In Johannesburg, you can buy a stolen shopping trolley for about €5 (R50). That can be enough to give you a business: a precarious and poor business, but a business nonetheless – carting people’s shopping and luggage around the city for a small fee. It is, as it sounds, an unregulated market, and because the trolleys are stolen – by organised gangs, using vans – it’s largely an illegal market. But the trolley pushers feel victimised by police, who organise raids to reclaim trolleys, and though they provide a service, have no rights or representative organisation. Most trolley pushers are immigrants, from Zimbabwe or Mozambique, and the gangs stealing the trolleys are Zimbabwean.

Ismail Farouk is an artist and urban geographer in Johannesburg who’s trying to change that. His trolleyworks.org project is a multi-disciplinary art project with a hard social purpose – improving the lot of trolley-pushers in Jozi. Frouk’s own website is here, and his elegantly simple trolleyworks site is here. There’s video of a trolley pushers’ protest here.

He and his team have designed a prototype of a cheap, more manouverable trolley – there is a video on the site – and are hoping to roll it out in what is an intriguing fusion of art, science and social purpose.

I learned about Ismail Farouk from the Forced Migration Studies Programme at Wits University in Johannesburg.
The programme is 'is an internationally engaged; Africa-oriented; and Africa-based centre of excellence for research and teaching that helps shape global discourse on migration aid and social transformation', based at one of South Africa's leading universities. Their website has an extensive range of papers on migration policy and trends in southern Africa and further afield. The multimedia side of it is thin, being an academic centre, but there is a discussion on 'Balancing Control and Cohesion, Immigration Policy in Europe', comparing policy in South Africa with Europe, here. The Programme also runs regular seminars, etc, and I learned about a seminar with Farouk from their mailing list.

From the Programme's website: 'Migration and displacement affect societies around the world. Nowhere are their impacts more evident than in Africa, where movements of people as a result of war, poverty, and persecution are central to the region’s economics and politics. While migration is transforming Africa, the continent lacks the capacity to understand and manage these movements. The Forced Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand is designed to address this need.'

One of the main projects at FOMACS is Digital Storytelling run by Darcy Alexandra. There are three digital stories so far available online: the stories of Abdel, Lyubov and Zaman, who each came to Ireland with the hopes of building a better future for themselves and their families. From Morocco, Ukraine and Bangladesh, they entered Ireland legally. Due to diverse circumstances outside of their control, they fell out of legality. These stories were produced in collaboration with the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, under the title of ‘Undocumented in Ireland: Our Stories’.

More generally, the Digital Storytelling project focuses on the making and telling of stories by migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in Ireland. ‘Through a collaborative and interactive process of creating a digital story, utilizing audiovisual media, participants individually and collectively reflect on their experiences of migration, engage in dialogue with others about stories that are often left untold, and develop a new and critical understanding of these life stories… Digital stories can be used as a means to communicate with family members across distances; analyse social issues; develop educational outreach; advocate for policy changes; build social networks and artistically express oneself in a way that underscores the vibrant and heterogeneous ways of living migration.’ The project is inspired by the work of the Center for Digital Storytelling, at Berkeley, California.

The second International Day of Sharing Life Stories is approaching, on May 16. The theme this year is ‘Journeys Towards Justice: Capturing the Stories of Human Rights in the Context of Migration.’ The organisers write: ‘We intend to collect stories of immigrants and refugees that can be used as tools to organizations that fight for their rights. The Day will continue to be an opportunity for people around the world to gather to hear each other’s stories. We encourage your participation through promoting events and sharing your stories with us by posting them at www.storiesforchange.net.’ Meanwhile, the main website will be used to gather together all the events around the world for the day.

The project is organised by the Center for Digital Story Telling in the US and the Museu da Pessoa (Museum of the Person) in Brazil. The Museu da Pessoa, ‘Latin America’s largest oral-history center’, was recently the subject of a feature in a Wall Street Journal. Read about it, and view online exhibits from the museum, here.

This excerpt gives a useful overview of the development of the museum and of the medium of oral history.
‘"Brazil is an oral culture, partly because of our African and indigenous roots," Ms. Worcman [the director of the museum] says. "You meet people who might not have had much formal education, but they have a natural gift for telling a story."
Oral history gained traction during the Great Depression, when the Roosevelt administration's Federal Writers Project collected stories of people like a Vermont stonecutter and a Florida swamp-dweller. Today, places like the Museum of the Person are helping to reinvigorate the genre with the aid of digital technology.’

Incidentally, FOMACS was recently recognised on the website of the International Day for Sharing Life Stories, here.

We'll continue this theme of oral history in further reports.

On the US-Mexico border, a group has been giving away disposable cameras for an art project. The Border Film Project gave cameras to two radically opposed groups on opposite sides of the border: to the undocumented migrants crossing the desert into the United States, and to the Minutemen volunteers trying to stop them, and has published and exhibited the resulting photographs.

As they record, ‘to date, we have received 73 cameras — 38 from migrants and 35 from Minutemen — with nearly 2,000 pictures in total. The pictures show the human face of immigration, and they challenge us to question our stereotypes and to see through new and personal lenses.'

There is a series of short videos on the project's website, illustrating the project.

