13 April, 2018
The Migration Museum Book Club aims to bring together those who have stories to tell and those who have read good stories.
Devised and run by our volunteers and based around a monthly theme, attendees are invited to bring a book, poem, article or a piece of their own writing to share and discuss with the group. Themes will be announced in advance of each meeting and will revolve around the subjects explored by the museum and its exhibitions, primarily focusing on migration, identity, and travel.
As the group develops, we hope to explore past, present, and future ideas through the lens of migration and grow the book club into a regular community, where people can share or just listen.
Our book club is open to all and there’s no need to register in advance – just turn up on the day.
Migration Museum Book Club dates:
Sunday 8 April 2018, 2.30pm
Sunday 20 May 2018, 2.30pm
Sunday 17 June 2018, 2.30pm
Sunday 15 July 2018, 2.30pm
Image © Tabitha Deadman
15 June, 2018
Fahima and family in Austria, part of Giovanna Del Sarto’s A Polaroid for a Refugee project © Giovanna Del Sarto
A guest blog by Giovanna Del Sarto, creator of A Polaroid for a Refugee, a photographic project depicting points of transition in the lives of individual refugees. As part of our activities for Refugee Week 2018, we are displaying a selection of images from A Polaroid for a Refugee at the Migration Museum at The Workshop until Sunday 1 July 2018. Giovanna will be speaking at our Refugee Week Late Opening on Thursday 21 June.
In 2015, after months spent reading newspapers, watching television reports and listening to different opinions about the refugee crisis in Europe, I felt the urge to go and witness.
My aim was also to volunteer, to be able to understand and be close to the people involved. Since October 2015, I have visited various locations including Preševo, Belgrade, (Serbia); Lesvos Island, Athens, Idomeni, where the humanitarian need was most tangible; and Chios, an island located just a few kilometres from the Turkish coast (Greece).
On all of these occasions, I had my Polaroid Land Camera with me – and it was during my first trip that the A Polaroid for a Refugee project was born.
Chios Island, Greece, 2016, part of Giovanna Del Sarto’s A Polaroid for a Refugee project © Giovanna Del Sarto
It is a project based on the concept of giving – giving something back to the refugees, a moment of their life and journey captured forever. The Polaroids reflect the inner strength and dignity maintained by refugees during their long and harrowing journeys. For every Polaroid I take, I give one to the refugee as a reminder of the moment. On the back of the Polaroid is a simple statement: ‘Wherever your destination may be – tell me when you feel you have reached a safe place.’ This is a message of hope, which, sadly, for some may never be fulfilled.
Everyone I photographed has a Polaroid now. I love the idea that they will look at those pictures one day in the future. The portraits I took are very similar to family portraits, conveying a relaxed and carefree attitude that only scratches the surface of the refugees’ lives. Yet the value for the refugee is to have this moment of escape from the horrors of their daily lives and to carry a reminder of it with them on their onward journeys.
Everyone wanted their photograph taken, but for many different reasons. The young men loved to pose; the mothers wanted a picture to show their children when they’re older; and the kids just saw it as a bit of fun.
And for us who look at these images? We see a different side to the refugee crisis from the one we’re usually offered. We see these people just as people, not as victims or heroes, not as refugees to pity or as migrants to fear. They emerge as humans – resilient, thoughtful, joyful individuals.
Mahbub in Athens, Greece, 2016
Since August 2017, I have been visiting people who have kept in touch with me and are building new lives in Europe. Some, such as Fahima, still have the original Polaroid, enabling us to reunite the two Polaroids in the place that they have chosen to rebuild their lives. Others, such as Rohina, had their Polaroids confiscated along the way but kept hold of my contact details and kept in touch.
I find this second stage of my project both fascinating and challenging, encountering situations that I might not have had if I had only focused the project on the Balkan route or if I had focused only on European countries that are considered ‘the destination’.
Fahima in Austria, part of Giovanna Del Sarto’s A Polaroid for a Refugee project © Giovanna Del Sarto
There is sometimes a perception that, once people reach their ‘destination’, everything will be magically healed. I met people along the way who didn’t have any money, food or means to carry on their journeys, yet somehow they managed to ‘make it’. At what cost, though? Some of the people I have revisited are struggling to come to terms with the memories and legacy of their journeys, and their new lives and circumstances.
Witnessing both situations has led me to realise how far away I am from truly understanding the experiences that these people have gone through.
Mahbub, Switzerland, 2017, part of Giovanna Del Sarto’s A Polaroid for a Refugee project © Giovanna Del Sarto
A selection of images from A Polaroid for a Refugee will be displayed in the stairwell and entrance corridor to the Migration Museum at The Workshop from Thursday 7 June until Sunday 1 July. Opening hours and visitor information.
Giovanna will be speaking about her project as part of our Refugee Week late opening on Thursday 21 June.
For more information on A Polaroid for a Refugee, please visit apfar.org or the project’s Facebook page.
7 June, 2018
We’re putting the finishing touches to our new brochure (our sixth, by my reckoning), which we hope to have ready in paper form and as a pdf on our website in the next few weeks. It’s always an interesting process: taking stock of how far we have travelled and how much we have done, re-examining some of the arguments we put forward in support of our cause previously, seeing how much our current aims coincide with those with which we started five years ago. It’s incredibly humbling, too, to see how much what we have achieved has depended on the partnerships and unsung contribution of volunteers, linked organisations, supporters both individual and corporate.
