IC Visual Lab
ICVL 2024/2025
Project delivery: Alejandro Acin, Negar Elodie Behzadi, Ben GJ Thomas & Dawn Giles.
Project partner: Bridges for Communities
Funding partner: University of Bristol
This project uses mapping, photography, and writing for newly arrived people in the city to chart their personal journeys and memories. This creative process helps articulate experiences, fostering wellbeing and building a profound sense of belonging from within.
Memories often get lost intergenerationally between migrant parents and their children, leaving first and second generation migrants with a sense of void or disconnection. This project collaborates with Bridges for Communities, a Bristol based charity for migrants and refugees, to address this issue. By engaging in intergenerational memory work using participatory collage methods, it supports recently arrived people in the city in building narratives of migration, fostering a sense of connection and belonging. By doing so, it creates new archives of migration while developing an innovative methodological tool which can be replicated to broader migrant communities.
To address these challenges, we launched the ‘School of Movements’ a participant-led creative programme - combining personal mapping, reflective writing, and participatory photography - to enable participants to reflect on their journeys while exploring their new surroundings.
The programme will culminate in a public exhibition and events series, staged across central East Bristol. This will include public installations, public walks and workshops led by participants. These outcomes aim to bring together a broad spectrum of local residents and organisations, fostering new connections and deeper community cohesion.
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