They explain the project as follows: 'To recruit migrant photographers, we visited migrant shelters and other humanitarian organizations on the Mexican side of the border. In the busiest areas, these shelters housed dozens of migrants every night, providing them dinner, a place to sleep, and sometimes clothes and medicine for the journey. We met the migrants in groups and told them about the project. Since many had never used cameras before, we also became impromptu photography teachers—pointing out the flash and film wheel and teaching them how to aim through the viewfinder. In addition, we showed them what U.S. mailboxes looked like so they would know how to return the cameras to us. Most migrants seemed eager to participate. Many expressed a profound desire to show American citizens what they had to endure to arrive in the United States.

We distributed cameras to Minutemen volunteers at observation sites in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California. During observations, volunteers camp out from sunset to sunrise, silently staring into the pitch-black darkness of the desert. When they spot migrants and smugglers, they avoid direct confrontation and instead call the Border Patrol. Our time with the Minutemen gave us a view of the so-called “vigilantes” that was much more nuanced than the caricatures painted by the media. We realized that volunteers are by and large concerned Americans, trying to do their part to make the United States a safer place and to protect American jobs. Many are retired veterans or have backgrounds in law enforcement. They have continued their lives of public service by volunteering to do what they believe the U.S. government should be doing—regaining control of the U.S. border with Mexico.

Migrants and Minutemen have very different backgrounds, yet they share one profound belief: both sides would agree that they are documenting a situation that should not be happening. U.S. border policy is broken and needs to be fixed.’

With local elections across the country fast approaching, Dun Laoghaire County Council (in Dublin) has launched a high profile campaign to encourage people to vote, particularly targetted at immigrants. A nicely-designed booklet, with information in Polish, French, Chinese and Russian (as well as English) has been distributed to houses, and ads are running at public locations. 'Regardless of your status in Ireland, you are entitled to VOTE' is the simple but clear slogan. The booklet can be downloaded, along with multi-lingual prompt cards (in more languages) and a voter registration form, here.

This coming Wednesday (25 March), at the Irish Film Institute sees the third in an ongoing series of six public conversations, hosted by the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice at DIT. Wednesday’s conversation, at 6pm, is with Melanie Friend of the University of Sussex and is titled, ‘Border Country’: Strategies of Representation. Her presentation will deal with ‘the photographic practices of representing the orderly landscapes and institutional interiors (Visiting Rooms) of Immigration Removal Centres’, alongside ‘soundtracks of voice recordings conveying the complex identities of detainees and the physical, psychological and emotional aspects of life in detention.

‘Border Country’ offers insight into the experiences of immigration detainees, particularly through the use of the voice as an emotional force acting as a counterpoint to the formal images of the institutions.’ (Melanie Friend's work has been covered here before. For convenience, I have copied excerpts from that previous report, from November 12 last, below.)

The conversation is in the series ‘Negotiated Identities, Histories and Public Cultures’, which explores questions of participatory media, public memory, cultural identity, heritage and difference. (Download the brochure here.)

‘The presentations unpack the ways in which constructions of place, space and cultural heritage are shaped by both individual and collective memories that are multilayered and contested; how cross-cultural translation is underpinned by asymmetrical relations of power; how public spaces mobilise the potential for both communal empowerment, simultaneous with technologies of control and regulation; and the role that the cultural and creative industries play in conserving or re-imagining past, present and future understandings of cultural identity and belonging.’

The Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice offers 'a distinctive interdisciplinary postgraduate and research environment situated at the interface between cultural studies and social documentary practice, emphasising the innovative use of lens and screen-based practice (film, photography and multimedia), allied to ethnographic methods in social research'. This series is curated by Rashmi Sawhney of the CTMP.

More on 'Border Countries':

Photographer Melanie Friend spent five years visiting immigrant detention centres in the UK, taking photos and making recordings, for her project, ‘Border Country’.

Over 25,000 people passed through the eight centres to which she had access during that time, and inevitably she became close to some of them.

‘I got very personally involved, you can't avoid it’ she told the Guardian. ‘I visited one person 14 times and was very upset when he was removed.’

She has kept in touch with some of the removed detainees, who have subsequently sent her emails detailing the danger that they have returned to. ‘I feel angry and saddened about how detainees are treated in the UK. I am horrified by the length of time some have been held. I heard some horrific tales of detainees being forcibly removed. As if they haven't been through enough trauma before they reach our shores,’ she said.

And on the centres themselves: ‘It is a locked away world. They look like ordinary places, but are also places of surveillance and demarcation, with lists of rules on the walls.’

You can view a slideshow from the exhibition here, buy the book here, and listen to some of the audio here on her website, here (follow the link for exhibitions).

On her website, she writes: ‘Dominant representations of asylum seekers and migrants focus on ‘our’ view of ‘them’ as ‘Other’. The interview extracts in Border Country’s soundtracks employ the asylum seekers’ and migrants’ perspectives as a mirror, reflecting both on the immigration systems itself and on our own culture.’

The relationship between a journalist/documentary artist and an asylum seeker can be a tricky one, and Friend discusses this. ‘Interviews developed slowly to build up trust. Each detainee and I met on at least two or three occasions and discussed the implications of possible future exhibition/ book/ web coverage. I was upfront about the fact that this was a slow long term project – and that be the time the show was exhibited, the individual would have likely been either deported, ‘removed’, or released. Such a project therefore could not help publicise his individual case for asylum. Despite this, we built strong bonds, and I tried to help in other ways. I was moved by the fact that, while in a very vulnerable position, the detainees who put themselves forward for interviews were eager to articulate their experiences and express their opinions for posterity.’

