Boarding Pass

Boarding Pass is a participatory art installation and public programme that I created in collaboration with Shakespeare’s Globe in London. The team at the Globe invited me to create an art project that reflects on Refugee Week, and after conversations and discovery of the space, the Boarding Pass idea was born, designed to reflect on the metaphor of borders and checkpoints. With this work, I wanted to provide a space for us all to rethink our values, relations to others, and reflect upon our judgements around the ideas of inclusion or exclusion.

I started this project with a workshop with the Globe staff and volunteers. Using recycled packaging and cast-offs from the theatre’s props and wardrobe departments, we came together to create handmade personalised boarding passes: a playful way of encouraging discussion around the fact that something as mundane as a piece of paper (or lack of it) could grant or deny access to a place.

Then, I produced the installation: using threaded black wire. We installed a barrier mesh between two columns, reaching from ground level to about 2.5m high, and 4m wide, cutting directly through an open communal and public space in the theatre building. The intention was to deliberately counter the naturally welcoming feeling of the Globe and to disrupt the ease with which visitors would ordinarily navigate the space, as a way of focussing attention on the idea of borders being constructs, and often arbitrary divisions of land or separation of peoples. Suspended among the wires were six questions, prompted by the 5W and 1H. Visitors were then invited to take a boarding pass, answer the question that hit them first, and add it to the continually growing installation.

I imagined this work as a participatory installation that initiates an open collective conversation. And it did. People from all ages, backgrounds and nationalities were reading, interacting and participating. The responses we had were heart-warming, eye opening and beautifully unique. One of the many powerful answers to my “WHERE do you draw the line?” question was: “I didn’t draw the line, but it cut through my home.”

More info published on Shakespeare’s Globe Blog