Often when you look at how migration is represented in institutional media it's often in terms
of stereotypes. [News reports] 'We are getting swamped by vast numbers of people', 'They're
just streaming across', 'This is an invasion'. When you're doing conventional journalism
you're the one with all the power. So you're the one that gets to choose the questions,
you get to chooses how you write it up, you get too choose how you pitch it to an editor,
you get to choose which facts you leave out. So i thought it would be really interesting
to look at some of these issues but working with the people who are maybe the subjects
of some of these stories.
People were mainly doing storyboarding work but they also did
more abstract things, like collage, or drawing, or group storytelling, and I thought
about it in terms of co-constructing the knowledge really. It wasn't like me going in and teaching
really, it was me going in and working with people. A much more participatory process,
really deconstructing all of those things. But actually what you notice is when you speak
to people about how they represent themselves and their identities through stories, I think
you see reflections and maybe echoes of some of these ideas that you see in institutional
media in the way people talk about themselves. We had a number of Kurdish women who were
reflecting on objects and talking about them and the memories that they made them think
of and Ramzieh did a story which was very personal to her which talked about her circumstances
of arriving to the UK.
My name is Ramzieh. I am from Syria. I live in Gateshead. [Translator] 'Last summer holiday
when she came here from and they were writing story about their life
she wrote about her family and how they moved to Iraq and then they are now separate, her
kids in Germany and Sweden, and right now she's here only with her husband. It's only
about the experience they had and the bad time they went through so it's important to
share it or to say to someone'.
He's a young man living and working in the north-east in
Gateshead. He has chosen to talk about his interest in Iranian wrestling. 'I want to
to be a hero but I think i can't. 'No you can't.' 'But how?' 'Just believe in yourself.'
'You can do everything.' 'Yes, but look at him, he's very strong, but I'm not.' 'I'm
sure you're better than him because you had more training.'' I lose the competition. Why?
Because I don't believe in myself.' 'If you want, follow your dream and be a hero, you
just need to believe in yourself and follow your dream. Just change your mind and do anything
that you want.' Very interestingly I think framing his story in terms of self confidence
and self doubt and maybe the conflict between those two things, but really the story if
you look at it is a competition and I think that's really interesting when given a choice
he's framing his story in terms of winning and losing. I think wrestling helps you. It's
a big opportunity for you to help yourself. How can you fight with your problems in your
life, because when you go to wrestling you need to fight with other people, so that's
good for you to make yourself strong. I like the motivation because when you see the people
they give you like a bad energy and say you can't do anything or something like that.
One sentence for my life: impossible is nothing, you can do anything. He is a from the DRC
so we conducted our interviews in French and he has chosen to talk in very general terms
about what he calls 'the life of a man'.
He's avoiding personal narratives, he's avoiding talking about himself which
is interesting, but also his choice of language is interesting in terms of gender. To connect
the work we did with Rob with the reality I think of my own mother who gave me life.
She was close to me and I didn't know that one day she was going to disappear. The work
that we have done with Rob, it makes people think about life because when you look at
life and face it, it is not exactly what you think. Losing a close person and precious
one, a beloved mother, it's one of the inspirations. The illusion maybe many of us have is that
we can talk about our lives in terms of our choosing, but actually our identities really
do determine what narratives we can tell. But I also think it's interesting to look
at moments of solidarity between different people and how storytelling can reach people
across cultural legal and social boundaries and make people talk to each other and engage
with each other.