Brief 1 / Projection (1) – Reflection on Audience Engagement

To evaluate how You Can’t Separate Water With a Stick engages an audience, I shared the work both digitally through the GCD Studio page and physically with a small group outside of the GCD course. The participants came from different backgrounds, including Pakhtun, Punjabi, and European contexts, which allowed me to observe how proximity to the subject matter shaped both engagement and interpretation.

In terms of how people interacted with the work, most participants chose to read it linearly, even though the format allowed for browsing. The flipbook was a key element in this. One participant mentioned that the act of flipping through it, along with the sound, made it feel like a real photo album. This suggests that even in a digital format, the project’s reference to a physical object strongly influenced how it was experienced. The structure of the work guided people into a slower, more deliberate mode of engagement, rather than quick scrolling.

Across responses, there was a general agreement on what the work was trying to communicate. Many participants understood it as a reflection on borders as imposed constructs, particularly in relation to the Durand Line, and how these fail to divide shared identities. For Pakhtun participants, this was often described in terms of lived experience. Their responses felt more immediate and personal, as they recognised aspects of their own histories and relationships in the work. In contrast, participants who were more distanced from the context approached it differently. One participant, for example, framed the work through ideas of state sovereignty and international law, while another read it as a cultural introduction that challenged existing perceptions.

There were also moments where the work became personal. Some participants reflected on their own assumptions or experiences, while others connected it to broader political or academic interests. Although no one expressed discomfort, these responses made it clear that the work sits within a sensitive space. Because of this, I made sure that participation was voluntary and that responses were open-ended, allowing people to share only what they were comfortable with. This was important in maintaining a level of ethical awareness, especially given the themes of identity, conflict, and representation.

Accessibility came up as a key point. While the English translations helped make the work available to a wider audience, some participants noted that certain nuances in the Pashto language may not fully carry across. At the same time, the photo album format seemed to help bridge this gap. Even when viewers felt that they were not the primary audience, they were still able to engage with the work through a familiar structure of images and fragments, similar to how one might experience someone else’s family archive.

Moving forward, this feedback suggests a few areas for development. There is potential to think more carefully about how translation operates within the work, and whether multiple layers of meaning can be preserved or expanded. The strong response to the flipbook also points towards further exploration of physical formats, especially in how they can shape engagement more intentionally. Overall, the responses show that the project is able to communicate its core ideas, while also highlighting the different ways audiences interpret and relate to it depending on their own position.

Appendix

1. How did you choose to engage with the work (e.g. reading, browsing, moving between elements)?
   
2. What do you think the work is exploring or trying to communicate?
   
3. Did any part of the work feel sensitive, personal, or difficult to engage with? (You can choose not to elaborate.)
   
4. Were there any parts that felt unclear or difficult to interpret?
   
5. Did you feel included in the intended audience for this work? Why or why not?

Haseeb – Web – Pakistani Pukhtun

1. Read the whole thing, followed by flipping the flipbook (appreciate the sound of flipping – felt like he was interacting with an actual book) followed by looking at the images attached. read everything again.
   
2. title of photoalbum is self explanatory and covers the project, its very apt. explores the shared identity of a people that are divided into different countries even though stemming from the same nation. it shows how state imposed borders divide the community further and further; state lines are not enough to sever the collective memory of a people.
   
3. All of art is personal but this piece was severely personal because I am pashtun and I have experienced the lived reality of growing up around Afghans. We are one people, but growing up, I looked at them through a lens of prejudice. They spoke the language as us but, they were treated differently. This wasn’t necessarily sensitive, but personal.
   
4. It is very easy to understand – because I am pashtun and it was very easy to understand pashto. But maybe, for others, it could be difficult to understand/interpret the nuances of the pashto language. A lot is lost in english translation if you don’t know the language. But, for me it was really nice reading the whole thing.
   
5. Yes, I am pashtun. I have close ties to the community. I really liked the flip book idea. For someone who was born in the 1990’s or early 2000’s, a family/photo album is the universal medium of memory. So, i felt included. It was like going through a personal memoir with the hand written poetry.

Afaq – Web (Phone) – Pakistani Pukhtun

1. Reading (going through the text), browsing (scrolling on the page), moving between elements (not sure what exactly it means but i did access the flip book at the end in which I had to move between the pages in the flipbook if thats what you mean)
   
2. How borders reimagine or differentiate the different sections of the Pakhtun community on both sides of the border. A digital diary has been constructed, combining poetry and pictures, which demonstrates the idea that you can’ separate a community by just drawing a line. Its pretty apparent from the “tappay” and the pictures that have been shared which conveys the idea which we have in our brains, that, we, pukhtuns, are the same people. The project is exploring this through poetry and pictures.
   
3. No, don’t think so. I mean, I am from the same area so I was aware already. It wasn’t really personal in that way. It was pretty smooth. Idk about the pictures, if they were personal but i guess because they are available here, so they are probably not personal.
   
