Chandni Patel

Based in London, my work explores the intersection between new technologies and media, and contemporary socio-political issues affecting identity and community. In ADS4, I have been interested in speculative design, approaching new technologies and legislative approaches through a concentration towards the implications of alternative futures. My first year project investigated English-language bias, and the influence of this bias in policy and legislation, through a design-engine built through AI. I am highly interested in image-making and story-telling through film and animation, using a cartoon landscape for alternative spatial narration.

Since graduating from the Bartlett School of Architecture, I have worked in number of socially conscious architecture studios, including Jan Kattein Architects and We Made That, primarily on small-scale built projects and funding strategies for local community groups, charities and local authorities.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

- Edward Bernays

To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has been handed to the people. People may feel they are increasingly in charge, but are they really? If the last century can be described as the century of the self in which dominating systems of power have sought to indulge and sate individual desires, this project questions what kind of world a focus on the individual self has shaped, and how the binary between the individual self and the collective self can be deconstructed to reveal more effective and egalitarian governance and power dynamics.

The strategies employed by nationalist groups confuse the role of the individual self and the collective self. They manage to represent arbitrary, individual self recognition through collectivised action to reveal political programming and instil protectionist public attitudes. This form of public relations, often categorised as liquid PR, canonises and reflects traditional values into contemporary fixtures, to define a continuity and refocus overall public opinion towards its own goals.

Liquid PR is also, notably a strategy defined within 'The Firm' - the British Royal Family and its associated institutions. This complex relationship between the individual and the collective, in which the Queen has maintained significant approval amongst the public despite a reign of British decline and a series of scandals, will approach a reckoning when the Queen passes away, marking a decoupling between national identity and the monarchy.

Long Live marks 2022 as a catalytic year in which the Queen's jubilee, her impending death and the behaviour of elected representatives and the Royal Family redoubles the significance of her position and what British Identity and values are upheld through the next century.

Long Live, Bexhill-on-Sea

Long Live proposes an alternative governance structure which collectivises private monarchic property. The project asserts that the coastline, the alternative future coastline and 12 miles off shore are the first spaces to slip into public, collectivised ownership and deregulation, becoming an assemblage of different jurisdiction and allowing maritime laws and behaviours to be bought to land. This system is enacted through a number of coastal towns and outposts, sites at the frontline of the fallout from the government's attitude towards austerity, industry, immigration and industry, allowing coastal strategies to prevail whilst collectivising the Queen's assets. In doing so, the project seeks to critique the relationship between the British Nation State and the protectionist identity which has emerged in the last decade through traditional forms of collectivisation, such as nationalism, to demonstrate a more favourable and equitable British Identity.

Medium:

Animation

Long live, Barrow in Furness

The British Coastline is private land under the jurisdiction of the Crown. It is the site in which a number of pressing issues intersect to provide a site for a vital catalyst of change. High levels of deprivation coincide with migrant routes into the UK and increasing extreme nationalist groups. The Queen and the Crown Estate stand to gain thousands of square miles of land and property to climate decline and flooding. It is also a site that will act as a microcosm for the Nationality and Borders Bill, a bill introduced by this government which sets out national identity in terms of looks and as a single monolithic British-ness, informed by those who emphasise ethnic identity and an Anglocentric British nationalism. Reinforcing this by means of an ideology and political theatre by the current government, allows this sense of national pride and identity to become the mainstay in reactions against how places are governed.

Long Live - Anglesey

This study into the coast reveals a number of coastal opportunities to enact alternative laws. Flags of Convenience, a mechanism used by Her Majesty's Fleet, in which ships host other nations flags to enforce poor employment law, deregulated fishing or to avoid tax, is deployed as a tactic to maintain the nation state, whilst enacting more suitable outcomes for local governance on sites which will fall in and out of a flooded state in the next century.

Long Live, Beachy Head

This masterplan speculates on the conditions in which alternative British values can be fostered through the study of the nation state, and the effects of legislation and policy in the creation of British Identity. A nation's laws and policies have a direct spatial and subsequent behavioural consequence. Long Live critiques the paradox that is inherent to national identity; that one's identity is personal whilst simultaneously constituted and shaped by overarching power mechanisms. In speculated towards an alternative power structure, unburdened by the legacy of one nation state, the project asks, can we enable the century of the collective self, and how might democratic agency manifest in the next 100 years.

Chandni Patel

Medium:

Social

About

Royal College of Art