Creative Responsibility and Human Rights: Telling the Untold Stories of the Crisis in the Mediterranean

A World Refugee Day Counterpoints Arts Learning Lab in association with the Migration Museum Project and the Migrants Rights Network, part of Counterpoints Arts’ dis/placed programme.

20 June 2015⎪1pm – 3pm⎪Free admission, book on Eventbrite
The Ditch, Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, London EC1V 9LT

This Learning Lab will take the form of a moderated panel with short presentations and open discussion.

A recent article by Guardian journalist, Jonathan Jones, sets the agenda for this conversation when he declares that ‘art’s response to migrant drownings should be way more aggressive’. Jones suggests that ‘the scale of our cruelty, the true consequences of all the rhetoric that de-humanises migrants, have become so lethally clear, surely art on such a theme should be less equivocal, more angry?’

What might a creative arts response be and can it ever act alone?

This Learning Lab brings together a mix of people who are actively engaged and interested in making urgent interventions in the representation and communication of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. It will showcase examples from creative practitioners, commentators and researchers who are telling the story of the root causes of the migrant crisis through collaborative storytelling methods, media platforms and broadcasting channels.

The aim is to set up a network of interested artists, journalists, activists, advocates, academics and policymakers with a view to sharing ideas and charting potential collaborations and storytelling partnerships.

The Learning Lab threads its way through Counterpoints Arts’ dis/placed exhibition opening multiple spaces for interdisciplinary reflection, creative exchange, cross-sector learning and collaboration.

Full details of all Learning Labs

Practices of Place-Making: Memory, Migration and the Global City (Part 1)

A Counterpoints Arts Learning Lab in association with the Migration Museum Project, part of Counterpoints Arts’ dis/placed programme.

16 June 2015⎪3:30 – 6 pm⎪Free admission, book on Eventbrite
The Ditch, Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, London EC1V 9LT

Artists are often astute observers of the intricate – idiosyncratic – processes of place-making. They are able to document the everyday minutiae shaping the cultural diversity of local places. Yet artistic practices of place-making demand deep collaboration, encouraging (interdisciplinary) methodologies of trust, participation, and democratic/experimental modes of representing ‘voice’ and collective agency for communities of place.

This Lab focuses on the work of artists who are engaging in place-making practices through the prism of migration, memory and the lived realities of the global city.

Using video, still photographs, maps, sound and text, Haim Bresheeth and Reza Tavakol’s installation ‘Convivencia’ (co-existence) explores the mixed cultural heritage and everyday life on Turnpike Lane, North East London, where more than 100 languages are spoken and people from all parts of the world live in close proximity.

The Learning Lab threads its way through Counterpoints Arts’ dis/placed exhibition opening multiple spaces for interdisciplinary reflection, creative exchange, cross-sector learning and collaboration.

Full details of all Learning Labs