4. No, I don’t think so. Thats probably because I am Pashtun so I am aware of the reality of living here. For people, who don’t live here (outside of Pakistan or Punjab perhaps), it would be hard for them to interpret it, because they will think that on the other side of the border there are Afghans, and Pakistanis on this side. For me, its not like that. On the other hand, we were taught that the Pahstuns precede Pakistan (in terms of identity). But for other people, its not like that. They would insist that I am Pakistani, then how can I be Pukhtun?
   
5. Yes, i think because its a gen z type of way of exploring a contemporary border. Yes, I felt included, since it was another way to look at things – not in a “oh I am pukhtun and the other person is pukhtun” kinda way. For me, it was cool way to look at it. I knew that people are the same here and there, but I had never looked at it through the lens of poetry and photography.

Khadija – Physical – Pakistani Punjabi

2. Brotherhood

3. Yes

4. Not really.

5. Yes, would be nice for punjabis to get some awareness of the human sentiments of the Pakhtun communities of Pakistan. Could help with empathy.

Math – Physical and Web – Half French Half English

1. I have had little choice as to how I engage with the work. It is a photo album so it is pretty much oriented towards browsing. I chose to read every sentence rather than focus on the images.
   
2. The work is trying to criticise the concept of borders, as legitimised by westphalian sovereignty theories. Thus, by focusing on how peoples organise socially, culturally and politically rather than entities external to the people trying to fit them into categories which are foreign to them. The project explores the social life of a place and how political and geographical determinants affects the lives of the people inhabiting it. So the work is exploring the reality of a place rather than how it is designated, through its peoples and more importantly through their interactions.
   
3. The work did feel personal. When I was doing an internship in immigration law, we worked on a heart breaking case. It was about two children who had been killed by the Taliban after they gained control over Afghanistan. The parents were claiming compensation from the French state for not evacuating them in time – the parents had survived. I won’t go into the details of it but this is when I heard about the Pakhtuns.
   
   Additionally, I am doing my PhD on Indigenous territories in international law. The covnentions I look at also apply to tribal peoples, including the pakthuns. I think a lot about this question of state sovereignty, about the fiction and legal construct of borders… learning about how they were created just reflects their arbitrariness. This work resonated greatly and even influenced my own work – it matches some of the paragraphs of my PhD.
   
   Also, my boyfriend is Pakhtun. He has introduced me in detail to the plights and history of his people, about the consequences of borders on them – especially in the context of the war going on between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Thus, this work feels very personal and I think that it is extremely relevant politically.
   
4. Some of them did, the writings, but I think that it is also the whole point. These small, short, descriptive and/or poetic sentences are very much what you find in old picture albums. I personally often have the same feeling when I’m going through family pictures of not quite knowing who these people were, where the picture was taken or what the person was really trying to convey whilst writing these short descriptions.
   
5. I’m not sure that I am the intended audience. The work feels very located and anchored into the context of Pakhtun people, of Pakistan, Afghanistan and of the relationships in between desi peoples. For me, this border is very far away from any place I have been. And yet, I have heard of the names of some of these places so often in the news, because of border conflicts – Kandahar, Peshawar… Without ever locating them. However, I don’t think i was excluded either because everything was translated into English. Yet, I also felt very aware that i did not have a lot of the codes or cultural knowledge to fully understand the pictures. And again, photo albums are kinda made to be lost and found – that’s the beauty of it, anyone can be the audience of someone else’s stories, past and intimacies. And I think that’s why the format perfectly suits the endeavour, opening the story of the Durand line to a wide range of people.

Momina – Web – Pakistani Punjabi ⁠
⁠1. reading, moving between elements

2. the culture of pakhtun community. it’s showing the people, mostly men, of the region that encapsulates northwestern region of Pakistan and north eastern part of Afghanistan. the piece is showing that the Durand line is merely an inconvenience and an unnecessary division between these regions as people are quite similar. I also felt that people shown on the archives were the passive recipients of war and conflict. 

3. no

4. no, the translations serve well to understanding the project

5. yes, it helps challenge the stereotypes and racism towards afghans. also I’ve not read enough work produced by afghans/pashtoons on the Durand line specifically, so this is a good entry point

Babar – Web – Pakistani Pukhtun

1.⁠ ⁠I read it from the start to the end. So I’ll choose ‘reading’ here, but the visuals kept me hooked throughout.. Visuals made the whole thing very interesting.

2.⁠ ⁠So basically a line drawn by the British colonisers became more real than centuries of shared blood.. The work refuses this whole thing (using the most intimate object(s), for instance family almbum as a example or if you take street photographs.. and this is to insist that recognition precedes borders. The idea of “foreignness” was installed, not discovered. Maybe that the water was never separated.. the stick just made people forget it was the same river.

3.⁠ ⁠I dont think so.. maybe you couldve slightly touched upon the fact that how the idea of Afghan qoumiyat/ethnicity ended there in Afghanistan (in documentation) when the brits created this line.. but maybe with that the project could have taken a different direction. so yeah i guess it’s fine the way it is

4.⁠ ⁠No

5.⁠ ⁠Yes ofc. Because I’m Afghan by qaam and ethnicity.. and this was about my history