Ultimately, she decided not to include any portrait photographs in the exhibition ‘because portraits, particularly of such vulnerable individuals as asylum seekers, risk objectification and stereotyping… I felt that the project would be more focussed, more coherent and more challenging without the visual identification of the speakers on the soundtrack.’

On the 21st March 1960, police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators protesting against racially discriminating laws in Sharpeville, South Africa, writes Conor Lenihan, junior minister responsible for Integration in the Irish government, on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (March 21).

In a statement, he continued:
Remembering this day serves as a reminder of the dangers of racism and of the devastation and damage that racial discrimination has inflicted and continues to inflict around the world.

Racial discrimination is harmful to individuals and is also harmful to the development of society. Social exclusion and racial conflict lead to disharmony and parallel societies. We are all responsible for guarding against a repeat of the horrors rooted in racism – from slavery to the Holocaust, from apartheid to ethnic cleansing.

No country or region is entirely free of racism and countries around the world are working together to fight against this social ill. My Office is currently actively engaged in the preparations for a United Nations Conference against Racism which will be held in Geneva in late April 2009.

The Conference will look at the concrete actions that have been taken since the World Conference on Racism which was held in Durban in 2001 and will also review what remains to be done to fight racism globally and regionally.

The recent St Patrick’s Day celebrations reminded us of all those Irish emigrants who have made their home in numerous different countries around the world.  I believe that this is an opportune time to reflect on the immigrants that have come to Ireland to work, to study, to make their home among Irish communities around the country.

According to the latest official statistics, in the last quarter of 2008, there were an estimated 476,100 non-Irish nationals aged 15 years and over in the State.

Ireland has welcomed these immigrants and it is encouraging to see that research  by  way  of  public  opinion  polls  both nationally and internationally, show that Irish people are adapting well to the increased diversity in the country and have a high level of day to day contact with our newcomer population and a relatively low incidence of racially
motivated attacks.

However, one racially motivated attack is one too many and we must continue our efforts to stamp out any discrimination experienced by migrants in our country.

Ireland has a robust equality infrastructure in place which consists of legal prohibitions on discrimination on nine specified grounds – one of which is race.  Complaint mechanisms are in place for persons who suffer discrimination and two specialised bodies - the Equality Authority and the Equality Tribunal - were established on a statutory basis in 1999.

In 2008, over 1,000 people brought claims to the Equality Tribunal, of which some 85% involved alleged discrimination at work. Almost half of the work related cases were brought on the grounds of race indicating a greater awareness on the part of migrants of equality rights and the mechanisms in place to deal with complaints of discrimination.

We must go beyond simply raising awareness and reinforce the importance of changing behaviours, policies and practices within organisations. In celebrating March 21, I would urge organisations to adopt, as a priority, a whole organisation approach to managing diversity.

My Office is investing in schemes to ensure that the type of social tensions between immigrants and local population that some other European countries have experienced will not emerge in Ireland.

This is especially important now during a time of economic downturn when such tensions have a tendency to surface. Recent job losses have affected both the host and the immigrant communities and, like many other countries, we are facing a difficult economic climate ahead.

More than ever before, we will need to work closely together and adopt innovative and strategic approaches.

In order for integration to be truly effective, there must be a ground-up approach which takes place at a local level. Integration policies and practices must be pursued at a local level, in the home, in the workplaces
and schools.

Towards that end, my Office is encouraging local authorities and community organisations to become more involved in the integration process. My policies and funding priorities are based around mobilising migrants to participate in cultural and sporting aspects of Irish society.

I  am  therefore  providing  funding to local authorities, sporting organisations and faith based bodies around the country in order to
facilitate integration at a local level and I approved funding in the order of €1.4m in 2008 in this regard.

In summary, I urge everyone to mark this International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination by rededicating ourselves to the equality of human beings and to continue to work together towards the development of a cohesive and integrated Ireland.

Wikipedia's account of the Sharpeville massacre is here, and an original report from Time magazine is here. South Africa's impressive Apartheid Museum is here.  

Monday week sees An Post's postcards exhibition open at the Civic Offices in Dublin. The exhibition has been built over the past year and more, with An Post asking people to create postcards relating to their experience of Ireland. Each month had a different theme: August was devoted to migration. There's more on the August theme here, and a contribution from Chinedu Onyjelem, Fomacs partner and editor of Metro Eireann, here.

The exhibition will also go on tour. Full details are:
Dublin Civic Offices, Dublin: 30 March - 9 April
Siamsa Tire, Tralee, Co. Kerry:  20 April – 2 May
Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, Co Mayo:  2 – 13 June
Galway City Museum, Galway, Co Galway:  22 June – 4 July
The Market House Gallery, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath:  15 July – 1 August
 

In these recessionary times, you might hardly think to find entertainment in an art exhibition depicting the hard, often harrowing experience of an earlier generation of male Irish immigrants forced to leave their homeland in search of work in a strange and often hostile place', wrote Frank Miller in the Irish Times this week.

'Yet if you should find yourself at a loose end in London over the next few weeks, you could certainly spend a stimulating hour or two visiting the PM Gallery in Ealing.

'The gallery is currently hosting the premiere of a new exhibition featuring the work of artists Bernard Canavan, Daniel Carmody, John Duffin, Dermot Holland and curator Brian Whelan, depicting the London-Irish experience in the 1950s and 1960s.

