A collaboration between Larry Ypil (Yale NUS) and historian Martin Dusinberre (University of Zurich), Ventanilla: Duet documents written correspondence between the authors about family and difficult colonial histories in the Phillipines and Australia. As the designer, it was an opportunity for me to don both my data visualisation and book designer hats, experimenting with how the intersection of these two design practices could reveal rhythms in a conversation and highlight contexts, subjectivities and nuances in interpretations of historical archives. More importantly, it was a chance to engage with histories of two places I call home.
This project situates the book designer as editor, reader and social anthropologist: every section of the conversation was mapped on each spread using an underlying grid, with each prompt and response moving horizontally and vertically in measured spaces according to the nature of the exchange. Being a “duet”, the notations beside selected lines throughout the text are loosely based on symbology in music and represent not only the details in each historical narrative but also the unseen dynamics between the two authors.
There are specific symbols for when the conversation diverged, when it converged, when there were unanswered questions, when there was a response to an earlier question, when there were similar themes but set in different contexts or manifested differently, and when there were pauses in the exchange.