As part of Migration Matters Festival 2024, we held a public showcase to share our recent work from the Centre’s Anti-Racist Archive.
This archive enables racially marginalised communities to explore and creatively document their responses to daily experiences, arts and culture, and pressing social issues. From October 2023 to June 2024 we conducted a series of workshops that focused on the theme of “home”. How do we define home? What is the experience of losing home for displaced and diasporic communities? How do we create home in hostile and oppressive spaces? These were the leading questions that drove discussion. With food playing a central role in participant responses, the group decided to format their creative work as a multimedia recipe book.
For the event, several contributors shared the recipes, videos, poems and essays produced for the book. Prompted by these presentations and the various herbs, spices and fruits scattered across the room, audiences were invited to reflect on their own relationship to home and food, sharing their responses via postcards provided.
We were also very happy to be joined by one of our community partners, The Lit Collective, who had recently completed a creative writing project through our Knowledge Exchange programme. Similarly this project invited young women of colour to think about the theme of home and resulted in a poetry anthology and short video. Several of the young contributors read out their poems during the festival event to much acclaim and applause. Read more about The Lit Collective and their Knowledge Exchange project here.
