Creating a Self-Authored Life

Photo Credit Najma Abukar @NajmaAbukar

Over the last year I was lucky enough to work on a project that combined my PhD research with my participatory theatre practice. Share My Table was a multi-artform project, co-produced by Scottish Refugee Council and Tramway. Positioned as Artist Researcher, I balanced two roles throughout this project. One asco-lead artist, working closely alongside Visual Artist Elena Mary Harris and Project Coordinator Deborah May, to collaborate with forty project members to develop a public performance that we came to describe as a walking-talking exhibition entitled I Hear The Image Moving. The second as an anthropological researcher, whose participation in the project – and ongoing engagement in ‘participatory dialogue’ or ‘a correspondence’ (Ingold, 2011) with everyone involved – would be fundamental to how I was going to explore and examine the relationship between arts practice and the integration of individuals seeking asylum and those granted refugee status as part of my PhD research. It would be in the doing of this project, as well as others, and in the act of ‘thinking, talking and writing in and with the world’ (ibid) that I would develop the direction of my thesis; beginning to understand that what I am hoping to contribute will be multi-directional. Not only inquiring into arts’ relationships to integration, but flipping the focus to explore what arts research and artistic methods can contribute to, or challenge about, scholarly and public understandings of the concept itself.

A major thread emerging from the work we made within the project and from the reflective research sessions that have taken place with project members since it ended, has been the role of self-definition and self-authorship. One particular example of this developed over a period of months, and through a number of at first unconnected artistic encounters. When invited to communicate what his personal experience of settling into Glasgow looked and felt like, Ezel (his chosen pseudonym) presented us with the figure of a man sitting on a bench with a newspaper on his lap, above him letters floated around him in the sky. He described this as the experience of having no English; with the letters unreachable, sometimes recognizable but out of his control. This image resonated with those in the room at the time, and so when it came to developing our final public performance we decided to develop this image through the use of projection. At this point, I recalled another workshop where we had played with written projection on our bodies. We had been using short poetic lines that the group had written, but during this session Ezel had been dissatisfied by the text we had, and instead went to the computer and wrote something new. He wrote the word Invincible and proceeded to project it on to his body. Now in many ways this was a fleeting moment, but the word invincible is not something we often hear used to describe refugees – we hear the words vulnerable a lot, we hear resilient, we hear human, we hear in need. But we very rarely hear a word that evokes such a sense of power, a sense of strength and vitally, a sense of defiance. It was a beautiful and provocative moment. And so, what we did, with the help of an animator was we brought these two ideas together. Beginning with the image of an unknown person lost in letters and words he cannot he get hold of, and ending with a scene where Ezel steps forward and commands these letters shaping them until they read ‘I am Invincible’. For me what we created speaks to the importance of self-definition and how that is achieved; that language learning isn’t just about communication, its about having the language and the space to define oneself, and to publicly present yourself on your own terms. Furthermore, it taps into Australian research examining the need and desire for a self-authored life in order to achieve an active form of citizenship that is defined by an individual themselves, something that is made practically impossible for people seeking asylum through the structural and violent procedures of the UK immigration system.

The final piece, presented at Tramway in October 2017, sought to diversify the voices constructing the image of migration, and worked to look beyond the issue of positive or negative coverage towards questions of representation, authorship and power. Throughout the process we engaged with, and subsequently asked our audience to engage with, the concept of concentrated looking (Cox, 2017) or listening with our eyes (Back, 2007). Working to expand what an image or story might tell us on the surface through an attentiveness to nuance, absence, complexity and social justice. In many ways, my PhD has developed a similar focus – not just examining the what of participatory arts, but the how, the who and the why. As my research continues I feel committed to rooting it within a critical inquiry into the ethical, aesthetic and conceptual tensions that permeate arts work within refugee contexts, whilst holding on to my belief – but not my assumption – in the potential for arts spaces to create the conditions for developing new forms of expression and dismantling prescriptive and constructed identities.

 

Catrin Evans PhD Candidate, School of Education, Glasgow University

Cover image: Najma Abukar @NajmaAbukar