Art in border practice and policy

ongoing

The project’s main objective is to build a framework examining how artistic practice can be applied within migration policy contexts. Addressing calls by refugees, asylum seekers and human rights organisations for more humane approaches to policy, this framework will specifically investigate how artworks made in response to the EU migration crisis can raise awareness, build understanding or disrupt usual relationships between refugees, local long-term residents, NGOs and border security personnel. Developed within a comparative study between Greece and Tunisia, the project will reflect the impact of the EU’s current retracting and expanding borders in two key sites on either side of the Mediterranean sea. As the EU enacts ‘buffer zones’ to stem the arrival of asylum seekers on mainland Europe, art practices will be analysed for the ways in which they express and alleviate multiple stresses for those impacted by such policy. Beginning with a review of artistic practices on site in these two locations, the project will map and analyse how art reveals relationships between multiple actors across refugee, resident, NGO and border personnel communities. This review will be contextualised by a wider review of art in global border practices. Interviews with key informants and observations of different practices in Greece and Tunisia will then inform the development of a practice as research methodology, drawing on the ER’s own arts practice to co-create a series of artworks with local actors to test and map possibilities for new and different relationships between those enacting and those impacted by migration policy. This participatory arts practice will iterate through a regular co-evaluation process to a build a framework that reflects the role of art in relation to multi-stakeholder support, partnership building and ethical approaches to inter-personal relationships. The framework and its development will be made available on an interactive website.