Workshop Overview
This activity aimed to use sound and music and the emotions they produce to reinvent dominant perceptions and migration narratives. Drawing on the findings from the PERCEPTIONS interviews, this activity re-constructed and mediated the topics of hope, faith and disorientation, central to migrants’ experiences and imaginations. It used experimental approaches to the co-creation of electronic music, acoustic instrumentation, sound techniques and rhythms by migrant musicians in Wales, Italy and Cyprus to enable a music conversation across borders. The activity built on music and associated practices of listening, performance and distribution to re-envisage spaces, times and processes of migration and the socio-cultural contexts in which they emerge.
Description of Activity
The activity deployed sound and music to develop experimental and collaborative accounts of the key migration-related themes and re-present migrant knowledges. It was organised around a music-centred event co-produced by migrants connected across borders via an online (Zoom) platform. During the event, migrant and local musicians used sonic formats to tell migration stories different to other (often textual and visual) media. Particularly highlighting hidden, fleeting, and taken-for-granted aspects of migrant lives. Live music performances mixed with pre-recorded music fragments opened space for different voices and enabled different modes of listening and responses. Apart from reflecting on the audible elements of migrants’ journeys, music reveals their sensory engagements with everyday spaces and emotional resonances with their multiple ‘home’ countries.
Outcomes
Outcomes included a collection of pre-recorded songs (with artists’ narrations contextualising, discussing and explaining sonic material), video and audio recordings of live music performances on the topics central to the PERCEPTIONS project (faith, (in)visibility, disorientation, loss and hope). Audio recordings will be linked to specific locations and uploaded to create a virtual map. Edited videos of artists performing songs and sonic improvisation are on the PERCEPTIONS platform and social media. The videos will also have use for practical and technical training, covering participatory, experimental recording and listening techniques.
Impact
Music-making’s collaborative and responsive nature, which brings together individual and collective action in improvisation, can help migrants achieve specific social goals around inclusion, empowerment, recognition, and community involvement. This approach gives migrants an opportunity to express themselves creatively, develop their music skills, improve social competencies, and offer supportive ways of learning. Development of the joint community event, involving different creative practitioners, helped identify motivations, material resources, feelings and concerns and develop new ways (changing values) of consensus building, collective expression, feedback, and decision-making.
This community event developed creative collaborations between established and amateur music artists and forged cultural partnerships within local neighbourhoods. Collective music-making and improvisation helped design and practice techniques for maximising diversity and collective creativity, which will be shared in future events to develop community cohesion. Contribution from international artists, who do not usually have a chance to perform or struggle to find their place in the established music field, also added liveliness and creativity to the existing cultural scene. The recorded videos of the event helped challenge stereotypes, raise awareness about alternative migrant perceptions of Europe, and promote cultural identities and intercultural dialogue.
Team Involved
Swansea University: Sergei Shubin and Eleanor Cotterill
African Community Centre Musicians: Chief Amas, Victor Brox, Ify Iwobi (Wales), Chris Obehi (Italy) and Michael Ndop (Cyprus)
