A Repository of Worries by Sarah Tabbara

When geometry and human intuition meet: What becomes of the intersection between pragmatic visual tools and emotion?

Everybody worries about something. Worrying is an act of the everyday that people identify with on a personal and human level. While the Central Saint Martins university's library can be regarded as a place where students pin a lot of hope on to work, converse, socialise, or even rest... it also becomes a spatial capsule that embodies a record of a shared human experience for those who visit it. This project serves as a visual exploration of what “mapping a worry” could be, revealing the underlying landscape of data that lies within this place.

The “Worry Journal” is a tiny book designed to explore what “visual structures” emerge at the intersection between neutral geometries and human intuition. It takes on the form of a functional and simply stylized template which provides the participants with an approachable set of illustration prompts. The latter are specific enough to be a foundation of reference, yet open enough to give the students space for interpretation and creative freedom to express what they’re worried about. Thereby, the journals capture the students’ most intuitive responses to the shapes provided. The project showcases 115 journals filled out by students in the Central Saint Martins Library. It takes the form of 3 outcomes: A 2-meter-long wooden shelf in which the journals are anchored, an animation that displays the individual pages of each journal, and an “Archives book” that curates the pages of the journals collectively. The ensemble of journals forms a repository of the students’ worries, where the individual journey becomes part of the collective, with every single journal becoming a placeholder of a distinct human expression.