Dispatches from the Department of Non-Binaries

- Written by Laura

Fikra Graphic Design Biennial in Sharjah, UAE, is the first event of its kind in the Middle East, at a time when creativity in the region is thriving. Its organisers – the graphic design studio Fikra – are on a mission to challenge our perception of the discipline, investigating its impact on past narratives, its present-day influence and how it can be employed as a tool for imagining radical visions of the future.

For the biennial, which opens on 9 November at the soon-to-be-demolished modernist icon, the Bank of Sharjah building, Fikra has imagined a new tongue-in-cheek governmental body, the Ministry of Graphic Design, and the departments within. From The Department of Graphic Optimism to The Department of Flying Saucers, each office throws light on an aspect of graphic design practice and how it crosses over with conversations vital to modern life.
 

The Department of Non-Binaries is a department that has particularly piqued our interest. Its headed by Basel-based non-profit cultural association common-interest and celebrates the power of hybridity and ambiguity. Coming just after the UK Government consultation on the Gender Recognition Act, which hopefully will lead to the legal recognition non-binary gender identity, it couldn’t be more relevant to the current cultural moment.

The installation itself brings together 21 artists, whose work resists categorisation and challenges binaries of all types. Artist Alexandra Bell's piece ‘A Teenager With Promise (Annotated)’ is a visual interrogation of newspaper bias through redaction and annotation. Designer/researcher Paula Minelgaite takes on the causes of Brexit. Dominican artist Lizania Cruz tells the personal stories of undocumented flower workers through floral arrangements, while Dutch duo Oddkin’s ‘Today’s Success Is Tomorrow’s Disaster’ is a board-game that scrutinises the moral implications of industrial livestock farming.


Given the fascinating parameters, we were keen to find out more about the department from common-interest’s Nina Paim and Corinne Gisel. Here they are in their own words…

Why do you think we as humans gravitate towards putting things in boxes, and why is that actually an unhelpful impulse?


That is quite a wide, complex, and multifaceted question. We’re actually not even sure this premise is, in fact, true — do all humans gravitate towards putting things in boxes? When it comes to gender identity, for example, many Native American tribes have been rejecting boxes. Prior to Christian intervention, Native American tribes assigned no moral gradient to love or sexuality and expressed fluid gender identities which they saw as a gift from the gods. So the first thing we must do is situate this claim: from where we stand, this seems to be much more of a modern and Western perspective and approach, rather than a ‘universal’ human impulse.

And as to why this is unhelpful, perhaps we can draw from Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall. He believed that our identities are not based on a set of ‘pure’ qualities that remain the same over time, but are actually a constantly shifting process of positioning. In his posthumous autobiography Familiar Stranger, Hall says, ‘Identity is always a never-completed process of becoming – a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being.’ If we can agree with this premise, that we are always in a state of becoming, then, of course, the idea of fitting into static boxes makes no sense at all.

Why is the idea of non-binaries helpful for this current political and cultural moment?


We live in a moment when the fight for equal rights, respect, and recognition – be that of gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, or else – has become a key driving force in the political sphere. We see this very clearly in the new global wave of feminist initiatives, in the intensified struggle for transgender rights, in movements such as Black Lives Matter or Decolonize this Place, and in political projects against income inequality such as Occupy Wall Street, Podemos, or the Fight Inequality Alliance, among many others. At the same time, throughout the globe, we also observe the rise of new populist nationalist regimes, the tightening of borders, and the enactment of discriminatory policies against minorities.

Although radically different in their natures, these phenomena share in common a central struggle for identity. Their clashing often results in extreme polarisation – as was the case in this ‘us versus them’ narrative which we saw in Brexit and the US elections of 2016. And currently, in Brazil, the presidential elections have been characterised by a similar binary viewpoint: you are either on the one side or the other. And each side vilifies the other to a point where discussion and debate seem no longer possible. In moments like these, families, friendships and other relationships fall apart, because there seems to be no way to meet one another in the middle.

From our perspective, ‘binarism’ is at the bottom of many problems we face today. Binarism reduces complex and multilayered issues into one-dimensional, simplified oppositions. And although we believe us humans can never fully understand a complex issue in its entirety, the more we engage with a multiplicity of perspectives, the better our chances to overcome the struggles between us. We have much to gain from conversations with one another across our differences. This is why we like the idea of ‘non-binaries’. Non-binary is what exists between and beyond two opposing poles, which is a perspective that might allow us to diffuse (and make more complex) extremes. At the end of the day, we all share basic human values that unite us. For us, the moment we are able to situate our own perspectives among those of others is also the moment we grow personally, and socially. We believe in radical pluralism.

How does the theme reflect who you are as a practice?

For a long time, we both struggled to figure out who we were as practitioners and what we stood in terms of creative or cultural disciplines. We would describe ourselves as designers ‘turned’ something else – ‘turned’ researchers, writers, curators, editors, publishers, and so on. But we couldn't fully identify with the other end of that ‘turning’ process either, which is something that made us rather anxious, especially at dinner parties, when posed that one terrifying question, ‘What do you do?’ Even though today many creative practices are openly ‘post-disciplinary’, there still exists a social, bureaucratic, and professional pressure to define one’s identity. It took us quite some time to understand that we are a hybrid of many things and that our practice is constantly mutating and evolving into something else, that we are in a continuously shifting process of positioning. Once we accepted that, embracing complexity became very much the center of our work and that’s how we envisioned common-interest. It is still difficult to describe what we really are and what we really do – and that’s not only ok but actually at the very heart of our practice.

What other projects have you got on at the moment?


At the moment the Department of Non-Binaries is occupying almost all of our time, but we are also currently doing design and curatorial consultancy for an exhibition about new developments in medical imaging, which will open next year at Basel’s Pharmacy Museum, here in Switzerland. We are also starting to prepare an upcoming publication about the roles of design through intersectional perspectives of race, gender, and class, as well as an edited volume about unrealised educational visions in design and architecture. And next to a few teaching commitments, which is something that we both really enjoy, we also have many more projects in the oven for the coming year. So stay tuned!