highly recommend keeping a small portrait of a historical figure who met a grisly end on your work desk. for perspective.
me: oh thomas cromwell, we’re really in it now. every day i get emails.
the postcard of thomas cromwell i keep on my desk: i was on committees with the duke of norfolk. and they beheaded me.
me: yep. good point.
me: cromwell. cromwell this post has got too big and famous and people are starting to misunderstand me on it.
the postcard of thomas cromwell i keep on my desk: oh no! you achieved too much fame and status? and now people are misrepresenting you? should we strip your lands and title? have you been beheaded?
me: YES ALRIGHT FINE
When I turned 34 I declared I had officially outlived both Alexander the Great and Jesus, and that my next target was Napoleon, who died when he was 54. I might need to procure a small portrait of Napoleon to provide me with perspective. “Oh, you’re anxious about an upcoming social event? I was at Waterloo.”
Yes, she was played by David Duchovny in a dress, but she was smart, capable, and ultimately saved the day. So far as trans representation goes, Twin Peaks and Lynch were decades ahead of their time.
I’m just saying, “We created a computer to make decisions for us, but it assimilated all of the bias that was implicit in the dataset and now makes incredibly racist decisions that we don’t question because computers are logical and don’t make mistakes” literally sounds like a planet-of-the-week morality play on the original Star Trek.
Instead of “live laugh love” or “home is where the heart is” my (wonderful, progressive, very accepting) dad put up the racism sign in the foyer
whats the racism sign?
The racism sign, as I like to call it, is from an art piece I made halfway through my first semester of art school:
It reads “any attempted theft will be reported to the police” in the 15 most commonly spoken languages by immigrants here other than English or other western european languages (in descending order).
This sign was only half of the art piece, the other half was the most stereotypically Icelandic painting I could think of:
When the piece was shown the painting and the sign were hung on opposite sides of the room, making the sign more of an afterthought for those who don’t speak any of the languages written on the sign. Standing out just enough for them to notice it and maybe wonder what it said, but ultimately not giving it a second thought for the most part.
I wanted to highlight one of the most common ways racism and xenophobia present themselves here as well as the comfort of ignorance. The sign doesn’t cater to you, you ignore it it, and you don’t care what it might say. You don’t have to think about it because it doesn’t affect you.
For those who can read the sign though, or bother to translate it, this is just yet another reminder of people’s ignorance and double standards. My inspiration for this piece came from my old workplace, where they had this sign hanging on one of the doors:
The main things that stood out about this to me were that
It was the only sign on the premises written in anything other than Icelandic and/or English
All of the additional languages (Vietnamese, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian) specifically targeted minority groups that already face discrimination here
The location of the sign. We only had 1 of these, and they chose to put it up somewhere where only staff would see it rather than the customers. In fact, it was right next to the break room so you had to walk past it every time you went on break. And it was a sign reminding people not to steal. Big win for inclusivity here
People love saying that we’re not racist/xenophobic here even though we very much are. The problem is just that so many people don’t take the time to look when it doesn’t directly affect them. I was very happy with my piece because people actually came up to me and asked what the sign said because they wanted to know, it started a conversation and made those previously unaware of this issue more aware. I wonder if these sorts of signs would be anywhere near as commonplace as they are if more people looked at them critically and asked “why is this the thing we bother translating?”
Anyway, all that aside I love my dad and I like the way this art piece turned out but also I am slightly worried about giving people the wrong idea when this is the first thing they see when they enter our home 💀
Well if you want my permission to show it then you have it :))
with great regret i must inform you that there is a typo in the Latvian translation, so it actually says “any attempted theft will be reported to poland”
I found out while working on this that it is extremely difficult to get 15 fully accurate translations into languages you don’t speak in the span of a week but this is killing me 💀
amhrancas 