Art and Migration, Part 1

“The Uprooted Tree” : Whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere, the life of an Hazara person is often clouded by a sense of danger and vulnerability. Many have fled Afghanistan or countries such as Iran and Pakistan because of direct punitive discrimination based on their ethnicity and most often, if not from their journey to safety, are themselves suffering from trauma, loss and alienation as a result of such experiences. Which begs the question: beyond the headlines, how is it possible to understand the trials and realities of the refugee experience? As a cross-disciplinary visual artist and poet Elyas Alavi talks about his experiences through personal, playful and mythological lenses. Evoking issues of identity, in-betweenness, memory, migration and displacement, he offers a deeper understanding of his trials as a Hazara refugee, artist and migrant to Australia.

Drawing on the personal and the collective, Alavi explores Hazara experiences of displacement through an autobiographical and visual arts practice focus, involving reflections on exile and memory, on crossing borders, on longing and the desire to return home; on the wounding nature of traumatic memory; on past and present histories of persecution and displacement; and the experience of homecoming, of ‘breaking the exile’.

My presentation derives from Afterwork Reading Club that Kunci initiated in collaboration with the Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Hong in 2015. The project was part of Para Site’s Hong Kong Migrant Domestic Workers Project. This presentation also derives from my involvement as one of jury members of the annual Taiwan Literature Award for Migrants in 2017. Afterwork Reading Club focuses on migrant workers literature as the important point at the politics of knowledge production within the context of Indonesian labour movement. I divide the presentation into three parts. In part one, I situate writing and reading practices in the everyday life of the migrant workers. Throughout Afterwork Reading Club project, we make a connection between ‘fiction’ as a literary style and representation of subjectivity construction process. In part two, I elaborate further on the performance of the migrant workers’ writings. I situate them within the specific context of writing condition—the kitchen, park, factory, ship, and jail. I map out the discourse on subjectivities showed in the texts. I examine the writing techniques and tools used to write the texts to develop an argument around writing stories. Writing is not only a safe space to convey thoughts and anxieties. To write a story means to reclaim ‘story’ as a site for recognition and self-empowerment. In part three, I examine the Instagram accounts of some Indonesian migrant workers. Using their photo postings as resources, I draw a narrative on experiencing the distance through the perspective of migrant workers.

Migration and borders are generally perceived and studied as a spatial process and the temporal aspect of migration has received much less attention. In this presentation I will develop an anthropological account of the lived experiences of the temporal aspect of border practices.