'My first surprise was to see The Quiet Men billed as “the first major contemporary London-Irish art exhibition” to explore this subject. As Whelan explains: “Irish music, literature, poetry and dance are celebrated all over the world. However, when asked to name an artist, many will have difficulty as very few have been celebrated outside Ireland. Perhaps because a people that experienced famine, war, economic hardship and mass immigration carried only their portable culture with them in their heads, hearts and suitcases.'

From the press release (which contains good short biogs of each artist): Each featured artist is an immigrant, or child of immigrants, from Ireland. This immigrant status informs the work, which observes the margins of society and is full of stories, humour and tragedy. The church and pub appear, as do the launderette, bus and train. The theme of the journey is often present in the songs, toasts, poems and prayers of the immigrant and the artists do not stray far from the vehicles that brought them to the city and might take them away again.

The PM Gallery is here. There is more on some of the artists here: Brian Whelan, John Duffin, Bernard Canavan and the late Daniel Carmody. The exhibition runs till April 18. A last excerpt from Frank Miller's article, especially appropriate for the week that's in it:

'There is no romance, it must be said, in Whelan’s tribute to those who helped build Britain. 'Paddy in the Smoke' shows a fairly evil-looking St Patrick with angels clutching on to coffins, it is not immediately clear whether the holy man is sucking the bodies in or spewing them out. In fact, Whelan explains, the bodies are sitting on unfinished slabs of motorway.

In what he describes as a sort of “spaghetti junction” moment, the artist says it occurred to him “there is no memorial to those, say, who built the Hammersmith flyover”, to those in that time, like his own father and uncles, whose hard lives and hard work also spelt a prematurely early death.'

'Stand up or a definition of Irishness that values human rights and diverse communities' proclaim Irish Queers, a New York based lobby that organises an annual protest at New York's St Patrick's Day parade, saying the parade has excluded gays and lesbians from participating. From their website:

For 18 years, Irish and Irish American queers have been challenging the narrow definition of Irishness set forth by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a conservative, Catholic, all-male organization that runs many St. Patrick's Day Parades across the country. As a right wing organization, the AOH prohibits all LGBT people and anyone that is pro-choice from OPENLY taking part in their events.

And from a short report on Indymedia:

'While our fight began in New York’s Irish and church institutions, we have learned that the City, the NYPD and the courts are all willing to trample the delicate, diverse fabric of the Irish community. So our struggle is not just with the parade organizers, but with the NYPD, the FDNY and other public servants who use the parade to express sentiments of hate and superiority that are disallowed anywhere else. And we struggle against messages of religious and military war-mongering in support of America’s conquests.

After 9/11, police and firefighters became the focus of the parade – celebrated and cheered even as they screamed “die, faggots!” at Irish LGBT people on the sidelines. While Irish immigrants of conscience were working to make links with Arab and Muslim immigrants who were coming under attack citywide, our parade was filled with US military contingents – bringing guns to our streets, hyping the war.

This year, the parade is filled with politics too. While we stand here – watching tens of thousands of NYPD officers march in a parade with an explicit message of hate – African-American communities and other New Yorkers are gathering in Times Square to hold the NYPD to account for the murder of Sean Bell. Like us, they are standing up to fight the NYPD’s wilful discrimination, its indifference to communities, its strong-arming of our streets, and its failure to take responsibility for creating a culture of violence. Meanwhile, back at the St. Patrick’s parade, our elected officials are falling over themselves to insist on firefighters' “rightful place” near the head of this bigoted display.'

Irish Queers is an organisation that grew out of the Irish Lesbian & Gay Organisation in New York in the late 1990s. More on the 'for journalists' section here.)

Happy St Patrick’s Day to all readers of Migration Matters. St Patrick is Ireland’s patron saint, and as such, a totem of the Roman Catholic faith. But as an icon of Ireland more generally, St Patrick has become an identifying symbol amongst the Irish diaspora. The justified cliché has long been that St Patrick’s Day was more celebrated abroad than at home: in the cities of the US, in particular, but also in the UK and worldwide, the day has long been a much-needed rallying point for Irish emigrant communities, and an excuse for misty-eyed romanticism amongst an even larger community that considers itself Irish by descent. To acknowledge the day that's in it, here is a short, eclectic selection of reading and resources on the subjects of St Patrick and the Irish diaspora.

1. The story of St Patrick I: how a shepherd in Wales (perhaps) came to be the defining figure of early Christian Ireland (maybe). (From Wikipedia)

2. The story of St Patrick II: how Patrick was trafficked to Ireland, in his own words... ‘I, Patrick, a sinner, the rudest and least of all the faithful, and most contemptible to very many, had for my father Calpornius, a deacon, the son of Potitus, a priest, who lived in Bannaven Taberniae, for he had a small country-house close by, where I was taken captive when I was nearly sixteen years of age. I knew not the true God, and I was brought captive to Ireland with many thousand men, as we deserved; for we had forsaken God, and had not kept His commandments, and were disobedient to our priests, who admonished us for our salvation. And the Lord brought down upon us the anger of His Spirit, and scattered us among many nations, even to the ends of the earth, where now my littleness may be seen amongst strangers.’
(From The Confession of St Patrick, on Project Gutenberg)

3. The story of St Patrick III: how the children see it, as in the ‘Give Up Yer Aul Sins’ animation series.

4. The story of the Irish diaspora I: where they settled in the US. A beautifully simple piece of online interactive media from the New York Times, consisting of a map and timeline of where immigrants settled in the US. See also a thorough account on Wikipedia.

