For this portion of the project, I wanted to go a different direction and what I’ve previously done with my unit 2 development. Instead of making all of my work be about me and about my own experiences as a remaining immigrant I instead turned out words and wanted to hear what other peoples experiences had been like. I first created this questionnaire as a way to gather small information about what people miss from home about what they miss from Romania and about themselves to some degree.
The questionnaire was first shared to my friends who answered the first few questions themselves and then it was further sent to other Romanians in our circle of friends and then through Facebook groups. The questionnaire was not an identifying questionnaire it did not ask the people to give their name or their contact instead it only asked them how long ago they came to the UK if they considered UK their home and a series of questions about whether they miss Romania or whether they consider UK as for their home.
What I did for the next few weeks was wait for the replies and then I compiled them in a way that I found to make sense, which was through a table. That way I was actually able to kind of track and realise what these answers are saying about the people and about their own experiences.
I was surprised to see that a lot of people that answered were actually people who came to the UK quite a while ago, almost a decade or around a decade ago, which was surprisingly not the audience that I expected to draw in. I was also surprised to see that most of the answers actually had quite a similar tone. A lot of people were missing Romania as a place of home, they were missing Romania as a place where family is and they were missing items from Romania that they technically could source in the UK but a lot of people argued that they felt differently in the UK (food, beauty products, general items).
It was also quite interesting that the questions that I had at the end regarding Romania, which was when you think about our origin country what comes to mind and how would you describe it from your perspective actually brought about very similar outlooks.
Many people discussed how, when they thought of Romania, they either thought of home or they thought of corruption, which I was very surprised by. While it is true that Romania, as a country, does have quite a bit of governmental corruption and that the citizens are acutely aware of it, it was still surprising to see that people found it to be their knee-jerk reaction or their immediate response when asked about Romania.
Similarly, when people are asked to describe Romania, they once again fall on the description of “corrupt.” They focus on the idea and the fact that Romania, while a beautiful country, is unlivable due to its corruption.
This was actually a question where many people mentioned that they would like to return home, that they would like to once more be repatriated and able to be with their families, but that they’re being held back by the corruption of the country. I thought it was quite interesting that many people have immigrated for, arguably, a better life, and while they don’t necessarily all consider the UK their home, it seems they find themselves to be somewhat stuck here in this way.
Taking these answers, I was actually inspired to create some sort of piece that essentially related to what these people had shared with me. What I wanted to do was represent their responses through a piece of design that captured the essence of their answers while also creating a harmonious, aesthetic work.
Based on these answers, I created a small book called Alta Parte / Other Piece, which is a small compilation of things that people spoke about in their questionnaires. The cover features beautiful places in Romania, and inside are people’s setbacks and hang-ups about coming back home.
The book includes the answers of several people, some mentioned that they cannot return home due to family in the UK or because of corruption, while others expressed disillusionment with the idea of returning to a country that is still arguably broken, even though the revolution that was supposed to fix this happened all the way back in 1989.
The cover includes typography made up of words that were commonly mentioned in the questionnaire, with the largest ones being those that appeared most often. It also makes a clear separation between the words in Romanian and those in English, transitioning from a more traditional, “local” font that one might find back home to a sleeker, more “English” typeface.