IDENTITY CRISIS

Episodes of Border Exchange

Undergraduate Thesis - University of Tennessee

Advised by : Jennifer Akerman + Marshall Prado Distinguished Design Award - 2019

The artificiality of national borders have generated cycles of displacement, violent encounters, and diplomatic conflict. National borders are physical, political, contested, heavily guarded, and have unnaturally divided people in past and present histories. This investigation focuses on the spectrum of social injustices occurring within border landscapes and the generational identity crisis it has caused.

Borders are products of conflicts, agreements, and embody painful histories. They are hybrid conditions existing between lightly occupied and completely abandoned. Its a site of juxtaposing and similar identities. “Identity-Crisis’ questions the spatial language of national borders and considers potential opportunities for physical, ideological, and economical changes creating an economy generated by those displaced.

This investigation speculates the India-Pakistan border as a case study questioning the role of the displaced individual in reclaiming control of their land and identity and history. The absurd origin and ongoing debate of land ownership has implemented an unnatural duality to a once united region. The 2000 mile border is physically inconsistent, and has yielded moments of ecological, and generational trauma. Three episodes have been choreographed as a response to the speculation, imagining the border swellings as programmatic sites of exchange establishing civilian control and generating a new identity.

Right : Visualizing conflicts, unnatural divisions, split territories and altered histories. Thar, Punjab, and Kashmir are split, almost perfectly. One religion to the left and another to the right. Dead-end roads are marked with an X and instances of recorded violence and sites of protest are represented in red with an increase in density as one moves north along the border.

Three locations were chosen as case studies to host such interventions that disrupt existing normality of military and political control, allowing the displaced to find agency to reclaim their identity.

Three speculative episodes with their own typology, program, and characters set and operate a form of exchange. Each scene considers a reclaim of ownership, and birth of an off-spring identity of those constantly at risk because of the border. Each episode reflects its immediate conditions addressing themes of cultural collisions, political and religious tensions, cross border interactions, methods of filtration and self resilience.