“While there is the potential to acquire the conceptual components of national identity, it is very difficult if not impossible to relive your childhood, change your physicality, transform your linguistic self and reinvent your family.”1
Migration and relocation are very physical acts and involve a person leaving where they were born and raised and moving to another country. Somehow, most of us view the processes following migration, namely integration or assimilation, as totally psychological. TAR ISTEACH | COME IN is a visual demonstration of the social seam between ‘New Irish’ and Native Irish as it is explored by the artists Julie Griffiths, Maeve Collins, and Monica de Bath, as part of Bealtaine Festival 2020 Commission. The artists produced a series of encounters with groups where the participants confronted the idea of hospitality in the context of their life as newcomers in Ireland, and through this process the physicality of post-migration life shone through.
That’s very much a focus for me, where the edges of things are, who is in and who is out, who has permission and who doesn’t have permission.
Julie Griffith worked with a group of refugees and asylum seekers in the Emergency Reception & Orientation Centre in Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon to produce a series of engagements with local community residents during COVID-19 restrictions. Before the restrictions, the group was working on different methods of cultural events where the centre residents would be hosts to the local community members. The idea of hosting remained the focus of the activity, adding a certain agency to newcomers’ role in society, which is an aspect of hospitality that should be considered more often: welcoming is something only those who belong can do. Griffith paired participants from the two groups so that each pair has the same age and gender, and the centre residents were the ones initiating the communication in the form of posting cards, placing them as de facto hosts of this long-distance conversation. This project was not aimed at the creation of a success story of becoming. The process of being an individual from one culture who lives in another is a complicated one and this project presented an opportunity for agency without expecting the catharsis of success or failure. Rather, it recognised that while starting a conversation with another person in your region seems like a simple action, the physicality of post-migration life, including, access to resources and social activities in times of crisis, draws clear boundaries to our ability to stay true to our customs.
In Lisdoonvarna, County Clare, Maeve Collins brought together groups of new mothers, both local and residents of the Direct Provision Centre. There are different types of support new parents rely on: learning from the knowledge of previous generations of their family and community, sharing the day-to-day responsibilities or child-minding, and offering support to the mother during the postpartum period. The proverbial village that it takes to welcome a newborn into this world can become a palpable void in a post-migration context, without the community setting we trust and feel comfortable relying on. This is particularly the case for mothers who are asylum seekers or refugees, and lack this loving, trusted network if they want to breastfeed, a difficult decision that often requires medical as well as generational support. Collins’ aim was to offer a social bond that would, at least physically, fill that space by creating a breastfeeding group. The difficulties in creating a consistent collective were built into the women’s status, not controlling their own timeline or location, which made it close to impossible to construct a safe space that later allows for participation as part of social assimilation.
I think there is a great sense of vitality in our group, especially in the beginning, when we were sharing and encountering different cultures crossing over, and totally forgetting where we were (in order) to meet each other in that space.
Collins also organised community encounters focused on domestic spaces, deliberating on the role of the kitchen as an important point of congregation in the homes of newcomers, or in the case of some of the participants who live in Direct Provision Centres, the meaning of not having a kitchen in a home, once again seeing how a physical condition bears down on post-migration life. Collins organised workshops for bread-making, basket weaving, and other crafts where materials were provided but the knowledge, much like in the case of the breastfeeding groups, was shared by the participants. The encounters granted the participants an agency through their expertise that their status, as it is defined by the state, denied them.
Monica de Bath connected with residents and volunteers who (built a garden) worked a garden won from waste ground within the Eglinton Direct Provision Accommodation Centre in Galway. She collaborated with resident families and a volunteer horticulturalist in support of developing the garden as poetic space. Working within the garden as a community, either gardening or drawing in an outdoors space was designed as a discussion-through-practice of the physicality of life in a new place. The aim was to facilitate the residents in developing a toolkit for sharing their experiences with each other.
Each person is (will be) involved in working on their own thing. It allows them time to breath… Having control of what’s in front of you, there’s something political in that.
