Interlope is a project which involves turning each of the 210 pages from Boris and Arkady Strugatski's Science fiction novel 'Roadside Picnic' in to an origami bird. An exercise in both digesting the text and origami incompetence. In the book, Red a 'Stalker' ventures illegally into a 'zone' to collect artefacts and debris left by an unknown ecological disaster or alien visitation – the location is an undisclosed but is widely assumed to be Russia. Parts of the narrative can be glimpsed on the folded sections of the birds and the small square of paper left behind after making them. this work develops ideas of language and silence, borders and boundaries and the complicated systems of propaganda at work in creating fables both in celebration of the soviet Empire and its demise. In 1979 Andrei tarkowski made a film called 'Stalker' based on the narrative of 'Roadside Picnic' developing the concept of the 'Zone'. Tarkowsky was exiled by the Russian government due to the anti-soviet sentiment expressed in his films ( the Zone widely thought to be a critique of the Gulags) and died not long later from a disease widely attributed to the time spent shooting 'Stalker' on toxic wastelands. This work begins to develop these narratives through the small gestures of reading and paper folding, making reference to systems of understanding and knowledge acquisition whilst using the emblem of the bird as conduit.
