Din och min plats

Abstract

The project is focusing on how design can prevent cultural identity crises in relation to language. Language is one of many factors that shape one's identity. If, for example, you are multilingual, you constantly create and recreate your identities through your language choices. In today's multicultural society, it is a great challenge to maintain one's mother tongue due to lack of educational resources. The process has consisted of workshops with bilinguals and multilinguals about the subject, and it has been shown that they often feel that they need to justify their ethnicity through their language skills. This in turn can create cultural identity crises because some have knowledge of speaking in their mother tongue but not reading or writing. The project explores how an artistic approach to your mother tongue can build an individual relationship to the language. The idea of the artistic approach and the individual relationship is to increase self-affirmation about their cultural heritage and decrease the need of affirmation from other people. The project has focused on building an artistic approach to the Chinese language, where the results have taken shape in artistic interpretations of Chinese characters in three-dimensional shapes.