant to the Arab region at large.
In her project Flat World, Gamal looks at the one-dimensionality of cartographic borderlines as an expression of power, and strives to add other dimensions to this interpretation. Her research traces the origins of this power, exploring those who have the right to draw these lines. The project questions the validity of the map as a source of information and proposes an alternative reading set in the context of the current Arab region, a geopolitical region that encompasses one of the most diverse and complex historical border configurations.
As Gamal explains in her dedication: “This project is not dedicated to a single person but rather, to a group of people. You can call them Arabs, but not all of them speak Arabic. You can call them a nation, but within their fabric are so many diversities that disqualify them from being one nation…To you people I dedicate my work, not for the aim of educating you, nor to tell you the answer for all of your problems, but because in my search for an answer, I stumbled upon more questions, questions that I failed to remedy on my own.”
Flat World offers specific criteria for re-drawing borders, namely: Geography, History, Treaties, Ethnic Identity, War and Power, each of which are deconstructed in six complementary maps that provide an alternative narrative of the globe as we know it. With the support of historical facts and data collected from international treaties and world maps, the six maps offer an unusually distinct understanding of the world, one that has the viewer questioning the somewhat rigid concepts of nationalism and identity.
Gamal concludes, “Maybe, by understanding how the world around us works, we can someday participate in the formation of our new world, one that is shaped by you and me.” A forward-looking vision indeed.
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