BAC has been invited to be part of the four-year multidisciplinary research project Making it Home: An Aesthetic Methodological Contribution to the Study of Migrant Home-Making and Politics of Integration (MaHoMe). The study will explore the meanings of home and of home making for migrants and is a British-Nordic research collaboration led by Kingston University together with Lund University in Sweden and Via University College in Denmark. BAC will host the artist, film maker and researcher Azadeh Fatehrad based at Kingston University. She will be running workshops in the UK, Denmark and Sweden with migrants who will be able to create and contribute with content on their own mobile phones.
The material will be compiled in a film essay by Azadeh Fatehrad, where audiences will encounter the migrant’s images, sounds and associations to home and their thoughts on the everyday practices of home making. Apart from being co-producers of a film, the interviewed migrants will also contribute to a publication and a conference. The study aims to provide basis for analytical research on some of the key issues around migration- and integration policy.
Azadeh Fatehrad explains how her work captures a feeling of inbetweenness, the duality of nationality creating displacement within each culture. “Home becomes the portable memory storage in phones and databases, this mobile home forms a feeling of belonging to somewhere. We’re attempting to trace the mobile elements that create the feeling of home or belonging that can give you the security that you belong, even though you are physically far from that version of home.”
Dr Azadeh Fatehrad is an artist and researcher based at the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre, Kingston University London, working primarily with still and moving images in the context of historical representation. She is co-founder of ‘Herstoriographies: The Feminist Media Archive Research Network’ in London.