5. The story of the Irish diaspora II: The greening of the Obama White House. Politico.com has the story of Barack Obama’s Irish roots, with a short video of Obama’s speech to the Society of Irish Women’s St Patrick’s Day dinner. ‘There is a reason why Americans identify so strongly with St Patrick,’ he said. ‘It is the story of believing in things unseen, and making that belief a reality.’ He reminded his audience that he has ‘an old Celtic name’ - Baragh – and said he ‘hopefully can earn the honour of an apostrophe in O’Bama’. Also on that page is a video of the Corrigan Brothers' pastiche, 'There's no one as Irish as Barack Obama'. The latest on Brian Cowan's visit to the White House, from today's Irish Times, is here.

6. The story of the Irish diaspora III: St Patrick is also the patron saint of the volcanic isle of Montserrat: here is a story of the islanders and their own troubled history of migration.

7. The documenting of the Irish diaspora I: Irish editor/publisher/political activist Niall O'Dowd has just launched a new website, Irish Central, aiming to be a clearing house for all things to do with the Irish diaspora online - both serious and light-hearted, as this article, on the top ten worst ever Irish accents on film, suggests. O'Dowd is the publisher of the Irish Voice, and a leader of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform. (See the print interview with him here and with Marian Finucane here - scroll to March 22.)

8. The documenting of the Irish diaspora II: The Irish Diaspora List is an email list on the subjects of the Irish diaspora, Irish identity and culture, the burgeoning academic field of ‘Irish studies’, and migration issues more generally. It is run out of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit at the University of Bradford, and is a scholarly list, without open access. I find its discussion often of interest and occasionally very pertinent to Migration Matters (though it is very much focussed on the Irish experience of migration, and mostly therefore on Irish emigration). To join the list, email a request to the details on the site.

9. The celebration of Paddy's Day I: In the Guardian, Irish author Mary Kenny suggests that Britain needs an equivalent to St Paddy’s Day, ‘probably the most successful example ever of "global branding" of a saint's day’. ‘While the British visibly and collectively squirm at the suggestion that there should be new definitions of "Britishness" or some ritual, or national day to mark "Britishness", the Irish identity as branded by St Patrick is easy, natural, exuberant - sometimes too much so, with fashionable concerns now about binge drinking - and inclusive. Paddy's day in Dublin can accommodate gay tableaux and Chinese dragons as gracefully as it can the traditional allusions to the holy Ireland of St Pat. A definition of success is when something can be "all things to all men": and you can take your Paddy's day any way you choose. But it will always have an element of the green - of Irishness - at its core.’ Details of RTE's coverage of this year's celebrations is here, but their online presence is very disappointing (bizarrely so, considering the potential international audience). Alternatively, try YouTube for a selection of clips from previous parades, etc.

10. The celebration of Paddy's Day II: Such inclusivity, however, is not a universal feature of St Patrick’s Day celebrations, as Ian Williams previously wrote in the Guardian.

11. The celebration of Paddy's Day III: why they celebrate it in Spanish Harlem.

12. The celebration of Paddy's Day IV: in her President's greeting, Mary McAleese describes Patrick as an immigrant to Ireland whose life was one of outrageous hardship and outstanding endurance. You can read her full greeting at the Irish Emigrant, a long-running and very popular email/online magazine.

Email migrationmatters[at]gmail.com with any other St Patricks' Day or Irish diaspora leads. Meanwhile, Migration Matters is off to the parade. Lá Fhéile Pádraig.

Dublin art collective Pallas is hosting an exhibition of two art films dealing with migration, opening next Friday. The first, ‘Resonating Surfaces’, is by Manon De Boer, an Indian artist living in Brussels. According to the press release, she ‘recorded and transcribed memories of the Brazilian city, São Paulo, from people who grew up in São Paulo and now live in Europe. She creates a picture of Paris and São Paulo through the memories of Suely Rolnik, a psychoanalyst, translator and former lover of Gilles Deleuze. Her story is a story about translation and re-translation, and about her long way home back into her own language: she had abandoned her mother language in favor of French as a consequence of traumatic experiences under military dictatorship. Through French, the acquired foreign language, she finds a way back to her native tongue.’

The second, ‘Lovely Andrea’, is by Hito Steyerl. This film ‘follows Steyerl as she returns to Japan, where she briefly worked in the 1980s as a bondage model under the assumed name Andrea, to search for a photograph of herself. Steyerl interleaves the narrative with film clips that include superheroes Spider-Man and Woman with cultural and political references to bondage, including samurai practices, popular music videos and images of Guantanamo inmates. ‘Lovely Andrea’ is played out like a psychological thriller in which Steyerl is both detective and missing subject.’ Steyerl works as filmmaker, video artist and author in the area of essayist documentary film and post-colonial criticism. Migration is one of her core themes. Her work is located on the interface between film and fine arts.

The films are showing at Pallas Contemporary Projects, at 111, Lr Grangegorman Rd in Dublin, from March 20 to April 19 from 12-6pm daily. Hito Steyerl will be in the gallery on April 6 at 7pm to talk about her work.

