This was a project from my Graphic Design MA course. The module required us to create visual responds to one article or book that we chose. The text I chose was Harvesting Misunderstanding by Tino Mantarro (See the original text at https://www.maize.io/magazine/cultural-misunderstandings-anthropology/). In that article, ‘border’ was the first word in this article which caught my attention. This word is followed by a very detailed interpretation as ‘A border is a place of misunderstanding’, which I quite agree with. Then another sentence ‘People, and the cultures they belong to, are fluid entities…’ offered a concrete visual imagination.

I was very impressed by those phrases especially because I studied computational fluid dynamics for couple of years and I was familiar with cases like inter-fluid boundaries. I decided to record different types of borders between liquids such as water, milk, oil, pouring acrylic and even washing liquid, which is the most common-seen surfactant. All those fluids were used to imitate the process of human borders.

I picked up different scales of human borders: individual psychological borders, ghettos in the mainstream and inter-cultural borders. They will introduce different scales of misunderstandings. Moreover, for every case of misunderstanding, I generally divided the development of border into 3 stages: fluid entity self-evolution, encountering with external liquid and mixing, representing personal evolution, interacting with the context and misunderstanding. The beauty of the mixing texture is a prefect visual expression of the beauty of misunderstanding, which Tino Mantarro encourage us to embrace. 

The interview was directed and created by Rydia Wu.