Videos - Forced Migration and The Arts - May 2024 Indaba

Thursday, 30 May 2024 saw artists, academics and activists living and working in countries that include the UK, Norway, and Lithuania meet to discuss work they are doing at the intersection where forced migration and the arts meet.

Art forms that were discussed as part of the indaba include visual arts, playback theatre, children's books and poetry.

The indaba took place in three sessions, namely:

2.00pm - 3.30pm (UK Time): Session 1: Arts-based methods, Visual Arts, and Digital Activism, with Charly Morris (UK), and Cecilia G. Salinas (Norway)

In this session, Charly Morris and Cecilia G. Salinas discuss arts-based methods, visual arts, and digital activism.

Charly Morris is a former art teacher, practicing painter and migration-focused PhD student. A feminist human geographer, she has worked with Ukrainian refugee women to investigate how place attachment can be cultivated through arts-based methods. Charly is currently working to apply arts-based methods to work with young migrant women gathering insights and experiences of activism in Sheffield. 

Cecilia G. Salinas is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. Cecilia shares with us how she works at the intersection of art and anthropology in her current ethnographic fieldwork aiming to understand the Mapuche-Chewelche people's digital activism in Northern Patagonia, Argentina. The Mapuche-Chewelche people have been forcibly removed from their territories since the European conquest, leading to widespread dislocation and the disruption of their ontological fabric. Despite these challenges they have demonstrated an incredible resilience and resistance in the face of forced migration.

4.00pm - 5.30pm (UK Time): Session 2: Playback Theatre, and Children's Books, with Alisa Volkova (Ukraine), and Sade Fadipe (UK)

In this session, Alisa Volkova and Sade Fadipe discuss playback theatre and children's books.

Alisa Volkova is a performer, trainer, playback theatre practitioner and psychologist from Kharkiv, Ukraine, currently based in Vilnius, LIthuania. She has been practicing different performance techniques and uniting them with somatic and writing training for 15 years. Alisa has been giving playback performances for refugees and internally displaced people since 2022. She has also been working with the playback theatre "Vakhtery" for 8 years. 

Sade Fadipe is a primary school educationist turned children's author, and is based in Essex where she runs a children's literary event. Sade is a non-refugee artist with lived experiences of unsettling migration as a child and as a parent. She links her work to the Refugee Week platform as one of her children's books, Snowy Joy addresses displacement due to war. Sade also uses this book in schools where the story is presented as a stage play.

6.00pm - 7.30pm (UK Time): Session 3: Poetry of Forced Migration - In conversation series, with Camilla Reeve, founder and senior editor, Palewell Press Ltd, and Jennifer Langer, founding director of Exiled Writers Ink

In this session, poetry editors and publishers, Camilla Reeve (Palewell Press Ltd), and Jennifer Langer (Exiled Writers Ink) discuss the work they are doing with refugee poets. Reeve and Langer were speaking at Forced Migration and The Arts on Thursday, 30 May 2024.

Camilla Reeve founded Palewell Press in 2016 and is currently the Senior Editor. She regularly hosts book events and joins panel discussions on subjects related to literature about the refugee crisis. Camilla is also the author of five poetry collections (Travels of a Spider, Travelling East by Road and Soul, Raft of Puffins, Tales from Two Cities, and What I tell myself at night) and a eco-fantasy novel for Young Adults (The Cloud Singer). Before becoming a publisher, she had 30 years’ experience in IT and Technical Change Management within the Retail and Telecommunications Sectors. 

Jennifer Langer is founding director of Exiled Writers Ink which began in 2000 and brings together developing and established refugee and migrant writers. Her debut poetry collection is The Search (Victorina Press, 2021) and she is editor of five anthologies of exiled literature: The Bend in the Road: Refugees Writing; Crossing the Border: Exiled Women's Writing; The Silver Throat of the Moon: Writing in Exile; If Salt has Memory: Contemporary Jewish Exiled Writing (all published by Five Leaves) and Resistance: Voices of Exiled Writers (Palewell Press). She also edits Exiled Ink magazine with an editorial committee. She holds a doctorate in Cultural Memory from SOAS, University of London and is a SOAS Research Associate.

Network Notes

[1] Forced Migration and The Arts is a global/international network that brings together people with lived experience of forced migration, refugee and non-refugee artists, academics, activists and art spaces from around the world. The network encourages mutual support and collaboration and hosts monthly discussion panels around forced migration and the arts. A playlist of videos of conversations we have had so far is accessible here. 

[2] We continue drawing attention to Sunday Lawrence's appeal for support. Lawrence is a refugee from South Sudan and a second year Law student at the International University of East Africa in Kampala, Uganda. He needs to raise €5,256 for tuition and sustenance. So far, he has raised €3,707 and needs to raise the remaining €1,549. Perhaps you can spare Lawrence a fiver (€5)? 

[3] In June, in light of how June 20 is World Refugee Day and June 17-23 is Refugee Week, Forced Migration and The Arts will be hosting an indaba every week for the duration of the month. The conversations/indabas will take place on Thursday, June 6, 13, 20 and 27 between 2pm and 7.30pm UK time. If you are a refugee or non-refugee artist, academic, activist or art space working at the intersection where forced migration and the arts meet, and you would like to speak as part of the conversation, please let us know through this form.