Some more on Pallas: Pallas Contemporary Projects is a not-for-profit, publicly funded gallery space, which focuses on developing exchanges between Irish and international artists with a strong conceptual approach working in different media. Pallas has established a reputation as a leading exponent of an alternative art methodology and D.I.Y. work ethic resulting in imaginative and challenging projects. Pallas Contemporary Projects focuses on the exchange of Irish and international artists with a strong conceptual approach working in different media.




           

A quick mention to a project of tangential interest to Migration Matters, Amnesty’s ‘Unsubscribe Me’ campaign against ‘extraordinary rendition’ and other human rights abuses in the war on terror. The campaign website features a number of beautifully-made, rather disturbing short films, as well ‘making of’ videos and interviews with participants. The website’s aesthetic is unusual, and there are various ways in which Amnesty seeks to use it to recruit people to its campaign, including ‘The Movement’. There's a short Guardian article on the campaign here.

While browsing online I stumbled upon riseup.net, and found this extensive list of social organisations, activist groups and more dealing with migration issues (too extensive to post directly here). Check it out, and let us know of any individual groups worth featuring here on Migration Matters. Riseup.net is an online platform providing communications facilities for leftist organisations, with an apparent emphasis on ‘security’ and privacy. As they say, ‘Riseup.net exists because we feel it is vital for communities of resistance to be able to provide for their own communication needs. We must not be forced to rely on insecure, profit driven means of communication which bombard us with mind numbing advertising.’ They outline their political principles here.

What's the difference between an illegal immigrant and any other member of society? asked Lizzy Davies in the Guardian, in a feature last September that we missed at the time. As the photographs on these pages remind us, just a few pieces of paper, she says. Davies met Fabien Breuvart, a 46-year-old photographer in Paris doing work documenting the 'sans-papiers'. Davies wrote:

Plastered over the roadside is a scruffy poster display, covered in parts by crudely typed flyers for workers' protests and general strikes. What looks from afar to be a mass of identical images reveals itself on closer inspection to be hundreds of separate portraits, all arranged block-like, row upon row. A woman in striking blue eyeliner and perfectly drawn lips clasps hands with a man in a sports jacket. An elderly lady with a mass of white hair poses with her baseball cap-wearing partner. One man rests his head on the shoulder next to him; another holds a toddler in his arms. Their subjects are of all ages and all colours, but the posters have one feature in common: in the centre of each is a passport or driving licence or blue-and-white identity card showing that one of the people posing is officially recognised by the Republique Française. The other is there illegally, as a sans-papiers or undocumented worker. Individually the pictures are charming but forgettable. Together, they are powerful, and demand to be noticed. And that, of course, is exactly the point.

The man who has chosen to record these people's lives is Fabien Breuvart, a 46-year-old photographer who feels he has a responsibility to support the sans-papiers in any way he can. Every lunchtime from the beginning of May to mid-July he locked the doors of his little shop and took his tripod down the rue Charlot to the Bourse du Travail, a labour exchange that has been occupied for four months by around 1,300 sans-papiers: men, women and children. There, in front of the dilapidated entrance, he took photos of the workers alongside documented members of the public who had come to show solidarity. So far there are 509 pictures, but there will soon be more - all of them aiming to show that, as their creator says, "the only difference between these two people is a piece of paper".

Breuvart believes an absence of political leadership means that solidarity with the sans-papiers comes most frequently from concerned individuals. He notes with pleasure that many of the people who come to be photographed don't even bother to look at themselves once the picture has been developed. "They came as though they were voting," he says. "To them the picture wasn't important; it was the act itself."

The Legal Aid Board has just published the latest issue of The Researcher, an online magazine produced by the Refugee Documentation Centre that covers legal issues related to asylum in Ireland. The editorial provides an overview of the issue's contents, as follows: David Leonard BL looks at the importance of medical evidence in the asylum process and he provides some recent case law on this. Also on a medical theme we have also included some excerpts from research on errors of recall by asylum seekers including those who have suffered from trauma and in a separate piece of research Patrick Dowling looks at consanguineous marriage and attitudes to disability in some Arabic cultures. On a different theme James O'Sullivan, who provides both domestic and international COI training, writes here on the critical issue of source assessment in COI Research. Jonathan Tomkin provides some advice on litigating effectively before the ECJ. Claire Bennett of Asylum Aid has summarised her recently published book, Relocation, Relocation – The impact of internal relocation on women asylum seekers. We publish UNHCR's statement on the important Elgafaji judgment at the European Court of Justice. John Stanley BL includes a summary of Elgafaji in his update on recent developments in refugee and immigration Law. And Sr Breege Keenan writes about the Vincentian Refugee Centre – the first Drop-in-Centre of its kind in Ireland to respond to the needs of asylum seekers and refugees.

The full contents list is:
Editorial
Source Assessment in COI Research - James O'Sullivan, RDC
Case C-465/07 Meki Elgafaji and Noor Elgafaji v. Staatssecretaris van Justitie, European Court of Justice, 17 February, 2009 - Statement by UNHCR
Medical evidence in the asylum process - recent developments - David Leonard, BL
The Preliminary ruling procedure in the field of immigration and asylum law - Jonathan Tomkin
Vincentian Refugee Centre - Sr Breege Keenan
Consanguineous marriage and attitudes to disability in some Arabic cultures - Patrick Dowling, RDC
Recent Developments in Refugee and Immigration Law - John Stanley, BL
Relocation, Relocation – The impact of internal relocation on women asylum seekers - Claire Bennett, Asylum Aid (The original report by Claire Bennett can be downloaded here.)
Research on errors of recall by asylum seekers - Edited by Paul Daly, RDC
Book Review - Handbook on Immigration and Asylum in Ireland 2007 - Paul Daly, RDC

(The Handbook is available from the ESRI, here, and contains a directory of research institutes and programmes working in the area of migration in Ireland. According to the review, much of the information in the book can be found nowhere else, and it is simply invaluable to everyone working in the asylum and immigration areas.)

