Category: UAL

For the ‘Craft Your Story’ project, the team delivered a workshop which was a celebration of crafts, culture, and creativity. The primary goal of the project was to empower refugees, giving them agency over their crafts and celebrating their cultural heritage. The workshop fostered connections among people from diverse backgrounds and provided a platform to learn new crafts and appreciate the diversity of skills and traditions.

In the workshop, each participant created a fabric page using textiles and techniques from their culture and displaying their own unique creativity. The pages were assembled to form a fabric book showcasing and preserving the skills, stories, and traditions of refugee makers, while also serving as a bridge between artisans and those who appreciate their talents, as well as an innovative educational tool. The fabric book also serves as a directory for those interested in collaborating with or hiring artisans, fostering creative partnerships.

This project explores the evolution of identity and decolonisation through the medium of fashion, cyanotype prints, paint, and embroidery, finalised through a collage-like layering of patches onto a pair of jeans. This was carried out in collaboration with asylum seekers based in London through a workshop to facilitate discussion around identity and migration.

The team used the vehicle of jeans – something so common in our everyday lives, yet also a result of globalisation, colonialism, and slavery – to entice people to rethink fashion colonialism and reflect on how it manifests in today’s world. Through this artefact, the team encourage the viewer to reflect on their shifting identities, embrace it as ever evolving, recognise the multitude of factors influencing their identity, and furthermore, to use identity as a way to form deep rooted connections.

This team created a storytelling campaign aimed to shift narratives around refugees, share stories, and honour the diverse backgrounds of displaced individuals. Recognising food as one of the crucial factors that connects people to their roots, uniting individuals, and building empathy through shared experiences.

A workshop was facilitated with the focus of sharing stories about special and traditional recipes, to support integration and appreciation of each participant’s distinct cultural heritage. By translating the shared recipes into textile art, the project enabled a space for participants to explore their creativity and create a tangible output that became part of a symbolic ‘tablecloth’ artwork honouring diverse cultures. Each recipe shared during the workshop brought about personal stories etched with joy, nostalgia, and fond memories, which were collated into a ‘recipe book’, a keepsake of this project aimed at preserving these stories to be shared with many more people.

‘Beauty in Brokenness’ is a performance encouraging people to appreciate imperfections, using the Japanese art of kintsugi to fix broken things with gold. It also draws on the Butoh ‘dance of darkness’ which is about accepting and appreciating darkness and misery. Although originally from Singapore, Karuna – reflecting on her shifting identity – is embracing the Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi, as a way to accept and embrace ourselves, including the bad parts of ourselves; it is a worldview centred on acceptance, transience and imperfection, which well aligns with her being trans and from a cultural minority. Her message is: what is seen as broken, different, or wrong by society, can be beautiful too.

This textile piece emerges from a profound exploration of cultural identity and the shared experiences of displacement and belonging. Through collective efforts within the team and the refugee collaborator, the project aims to honour and celebrate diverse cultural heritages. The artwork is a testament to the intimate connection between personal narratives and broader themes of international migration.

As international students, the team grappled with feelings of nostalgia and homesickness, prompting a deep reflection on their identities and cultural diversity. In ‘The Feeling of Home’, the team intertwined individual perspectives, weaving a tapestry that speaks to the universal human longing for a sense of belonging. Each stitch represents a moment of self-healing and introspection, as we navigate the complexities of displacement and cultural assimilation. Through this creative process, the team invites viewers to contemplate their own experiences of home and belonging, fostering a dialogue that transcends borders and celebrates our shared humanity.

Tens of thousands of people are displaced every year owing to armed conflict and hostilities in their native countries. Many people are forced to abandon their homes, families, professions and even sense of identity in their search for safety and a place they can call home. ‘Our Song’ inverts the lens onto the viewer to showcase how anyone can be a refugee and eliminate the unsettling feeling of ‘otherness’ that comes with the refugee label since, at the end of the day, we are all human.

The soliloquy of the refugee collaborator and the creative use of Farsi poetry in the film is an attempt to depict the strength and steely resolve of anyone who finds themselves on this tumultuous journey. The refugee collaborator’s act of writing on the artefact – the Hijab, the traditional Middle Eastern headscarf, which has been sized up to nearly the size of a flag – is a symbol of the spirit of resilience against oppression as much as a reflection of her unwavering resolve. This is a force from within that transcends all grief, anguish, trauma and pain, and is common to all refugees who are on this difficult journey.