Day 109, Year of #Mygration: Memories of Migration

I started talking with Natasha Davis, a performance and visual artist who creates poetic and challenging interdisciplinary materials exploring body, memory, identity and migration. Together with Siobhan Campbell (OU), they have a collaborative participatory installation, focusing on floor plans of homes relating to personal migratory histories, the architecture of memory and the body as a site of memory. As we chatted about how stories of the past are interlinked with stories of the present, different lived experiences of my own started coming to me, some becoming intense as I will describe below.

While taking pictures of Natasha and Siobhan’s installation something unexpected happened. A woman dressed in white clothes, her eyes covered with a scarf, approached me. The woman was accompanied by a man wearing a doctor’s white coat and a woman dressed as a nurse. The blindfolded woman stood in front of me and, in a way that reminded of an interrogation process, she loudly and sternly started asking questions: Name? Surname? Father’s and mother’s name? Nationality? Religion? Race? Colour of hair? Eyes? Papers! Where are your papers? Finally, she started singing loudly in an opera style: Papers! Where are your papers? Show me your papers! In this peculiar scene I felt somehow awkward, stirring memories of the multiple asylum seekers’ interviews I have attended as a lawyer, when similar questions were addressed to them. I remembered Farhad (pseudonym) an asylum seeker and friend, whose application had been pending for eight years. He was very experienced with asylum seekers’ interviews, since he had attended plenty of them as an interpreter. Even he, who was so well prepared for this interview and so familiar with the whole process, when his own interview started all the questions made Farhad freeze. He couldn’t speak at all. I had to ask the asylum committee to interrupt the procedure to give him a break. Farhad told me that those questions reminded him of the first time he arrived in Greece, as an unaccompanied minor. The police had arrested him and were asking similar questions. “Despite the fact that I have been living and working for so many years here (in Greece) the feeling is now exactly the same as that first day I arrived”, he told me. This scene with the blindfolded woman brought back how cruel and humiliating an asylum interview can be, or any kind of an ‘interrogation’ process. One can hardly get familiarised with such processes, even if this “interrogation” takes place as part of an artistic intervention.

This artistic intervention was part of the ‘Tate Exchange’ event, as a ‘collaborative response by musicians, singers, performers and creative facilitators to the powerful themes of displacement and dispossession at the centre of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s intense 1950 opera, The Consul.’