CONNECTING STORIES

During one of my artistic research trips in 2016, I managed to enter The Dzjangal (France), one of the largest informal settlements in Europe at the time, which has been the first field of investigation of my dissertation since 2019. The first approach to The Dzjangal was through an art action called ‘Connecting Stories’: it consisted of the exchange of anonymous letters between newcomers and compatriots between emergency camps in Europe ︎

Connecting Stories was an artistic response to the increase (since 2015) of people-in-transit from West Asia, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa seeking refuge in European countries —academically referred to as "the long summer of migration" (see Römhild, Schwanhäßer, Yurdakul et al. 2017; Kasparek and Speer, 2015). The impossibility of communication between compatriots and family members in these emergency camps, as they had no access to internet, telephone or location information, encouraged me to look for an ‘artistic way’ to facilitate this communication. I say ‘artistic way’ because it was a creative way to camouflage this activist act, as one of the policies of the European authorities was to prevent communication between new arrivals for reasons of their own 'safety'. Connecting Stories was the starting point for my next encounters in the second and third field trips of my dissertation toward the communities of Tiburtina (Italy) and Los Arenales (Chile). This art action was also the starting point for my own personal critique and self-reflection when working with communities, especially ‘refugee’ communities, who are in an extremely precarious position. Connecting Stories not only led me to encounter The Dzjangal, Tiburtina and Los Arenales, but also opened the desired window for a journey into the many ethical challenges that artistic practices such as participatory art, social art and art+activism pose when working with communities. In the Chapter Autoethnography of my PhD manuscript (not-yet published), I have undertaken a self-reflexive analysis of the challenges of artistic work with communities in an autoethnography — a starting point for my further reflections on the intertwining of art and anthropology.