Moveable Type _’Unfeeling’

A series of collage works created for the UCL ‘Moveable Type‘ / 14 publication. These works were designed as an interchangeable sequence so they can also be viewed as diptychs / triptychs or as a longer series.

The pieces use fragments of colonial era publications as a basis to explore ideas and themes presented in Xine Yao’s ‘Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America’ (2021).

This text explores ‘unfeeling’ as a method for refusing social legibility and disrupting colonialism and other oppressive hierarchies. In attempting to visually articulate these ideas of refusal and disrupted legibility, Alex was particularly drawn to Yao’s critiques of the colonial gaze / mindset and her observations around the proximity of violence and oppression to sentimentalism.