Is every act of migration itself a performance? How are our understandings of ‘territories’ as fixed entities challenged by the movements of people to and through them? PERFORMIGRATIONS attempts to address these questions by imbuing the territorial map with the dynamism, depth and range of mobility experiences through a series of collaborative artistic interventions.
Migration is performative. Relocation may involve the adoption of new roles and transformations in identity played out across borders and spaces. Focusing, in particular, on the movements of people across the E.U., and between the E.U. and Canada, PERFORMIGRATIONS reconsiders the ways that we draw geographic borders by placing storytelling, creative acts, and cultural heritage at the locus of place-making. Performance, art, and mobile media technologies offer exciting new ways to explore and express the various instances of belonging and alienation that frame migration narratives.
The creative engine of PERFORMIGRATIONS is a collective of seven artists whose practices address homelessness and youth, migratory domestic labour, food commercialization and cultures, musical expressions of memory and place, queer kinship and intergenerationality. Contemplations of migration and identity are of crucial importance in our increasingly mobile global society. This project will illuminate such concerns while generating intriguing new approaches to collaborative art-making and research.
At the heart of PERFORMIGRATIONS is an interactive art installation that demonstrates the stakes and outcomes of territorial migration, focusing in particular on the movements of people across the E.U., and between the E.U. and Canada. The installation will integrate ‘traditional’ art forms with emerging geo-locative media platforms. An interactive digital medley of words, sounds, still-images, and video performances will catalyze an expanding communal narrative, and will grow and develop with the addition of new materials as the project itself migrates from location to location.
These collaborative and individual installations are complemented by the contributions of a team of researchers from across the E.U. and North America. The entire PERFORMIGRATIONS team represents a range of experience and expertise that is in many ways itself a microcosm of diverse contemporary national demographies.
A network of 16 European and Canadian Institutions also support this venture. Through this network, we aim to invite a trans-national audience to observe and participate in this interdisciplinary, multi-mediated approach to research and creation.