1. Blender

The Queue: a walk through London’s History is about the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the consequential queue that was organised for mourners to pay their respects. I focused my work on the cultural and historical implications of the path of the queue. My aim was to first analyse which sites the path made you walk through, and how that affects a mourner's reflection on their national identity and culture. I ended up treating the trail as an open, urban, historical museum which includes a collection of iconic buildings who have shaped the United Kingdom as we know it today. What I want to showcase in this project is how we can change and create a new narrative of this path through the use of 3D modelling and animation. The lack of historical explanation inscribed on the buildings passed in the queue show how there is little effort to acknowledge the heavy involvement in slavery and colonialism within their walls. This curation inevitably fuels a feeling of patriotism which is already deepened by queuing for an average of 24 hours to see the lying in state of Britain's most iconic figure in recent history. The use of 3D in my project allows me to copy a reality digitally, by exporting 3D maps from Google Earth, to reinterpret the dynamics around us. I re-narrated this curated path and told a more inclusive history of the buildings. I want to decolonise the path by acknowledging that the majority of the buildings have directly, or not, benefited from colonisation and the slave trade. I believe it is vital to showcase this one sided success story of the UK to a crowd of people queuing up for hours for one of the most patriotic events in UK’s recent history. To not address and acknowledge the real past of the buildings creates a biassed, rigged understanding of a national identity which can fuel a patriotic feeling and therefore disregard modern issues that trickled down from that page of British history.