The current and back issues of the Researcher can also be accessed in various forms here.

On the beach is a middle-aged Frenchman and a Kurdish teenager. In the distance a ferry sits on the horizon and beyond it, on the other side of the Channel, is England. The older man, a swimming instructor at Calais's municipal pool, dreams of winning back his wife, a charity worker who has tired of him. His young friend dreams of reaching the UK, joining his girlfriend and playing for Manchester United. The refugee walks into the foaming, freezing, grey waters and starts swimming. The scene, writes Jason Burke in the Guardian, is from the film Welcome, opening in French cinemas this week. The work of director Philippe Lioret, it portrays with brutal honesty the lives of refugees trying to reach the UK from France - the cold, hunger, casual violence from police and the risks run by some to help them. Welcome has already won critical acclaim, playing to packed cinemas in pre-release screenings, and seems certain to become an art-house hit.

There is some audio from the film on this blog and a report (in French) on YouTube, which features a discussion between the director and students. 

Burke's article on the film accompanies a striking report of his investigation in northern France. He writes from Norrent-Fontes:

The three tents are clustered in a ditch, beside a field, in the middle of nowhere. Anthony sits by the fire and strums his makeshift krar, a traditional Eritrean lute. It is 10am and the frost is still on the rutted brown fields that stretch to the flat horizon all around.

A tractor bumps past, a crow flaps across the grey sky, the traffic on the A26 Paris-Calais motorway 500 yards behind a small wood is barely audible. It is an unlikely place for a refugee transit camp, the last stop before the UK. The nearest town is two miles away: the grubby two cafes and post office of Norrent-Fontes.

But the ditch is a temporary home for 26 young Eritreans and Ethiopians trying to get to Britain by hiding in the lorries that stop in the layby every night. And their situation is far from unique. An investigation by the Observer has revealed scores of such makeshift settlements containing an estimated 1,500 people, including women and children, scattered across a huge swath of northern France.

According to Karen Akoka, the co-author of a recent major report on the unprecedented new network of camps, the fault lies with the progressive closure of facilities for immigrants in towns such as Calais, a French government drive to disperse and harass asylum-seekers who cross its territory, and new security measures implemented by the UK that have made it harder to physically penetrate the ports – forcing immigrants to try new ways to cross the Channel. Each week a new camp is established. The true number of them is unknown. "There are many that no one notices," says Akoka. French officials rebut the accusations, saying their policies are "humane, fair and generous" and denying any harassment or deliberate dispersal.

The latest issue of the Drum Beat newsletter on development and communications explores intersections between climate change and communication for development. The Drum Beat has been mentioned here a number of times – their work on development often overlaps with migration issues, and their focus on innovative media dovetails nicely with Migration Matters. This may be of interest following the recent focus here on climate change and environmental refugees (see January archive).

One intriguing project Drum Beat reports on is Fired Up Media, a network of videographers, editors, and journalists ‘reporting from the front lines of the youth climate movement and disseminating through the Fired Up Virtual Newsroom’. Here’s how they explain what they’re doing:

The media landscape is evolving and shifting rapidly to favor those who are nimble, multi-spectrum, and global. However, most media entities are massive conglomerates, often controlled primarily by a small group of investors or an individual. Fired Up Media is designed to evolve with this changing landscape, but first you need a map. This page contains a link map to a number of prominent environmental, climate, and youth media organizations. Fired Up Media’s work sits at the intersection of these organizations and efforts, serving to pull together independent, youth, and public service media efforts and those aimed at educating the world on the issue of global warming. The Fired Up team sees this focus as a lens, rather than a filter, that takes in the entire global media landscape.

We reported recently on the antics of Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Tuscon, Arizona (‘antics’ is what they may seem like, filtered through the distorting lens of the media circus, but no doubt they are rather more horrific when viewed up close; see the report in the January archive for more).

Now, America’s Voice, the US immigration reform ‘platform’, has launched a campaign to counter Arpaio’s tactics.

'Should "America's Toughest Sheriff" get a free pass on his controversial tactics? Should he round up immigrants at traffic stops and force them to sleep in separate "Tent Cities" in the desert? We think he should get investigated by the Department of Justice', they say.

'With over 2,700 lawsuits against him, a history of virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Latino tactics, and 40,000 felony warrants outstanding in his jurisdiction, Arpaio has fostered a climate in which real criminals roam free while hard-working immigrants live in fear. America's Voice is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to begin a federal investigation into his tactics, giving Sheriff Arpaio the attention he really deserves.'

There’s a smart, simple video and a petition (‘Sheriff Joe Must Go’) available here. And America’s Voice has a list of highlights of the Sheriff’s record for download here.

