Saba Mundlay

Saba Mundlay featured image

About

I came to the RCA so that I could have 2 years to process loss…to dig, organise, and explore my personal archive of photos, writing, things like that. To work alongside and with people in an academic, process / practice driven environment.

To have someone ask me what my practice is. These 2 years have been exactly that and I am thankful. It feels really good. My practice is rooted in storytelling and narrative building, and then finding an appropriate medium. 

So far, those have been writing, scanning, printing, and film-making. I don’t know if I’ll make another film, but I had to make this one. I wanted to tell this story with my mom - of her diagnosis, of our relationship, and they way we communicate. Most importantly, I wanted to work on it with her so that she knows how much her words matter to me.



Contact

Degree Details

Statement

Loss (grief, mourning, death, a burnt bridge, a lost memory) is an altered experience of space, manifesting both in the material world and the remembered, imagined space captured in image and video.

Loss is a remnant. Loss remains outside of a linear understanding of before, now, and after by inhabiting both the before and the after, positioning the now as an overlap of the two, rather than a stage in between. Loss simultaneously lives in the present, the before, and the after.

In mourning, it is demanded of me to live in the present, not to dwell in the before, and to strive towards the after. This is the demand to move on - forwards through time, but backward through space.



I Made a Short Film with my Mom

For / About / With (2022) is a short film I made with my mom, who was diagnosed with ALS in 2015 and types with her eyes on her Tobii Dynavox. 

This is a trailer.

Medium: Google Pixel 3; Google Pixel 5; Adobe Premiere Pro; Paper; Printer; Scanner; Pen; Pencil

Size: 1280 x 860

In Collaboration with:

I Love my Scanner

A Scan from Sticky Fingers Publishing
A Scan from Sticky Fingers Publishing

I Like to Write

'A Visual Reading of Glitch Femnism' published via ARC Magazine
'A Visual Reading of Glitch Femnism' published via ARC Magazine — I asked 12 students to design A4 posters responding to one chapter from 'Glitch Feminism'. The posters come together as a response to Glitch, a concept developed by Legacy Russell in ‘Glitch Feminism.’ Russell repositions glitch from being a simple machine error to being a chance to expand the space of what functions a machine should or could perform.
Fugitive Voices session with Eleni Papazoglou
Fugitive Voices session with Eleni Papazoglou — Fugitive Voices is a lecture series for Visual Communication students. Having someone come in & give a moderated talk, with some space for questions after just doesn’t feel fugitive enough. We wanted to challenge traditional online-based lecture formats by designing a workshop focused on participation through the anonymous, written word. On camera, there is a pressure to be agreeable and that feels like talking towards consensus.
A Workshop with AFT11H
A Workshop with AFT11H — We gathered together to write about what the Archive is. We listened to Archive for the Eleventh Hour (AFT11H) discuss their practice, after which we sat in a circle, I pulled out an audio recorder, and we started reading from the document we had written. Sometimes there was silence, sometimes we took turns, other times it was cacophonic shouting. This 2 hour long workshop resulted in a 15-minute soundscape reflecting on our personal approaches to archiving.
A Collaborative Improv Writing Workshop with SCRAWL
A Collaborative Improv Writing Workshop with SCRAWL — Our writing workshop was modelled after improvisational comedy warmups and games.

And Here's my Dissertation

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The constant collection of data by a social network is participation, where both activity and inactivity are recorded. Looking at the relationship between network owner and network user through a spatial voting theory framework, I am trying to understand the datafication of participation in a social network. We, whether consciously or not, spend much of our time feeding our various social networks with information that reveals who we are, what we value, and what we believe. Harnessing that power is reliant on having access to and understanding of a whole network rather than isolated parts. Engaging in a ‘Research Through Design’ methodology, this thesis culminates in a ‘designed artifact’ of my explorations taking the form of a workshop. Participants were guided through downloading their entire repository of available Facebook data, a series of mapping exercises, and a discussion.

Where are the nodes? is an attempt to ground personal data in a political space.