Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Working in collaboration with the charity Freedom from Torture, this research explores how forcibly displaced people who have experienced trauma are supported in their recovery through engagement with the arts. The participatory arts intervention focusses on re-imagining places; safe-havens from their homeland, their journey, or a place they wish to reach, expressed as paintings. For this group understanding the self can be complex, having experienced physical movement and dislocated shifts in identity. Cartography typically used to survey physical landscapes is an inaccurate instrument for the task of locating the individual. The research explores the benefits of participatory arts as deterritorializing method, and the strategies necessary to find the self within the intersecting and overlapping territories of nations, ethnicities, linguistic communities, and geography. Workshops provide a safe space enabling participants to explore new territory - a transitional space between abandoned homeland and new habitation. The approach has potential to enable refugees to cultivate new ways of thinking and talking about their experiences, to connect the past with their present lives, and discover new abilities. We suggest that if such individuals can develop a reformed concept of self in a new territory, it begins a process of personal deterritorialization supportive for recovery.