Presentations & Workshops
academic conferences, community groups, and activism
Photograph by Anoosh Ariamehr
‘Made in Migration’ WORKSHOP
The Made in Migration Collective is pleased to launch their collaboratively co-created and co-curated digital exhibition, ‘Made in Migration’ (June 2021). The Made in Migration Collective is a fluid group of dynamic individuals with a common purpose – to educate about the realities of forced displacement in Europe and to fiercely advocate for the rights of people displaced by war and other oppression. We are intergenerational, of mixed sexual-orientation, and of mixed social, educational, and cultural backgrounds. We work together using the activist concept of prefiguration – that is, conducting interactions between ourselves using a ‘flat’, non-hierarchical structure, where our different individual skills, knowledge, and lived experiences are respected but everyone is equally able to question, critique, or dismiss ideas about how we proceed.
Following the necessary cancellation of a planned week-long workshop in Oxford in March 2020 (due to Covid-19), The Made in Migration Collective spent a year working together online, co-interpreting mixed-media material and visual data which were collected collaboratively in Sweden, Greece, and the U.K. (2017 – 2020). Adapting to Covid-19 restrictions, The Made in Migration Collective used interdisciplinary approaches drawn from archaeology, anthropology, architecture, ethnography, material culture studies, film and creative writing, to co-create mixed-media reflections on the buildings, places, journeys, objects, and personal belongings involved in contemporary lived experiences of forced displacement in Europe.
The result of this collective work is ‘Made in Migration’, a mixed-media digital heritage exhibition. Everything shared here was produced freely by individual members P2 MIM COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHIES of our collective or by pairs or small teams.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to have received funding towards this project through the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund. We also thank www.prsc.org.uk for generously allowing us to record their real life ‘Space’ to create our digital exhibition space. We thank www.logodesign.co.uk for providing technical help to make the website and for offering free web-design skills training to our Collective. We thank students from DBS, the Sound and Music Institute, Bristol – Emma Abrams, John Kenton, Ethan Harper, Louis Marcell, and Dan Pople - for collaborating with us to make original music. We acknowledge the extra time and special effort put in by all members of the Collective – including those who cannot be named because it is not safe to do so - and other friends along the way. Their labour is not quantifiable, but without it, our exhibition could not have been produced.
We hope that you find your visit to our exhibition interesting, informative, and radically reorienting.
