This project tackles fixed understandings of hybridity by investigating different types of cultural intersection and their manifestations. Seemingly similar, cultural hybridity in Japan's history of nationalism and in diaspora communities provides a key point of comparison. The project explores these as 'insidious' and 'messy' hybridities respectively.

Paper is chosen as a central character because of historic transcultural movements that have disseminated it as a product rather than a craft. The project centres around an imaginary Japanese family who move to Gravesend to study the industrial technologies in the Imperial Paper Mill. As generations pass, different relationships between craft, hybrid identities, and architecture are traced, reaching a point where craft moves from the domain of the private to the public, in the form of a squatting paper school.

The school becomes a site for messy, diverse hybrid cultural production, usurping the formal imperialistic provenance of the mill. Paper is expanded in its material capacity to serve the processes of learning, testing, negotiating, building, and rebuilding in a dialogue of collective and continuous hybrid cultural production.