Languages of Lunar House
--- is a folded booklet unravelling the languages of Lunar House.
Lunar House is a Home Office Visa and Immigration building in Croydon, London, 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.
This booklet is structured around a text from the Gov.uk website which describes the asylum screenings process at Lunar House - a short, instructional text which epitomises the attitude, tone and approach of the Home Office.
Within this booklet, the Gov.uk text begins to be unravelled, reconnecting the words to their etymologies, and creating connections, both tangible and imagined, between the body, the earth and the sky. The folded page encourages the Gov.uk text to traverse the page and expose the diverse connections held within its own language. The words become displaced, re-positioning themselves and gathering relations.
Etymologies show our languages in modes of connection and migration, always shifting, travelling through linguistic roots and resurfacing in partially remembered or imagined times and places. By connecting across etymologies and languages, the words of and for the border unravel themselves and dissolve the notion of the border as static, defined and singular.
This folded booklet is a gathered part of A Lunar Perspective.
--- is a folded booklet unravelling the languages of Lunar House.
Lunar House is a Home Office Visa and Immigration building in Croydon, London, 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.
This booklet is structured around a text from the Gov.uk website which describes the asylum screenings process at Lunar House - a short, instructional text which epitomises the attitude, tone and approach of the Home Office.
Within this booklet, the Gov.uk text begins to be unravelled, reconnecting the words to their etymologies, and creating connections, both tangible and imagined, between the body, the earth and the sky. The folded page encourages the Gov.uk text to traverse the page and expose the diverse connections held within its own language. The words become displaced, re-positioning themselves and gathering relations.
Etymologies show our languages in modes of connection and migration, always shifting, travelling through linguistic roots and resurfacing in partially remembered or imagined times and places. By connecting across etymologies and languages, the words of and for the border unravel themselves and dissolve the notion of the border as static, defined and singular.
This folded booklet is a gathered part of A Lunar Perspective.
// bibliography
2019