REFUGEE NARRATIVES — 20:20 STORIES OF MOVING LINEAGE
20:20 Stories of Moving Lineage is an epic project undertaken by students of DPS: a series of animations working with oral histories and a set of analytical posters by Saumya Mittal to represent narratives as data-visualisation.
20:20 is a multimedia touring arts exhibition, co-curated by FotoDocument and London College of Communication, which is the result of a community legacy project from Brent-based non-profit Salusbury World Refugee Centre. The project casts a long lens over the charity’s work from 1999-2019, through the collection and artistic interpretation of oral testimonies and ephemera of 14 ‘grown up’ child beneficiaries of the centre and their parents, to mark its 20th anniversary.
The project explores the impact the charity has had on the lives of the children and their parents and includes memories of homeland, reasons for exile, exploration of resilience and social agility and celebrates their achievements now.
The children featured in the stories attended Salusbury Primary School, Brent, from 1999 onwards at the time when the school leadership team created a bespoke refugee centre, Salusbury World, in response to growing numbers of new-arrivals presenting with complex needs in the wake of the Kosovan war and other major global conflicts.
Salusbury World Refugee Centre is a specialist refugee education charity, recognised widely as a beacon of good practice in the integration of asylum-seekers, refugees and migrants within an educational setting & the wider community. The heritage the project will uncover and preserve is unique and represents, to our knowledge, the first heritage project of this kind.
To capture their oral histories, participants were asked about their experiences as refugees and were invited to think of a ‘significant object’ to represent their life’s journey. The artwork created in response to the testimonials and objects includes: photography / graphic participant portraits; data information visuals of participant objects; ‘real time’ films of the edited oral histories comprising animation, illustration, typography, digital art and motion design.
