The Beauty of Movement
Arts and design for new migration narratives
This essay is based on a beautiful collaboration with friends and colleagues at the ‘Beauty of Movement’ event during the London Migration Film Festival in November 2023: Federica Fragapane, Adama Sanneh, Eka Ikpe, Gabriella Gómez-Mont, Khalid Albaih, Emilia Terragni, Sama Kai, Mark Miller and Nushy Rose. This essay is dedicated to them.
Credit: photo by Sama Kai
The theme of the 2024 Venice Art Biennale is ‘Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere’. The aim, in the words of its curator Adriano Pedrosa, is to celebrate ‘artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, and refugees—especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North’. The theme is part of a wider move to ‘decolonise’, and ‘favour artists who have never participated in the festival before’.
This is just the latest example of a series of exhibitions, festivals and other events celebrating the joy, beauty and talent unleashed by the global movement of people. Moving between places and across borders is much more than just crossing them. It is a journey of ideas, talent and cultures. The beauty of movement is in the experience shared by so many and the creativity, ideas and hopes of the people making these journeys.
Yet too often this beauty remains an untold migration story: look no further than recent electoral campaigns in Europe, the UK and US, to see how political narratives around migration are not changing. If anything, they are getting more toxic, extreme and ‘ugly’. The trouble is that well-meaning and evidence-based attempts to challenge these narratives with arguments around migration’s (mostly economic) benefits, framing migration as a positive phenomenon is just not cutting through the mainstream political discourse. This has to change. ‘We’ , people advocating for fairer and more pragmatic and humane approaches to migration, need to start telling a different story about the movement of people.
The beauty of movement is an idea that challenges traditional views on migration, overcoming the good vs bad dichotomy and throwing away labels like ‘challenges and opportunities’. It demands bold, innovative thinking and actions. The power of storytelling and imagination is crucial here— music, poetry, dance, and the arts are unparalleled in their ability to shift perspectives, foster new understanding, redefine borders and dismantle barriers.
The greatest barrier is the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the ‘others’. Arts, culture, music, and dance can help knock it down. Here’s how.
Rethinking Borders
The physical barriers that prevent people from moving safely are one of the greatest tragedies of our time. Political debates focus on controlling national borders, but those are not the only ones that matter. The imaginary borders between ‘us’ – the natives, those who stay, the ‘host countries’ – and ‘them’, the ‘others’, the migrants, are major obstacles that prevent humanity from sharing a collective future.
People who move and people who stay share the same humanity. Our destinies are inextricably linked, sharing mutual challenges, opportunities and benefits. These common experiences are hampered by barriers, borders and regulations. While these are often put in place with ‘good intentions’ and reasonable sounding purposes, such as ‘regulating and managing flows’, in practice they result into deeply unequal and non reciprocal arrangements which exacerbate not just our ability to move, but also to live.
Think about extortionate remittance fees, restrictive work permits, visas rejection rates and family separation. These are imposed, artificial barriers, which can and should be knocked down.
In the words of Gabriella Gómez-Mont: “We must talk not only of the politics of borders but also the poetics and pathos of borders: we have created imaginary borders and boundaries that have incredibly real effects on people, on both sides.”
Credit: artwork by Khalid Albaih
Arts and culture then become creative bridges, upheld by local and global communities, which can counteract the very real barriers that frontiers and borders create.
Credits: photo by Yuki Sumner, artwork by Gabriella Gómez-Mont
Credits: photo by author; still image from On Freedom Of Movement: wi de muv, Julianknxx
These physical and imaginary borders limit the sharing of knowledge and experiences and nowhere is this felt more acutely than in the African continent.
As Eka Ikpe explains, Africa is a continent of abundance, and its people are knowledge creators with increasingly global influence. Yet the movement of Africans within and outside the continent is severely restricted and as a result, the knowledge and influence created on the continent too often cannot leave its shores.
In the recent film directed by artist Juliaknxx “On Freedom of Movement (wi de muv)” the Mayor of Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone, explains how for young creatives in her cities not being able to move equals not being able to breathe and how moving should be a choice, not a necessity:
“I appreciate that you care about the people who come to your city, but I really care about the people who leave my cities”.
Our recent analysis of Schengen and UK visa rejections exposes deep inequalities, with many from African countries unable to move. So it is all very well to celebrate the immense talent of African creators, but without visas to travel this enormous potential remains untapped.
Credits: artwork by Federica Fragapane
Removing these barriers is our best chance for peace, prosperity, cultural exchange and so much more.
If we do not act, we all miss out.
Imagination is problem-solving
Culture, the arts, design, music and dance: far from being cute or frivolous, they represent all that we have in common.
As Adama Sanneh always reminds me, artistic productions are concrete actions, breaking down barriers for everyone to experience and enjoy - beyond museum walls or catwalks. These actions and the narratives they inform offer a unique opportunity to reframe the movement of people: as a collective experience; as imaginative problem- solving; as memory for the forgotten crisis.
Bridges of words, colours and imagination can breathe life into policy and political spaces, connecting us across borders and continents.
In the words of Emilia Terragni: “Arts and Design can be incredible agents of change.
Through creativity, planning, simplification, analysis, communication, lateral thinking and beauty. Designers are problem solvers, they explore the unknown, they challenge and they do not take no for an answer until solutions are discovered.”
Credits: courtesy of the Moleskine Foundation
The visual and political power of words and numbers
Cartoonist and activist Khalid Albaih reminds us that to truly honor human experiences, we should place lived realities at the heart of the stories we tell, counting those who have not counted with respect, always.
Credits: photo by Yuki Sumner, artwork by Khalid Albaih
We must carefully consider the visual and political power of words, images, and numbers in narrating the stories of those who move.
Where is joy and beauty in the stories we tell? Too often, we focus on tales of tragedies, vulnerability and hate, whilst the value and contribution of migrants to our societies and economies are scribbled off the page.
There is always a story behind data. Federica Fragapane’s visualizations not only bring data to life but most importantly turn data into human, urgent and beautiful visual stories that travel far and wide.
From Iran, Afghanistan, Gaza, and Sudan, we cannot simply move on when a crisis falls out the news cycle - words, images and numbers can help us remember, reflect and bring stories to the world’s attention.
Beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder, and as such it is a subjective, personal experience. So is moving between places, as a choice or necessity. I said it before, and I say it now with more conviction than ever: Another migration story is possible but the beauty of movement is an altogether different story, which requires an imaginative vocabulary of words, sounds, data and colours, but more than anything new and louder voices.
Credits: artwork by Federica Fragapane
The Beauty of Movement event will be returning in November 2024 during the London Migration Film Festival. Follow @lago_collective on instagram for updates and get in touch if you’d like to find out more. Download the essay here.