Serial Migrants and Identity / The Arts of Migration
Conference/ Exhibition/Performance
March 10-11
The artists of The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop (MMTW) were born and have lived in different countries. Yet they share a common story of serial migration. While a cosmopolitan may evolve from provincialism toward global consciousness and an immigrant may feel torn between two countries, the “serial migrant” is shaped by her implication in successive environments and the effort to make herself of them all. In her book, Moving Matters Paths of Serial Migration, Susan Ossman documents these subjective struggles with the accumulation of ways of being oneself in varied contexts. She probes the conceptual implications of taking a mobile, path-oriented approach to conceptualizing emerging forms of social and cultural diversity. Since 2013, the artists of the MMTW have taken her analysis as a springboard for further research, fashioning themselves as a collective to examine their common experience of serial migration by producing works of art, exhibitions and performances to probe the politics of movement, migration and sequestration.
The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop performance and exhibition of MMTW Memory Books at the Culver Center accompany the Serial Migrants Art and Identity conference at the Center for Ideas and Society on March 10-11.
The Memory Books reference the intensity of our connection to the site and set of participants that make each event memorable, chronicling the imaginative and affective development of the project. The performance mingles work developed across sites, embodying how the workshop is both made in and of specific places and sets of people yet transcends them.