‘Welcome To My World’ is a new four-part series on RTE One in which immigrants invite an Irish friend, family member or colleague to accompany them back on a visit to their homeland. This follows a successful formula established with ‘No Place Like Home’ and in fact answers one of the key criticisms of that programme. In ‘No Place’, the presenter brought a video message from an immigrant in Ireland to their family at home – raising the question as to why RTE couldn’t have stumped up the (marginal) extra expense to bring the person themselves back to visit their family. That, though, would have crossed the line firmly into the genre of social documentary, whereas the tone the station is aiming for is very much that of travel tv – and it seems to work, given the show’s broad appeal.
‘Welcome’ appears to mix the travel genre with the reality tv one - as the blurb says: ‘The roots and relationships that they have established in Ireland will be literally road-tested as the travellers discover what they now hold in common and what they will always have apart.’

Episode one aired last Friday, and is – hooray! – available in its entirety (25 mins) online. It follows Galway bus inspector Mike Waldron, whose multicultral exerience amounts to having once eaten a kebab, and being sick for three days, to Turkey with his colleague and friend Kenny Ipek, where they finally get to settle their long-standing rivalry over who is the better driver, in the traffic of Istanbul. From an initial viewing, it looks lively, intimate, humorous and very well shot.

Last chance to see the Wole Soyinka play, ‘The Trials of Brother Jero’, is this week. The play, in a production by Arambe Productions, runs until Saturday at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Trinity College, and features members of the Dun Laoghaire Refugee Project (accomplished actors in their own right) in its cast. See the report last week, below, for more.

‘The Scattering’ is a musical show based on the Irish experience of migration. It plays at the Everyman Palace in Cork on March 15, at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on March 17 (St Patrick’s Day) and at Grant’s Hotel, Roscrea, on March 20. Virginia Keane, the promoter of the show, writes:

The show is based on movement in and out of Ireland since the monks of the 5th century. There are songs, old and new, recalling major movements such as the soldiers of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the famine exodus, and the later strong emigration. Tunes also commemorate those who went to Montserrat and Barbados in the 1600s; there is an unaccompanied version of Van Diemen’s Land is for the first Australian exiles, and Far Away in Australia for later travellers. Altogether, there are 25 pieces, all directly relating to emigration and modern travel. The Cunningham sean-nós dancers from Carna do their magic on stage at various stages during the show and stories of particular emigrants add to the atmosphere. The DVD and accompanying CD were released in October 2008 and the show is in its second round of concerts. It has been a major success at every venue so far, with standing ovations showing audiences’ appreciation for the variety and sheer entertainment of the night. More info on the show itself and pics are on www.seankeane.com.

Many of the new songs were written by Kieran Wade. They are beautiful songs which, though new, have the structure and resonance of traditional material. On stage are Anth Kaley on keyboards, Sean Regan on fiddle, mandola and vocals, Pat Coyne on guitars, Rick Epping on mouth organs, Jew's harp and concertina and Sean Keane on vocals, flute, whistles and uilleann pipe, as well as the Cunningham Dancers.

'People who are refugees are sad. Everyday they aren’t happy. Their tears fall onto the ground all the time. They never have freedom in their life.' These are the words of a Burmese young person called Kham Sheng, written while in exile in Thailand, wrote Susan McKay in the Irish Times last Wednesday. McKay was visiting a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand. She continued:

When we are introduced to the refugees they put away their sad faces. They smile. They are friendly and open. There’s a shortage of rice, but we are fed handsomely.

Theh Reh fled the military regime in Burma in 1992. He lives with his grandmother, Hency, his parents, his sisters and their children, four generations of the family packed into a small house made of bamboo and straw. The illusion is maintained that the Baan Mai Naisoi refugee camp is a temporary arrangement – no permanent structures are allowed.

'My father was a village head in Burma,' he says. 'We had constant trouble with the army, but it was a difficult decision to leave. Everything is hard. We were farmers before. We grew rice and corn and other crops, but here we have no space to grow anything. We can’t teach our children how to be farmers.'

The Irish Times ran an editorial to accompany the article, which described the background to this refugee crisis:

They have fled from horrifyingly oppressive conditions in Burma to the relative safety of a border camp. But once there they have very little to do, are not allowed work and cannot farm or grow their own food. It is boring, but far better than being continually harassed by the Burmese army in their home villages. Only educational programmes and the possibility that some of them will be selected for international resettlement give them grounds for hope. Last month 78 members of the Muslim minority Rohingya community in a camp on the Bangladesh-Burma border were selected to come to Ireland under a United Nations programme.

According to the print edition, McKay's article was to be accompanied online by audio and a slideshow, but all I can find is a tiny slideshow embedded into the online version of the article.

McKay travelled with Irish charity Trócaire to highlight their annual Lenten fundraising campaign. Trócaire's Lenten campaign is here, and the charity has individual stories of refugees and displacement here (again, there is an embedded slideshow on the page, but it is very small).

RTE Radio One's News At One today reported on the situation of migrants in rural Ireland and the issue of whether many will return to their homelands in the face of the economic crisis. (Note that this link may not work later in the week, in which case, go to the programme archive here.) The item focussed on a new report from Irish Rural Link suggesting that many foreign nationals (has anyone got a decent, humane, general term to describe people who have moved here from abroad? They're all, at best, so clumsy) will weather the economic storm here. Amongst the figures in the report: up to 50% of those who migrate in good times will stay during bad. In Irish rural towns, typically 15-25% are immigrants, rising to 45% in the case of Gort, in Galway. Download the Irish Rural Link report here.

Thanks to Roisin for the alert. Please send your alerts to migrationmatters [at] gmail.com.