Aesthetic Workshops: Making It Home - Migrants’ Memories and Imaginations of Home
Azadeh Fatehrad (Kingston University, UK)
Azadeh Fatehrad devised and led a series of participatory Aesthetic Workshops across the UK, Sweden and Denmark focusing on migrants’ memories and imaginations of home. The workshop series was developed and delivered in collaboration with NGO partners, ActionAid Denmark and Andromeda 8220, Compass Collective (UK), and the Baltic Art Center (Sweden).
The workshops series had three key stages:
(i) launch of the series in November 2021 with an online Toolkit One Meeting of all NGOs and workshop facilitators hosted by the Baltic Art Center (BAC). Led by Azadeh Fatehrad, over two-days the group developed a rich pool of ideas and collaborative methods that provided the basis for the in-country Aesthetic Workshops.
(ii) delivery of the aesthetic workshops across each country with NGOs, workshop facilitators, and migrant participants as co-researchers from November 2022 to February 2023
(iii) concluding Toolkit Two Meeting in September 2022 of NGOs and workshop facilitators for reflection on the workshop series and development of a Toolbox.
Jan-May 2022 Aesthetic Workshop Series Denmark
Four workshop sessions were held in Aarhaus in collaboration with NGO partner ActionAid Denmark and the art collective Andromeda 8220. The series was co-designed and facilitated as a participatory film workshop by Andromeda 8220 - artist and curator Aysha Amin, interaction designer Alexander Muchenberger, and filmmaker Anita Beikpour. The participants produced and edited short films and a performance (SEE). A further outcome is the home-activist guidebook.
April 2022 Aesthetic Workshop Series UK
Held consecutively over four days in London, the workshops with young migrants over the age of 16, were delivered by Compass Collective and workshop facilitators Victor Rios, Jay Jones, Leah Gayer and Ali G. Working as co-researchers, the workshops focused on discussing and collectively sharing perceptions, feelings and memories of home (past, present and future), and the challenges of home-making through performance, photographs, sounds and short films produced on mobile phones.
Photograph: Fran Lloyd
April- June 2022 Aesthetic Workshop Series Sweden
The workshops held in Visby in Sweden on 29 May and 12 June were a collaboration with NGO partner, Baltic Art Centre - Anna Norberg and Helena Selder - and the artist facilitator Eva Hållsten. Organised as informal gatherings, they focused on the sensory feeling of homemaking through the cooking and sharing of recipes, food, conversations, and images and videos taken on mobile phones. At the second workshop the focal activity was constructing a wood-fired oven based on online instructions from Afghanistan, which facilitated the preparation of traditional homemade foods from the participants’ motherlands.
Photograph: Phil Dodds
The overall aim of the participatory aesthetic workshops was to provide migrant co-researchers with a platform to express their understandings and experiences of home-making by means of their smartphones and the video and soundscapes that they can create. These multiple memories, imaginations and experiences of home through individual as well as collective memory resulted in the following outcomes delivered by Azadeh Fatehrad, in collaboration with NGOs and workshop facilitators:
March 2024 ‘Home Away From Home’
A fictional 40-minute documentary film (HERE)
Exhibition ‘On the Move: Mobile Phones and the Tapestry of Home’
Beaconsfield Gallery, London, U.K.
1 - 16 March 2024 (HERE)
Exhibition ‘Making Home’
Gotlands Art Museum, Visby, Sweden
23 March - 1 May 2024 (HERE)
Event: Participatory Research in Migration, Community, and Aesthetics London UK in collaboration with Baltic Art Center and Compass Collective
11 June 2024 (HERE)