Working the soil gave a non-ephemeral representation of the agency possible through community collaboration. Beyond the physicality of the access to land, the activity as well as the accompanying drawing comment on matters of climate and biodiversity in the context of contemporary migration practices. Crop growing often relies on traditional practices and knowledge of the land and the weather. This collaborative skills sharing between native and newcomer communities is crucial to allow for the development of a healthy community in post-migration situations, with active roles given to the groups as they become participating residents and later citizens.
TAR ISTEACH | COME IN facilitates and promotes projects that, with time, can bear fruit for our entire community as the welcoming and developing migrants’s cultural practices will grow to be considered a mainstream practice in contemporary Ireland.
Monica de Bath
For artist Monica de Bath the existence of the poetic in places, relationships, and objects, is a fundamental aspect of her practice. For Tar Isteach, de Bath focused on facilitating the creation of a poetic space in an outdoors community garden. Her idea was for the work done in the garden, be it gardening, making art, or simply being outside together, to act as an instigator for reimagining (conversation). de Bath learned about the make-up of the community of residents in Eglinton through encounters, and noticed that many of the families at the Direct Provision Centre are quite young, and that often the older members of the expanded family remained in another country. This led to two important realisations: skill sharing, which would have happened within expanded families between generations, needed to be re-defined according to this new situation; young families who migrate often rely on the children to lead their engagement with the world outside the family unit.
I think it’s going to link into bigger things and to look into the way creatives (think about) supportpeople from different cultures actually being the artists collaborators in (supporting)creative projects like this.
The artist set out to (the) create the possibility for a place and time to spend time together as a community in a relatively equalising situation. Drawing, painting, gardening and minding the garden, or playing together, were activities that allowed the residents to decompress and practice a fertile relationship with their new land.
With COVID-19 restrictions, attending group meetings in the garden stopped and de Bath started online drawing sessions with the families and facilitating discussions about creating an outdoor drawing facility in the garden.
Julie Griffith
Julie Griffith works with residents of the Emergency Reception & Orientation Centre and with a group from the Men’s Shed, both in Ballaghaderreen, County Roscommon. As part of her engagement with these groups, she makes sure to step into their interactions with awareness to questions of permission, agency, and access, and her treatment of this include a critical view on her own creative engagements in terms of gender, ethnicity, and age. Griffith is interested in the understanding the structures and systems of othering through her art practice. It is important for her to learn where the limits of society are placed before acting, to be aware of her position when engaging with those in society who have less agency. This has a direct impact on how her interactions are built.
Searching for the edges of things, who is “the other?” Am I “the other” as the artist entering their space? Do I become part of the institution?
Considering that it is typically women who tend to engage in collaborative creative practice, the artist selected the Men’s Shed in order to support the development of male collaborative creativity, and as COVID-19 restrictions made it more challenging to gain access to the residents, Griffith developed various alternative methods that use language and craft skills as channels for more remote collaboration. Among these are a book of words and phrases about the idea of hospitality collected from the residents in their first languages, that are intended to be stitched together into a quilt.
Maeve Collins
A significant aspect of artist Maeve Collins’ engagement with the group at the Lisdoonvarna Direct Provision Centre involved learning how the residents of the centre live through similar family life experiences to her own. Together with a group of mothers to newborn babies, like herself, she examined the means of support accessible to them in terms of mentorship, resources, and equipment. Notably, she witnessed the gap in knowledge regarding breastfeeding, without intergenerational support within the community, and with no access to consultants at the Direct Provision Centre, most resident mothers had no other option than the use of formula.
Art is a proposal of the thing and then it is the thing. For me there was only one kitchen in direct provision, there’s a lot of no kitchens. Also, there’s not a way that you’d have a kitchen in Direct Provision. We were proposing to have a kitchen… making culture in the kitchen because there wasn’t a kitchen.
In her interaction, Collins approaches the common awkwardness in the situation of being a stranger who steps into a community setting with complete openness. The question of who is the host and who is “the other” in the collaboration is one explicitly discussed as part of the interaction in detail. This approach, together with the artist’s own experiences informing the engagement, opened up the relationship to allow for personal links and friendships to be created within the group and with the artist.
1 Hanauer, David Ian. “Non-Place Identity: Britain’s Response to Migration in the Age of Supermodernity.” Identity, Belonging and Migration, edited by GERARD DELANTY et al., Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2008, p. 205
Intersecting Interests 