One of the largest chapters in the brochure sets out the case for a migration museum, building on the latest research and reflecting a changing climate in the country’s attitude to migration. Much of the evidence here surprises me every time we revisit it for a new edition of the brochure – the facts, for example, that the UK, statistically, is more cynical about the reasons immigrants come to our country (more than 40 per cent of those surveyed saying they do so to seek benefits) than all other European nations, or that there is a greater divide in our country than all others between those who are young and degree-educated and those who are older and not university-educated in terms of people’s opinion of the impact of immigration on the economy. And then there is the statistic that in some ways lies at the heart of what the Migration Museum Project has been about from the word go: the fact that more than three-quarters of the population see immigration a ‘problem’ nationally, but less than one third see it as a ‘problem’ in their local area.
One of the tables used in our forthcoming brochure; this shows the UK public to be more likely than that of any other country surveyed to think that immigrants come to this country to seek social benefits © Transatlantic Trends
This kind of mismatch is not unusual: the misrepresentation of the level of crime, for example, is often used as evidence that the fear of crime dramatically outstrips the reality. But it is nevertheless an interesting illustration of our ability to hold an intellectual or abstract opinion that is at variance with the day-to-day reality of our lives. Making exceptions for people we know and like seems to be part of the basic human condition:
‘I hate all Man City supporters.’
‘But Tim, your best friend, supports City.’
‘Yeah, but Tim’s different.’
or
‘All people from eastern Europe should go “home” now.’
‘What, including Pavel, our Julie’s boyfriend?’
‘Well no, obviously not Pavel. Of course, he can stay.’
It’s not quite the same, but there was an interesting illustration of this basic point – that people feel differently about ‘others’ once they are actually connected to them, through their stories, through meeting them, through living among them – in the BBC three-part programme that earlier this year ‘commemorated’ the 25th anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. In the first episode of the rather optimistically titled Stephen: The Murder that Changed a Nation, there is a moment (around 48 minutes in) when Doreen and Neville Lawrence become aware of an article about them in the Daily Mail (Monday 10 May 1993), criticising them for associating themselves with a march that had ended in violence (the article’s sub-heading read ‘Activists turn brutal killing of a schoolboy into a political cause.’). The Lawrences and their advisers consider how they should respond, and somebody suggests a phone call to the paper. As they discuss options, Neville Lawrence mentions that he knows someone senior on the paper, having done some plastering work on his new home. This someone senior turns out to be the newspaper’s editor, Paul Dacre, whose telephone number Neville has.
He phones Dacre.
What followed is quite extraordinary. Dacre, who hadn’t realised that Stephen Lawrence was Neville’s son, apologises for the article, arranges a corrective interview that is published days later in his paper and then – four years later, in 1997 – is personally responsible for the Daily Mail’s historic and sensational front page article that names the ‘Murderers’ of Stephen Lawrence and challenges them to sue the paper if they think they have been falsely accused. It was an article that shocked people, both because it dared to say what no other paper to that point had, and because the Mail was the paper that many people would have considered the least likely to run such a story. In one broad stroke, it managed to subvert liberals’ opinions of the Daily Mail while possibly also confounding the expectations of its readers.
The famous front page of the Daily Mail on 14 February 1997, an exact print replica of Paul Dacre’s handwritten layout.
Of course, the story doesn’t have the resolution that we might all have hoped for. Only two of the ‘murderers’ have ever been convicted, and the chances of the others being brought to justice seem increasingly slim. More significantly, of course, there’s no getting over the fact of Stephen Lawrence’s murder. With damning poignancy, Doreen Lawrence talks in the BBC programme of the family’s decision to bury Stephen in Jamaica, ‘because England did not deserve him’. Despite the title of the BBC programme, has the nation in fact changed to the extent that she might have made a different decision now? Huge question marks remain, but it is nonetheless gently reassuring to think that a paper that is regularly pilloried for promoting what people see as a right-wing, xenophobic agenda in this instance so firmly aligned itself in opposition to an act of racist brutality, largely on the basis of the human contact between its editor and the victim’s father. Candidly, in the BBC’s programme, Dacre wondered whether he would have written the piece had he not known Neville Lawrence personally – and ended up deciding that he would not have.
‘Any fool can know,’ as Albert Einstein said. ‘The point is to understand.’
13 December, 2017
The Migration Museum Project (MMP) has received an award for specialised services at the Three Faith Forum’s (3FF) 2017 awards for London’s faith and belief communities. Our director, Sophie Henderson (pictured above), attended the award ceremony in London on 27 November 2017 and received the award on behalf of MMP.
The awards recognise the vital work of local communities in making London a welcoming place for people of all faiths and beliefs. The awards were sponsored by The Exilarch’s Foundation and Amersi Foundation, and the event was supported by Her Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London’s Council on Faith.
72 local projects received awards for their services to and for faith communities in London. These projects demonstrate how Londoners from all faiths and beliefs can work together for a fairer and more inclusive city.
We are very grateful to 3FF and the award sponsors for recognising our work and activities as we continue to engage with diverse communities from all backgrounds and faiths. Many congratulations to all of our fellow award winners.
Find out more about the awards and see the full list of award winners here.
For more on 3FF, visit their website.
Photo by Maria Alejandra Huicho
