By performance and visual artist Belén L.Yáñez
In a time when the word welcome often feels uncertain, performances like Welcome offer something rare: a pause, a breath, a space to reconnect with what it means to meet one another with openness.
Presented as part of the 2025 Platforma Festival across the East of England, Welcome unfolded as an interactive performance, both intimate and collective. Each participant was invited into a sensory journey, a place where sound, touch, and memory came together to remind us that connection is possible, even among strangers.
At a moment when so many around the world are displaced, when borders harden and the word refugee is too often met with suspicion, Welcome stands as a quiet act of resistance. It asks us to notice how we meet those we do not yet know, how we extend or withhold warmth, and how we carry both fear and hope in our encounters.
Audiences in Great Yarmouth and Colchester described their experiences as “moving and powerful,” “a journey between tears and laughter,” and “mesmerising, a sound and movement trip that transports you to another dimension.” Many spoke about feeling calm, alive, and reconnected, with themselves, with others, and with the simple human act of trust. As one person beautifully said, “Everyone should be part of Welcome at least once in their lives.” Perhaps because, in moments like these, we remember that connection is not something we create, it’s something we allow.
It is easy, in the noise of the present moment, to feel that the world is becoming less welcoming. The pace of life, the divisions we read about daily, the sense of constant crisis, all can make us close inwards. Yet Welcome invites the opposite. Through shared experience, through the vulnerability of touch and sound, through the act of meeting without words, it reawakens our capacity to receive and to be received.
Festivals like Platforma, produced by Counterpoints with organisations and artists across the region, play a vital role in making these encounters possible. They bring together artists, audiences, and communities from different backgrounds to share stories of migration, belonging, and renewal. In doing so, they remind us that art is not a luxury; it is a bridge.
In the land of walls and headlines, Welcome whispers something simple and radical: every meeting can be an invitation.
They say that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king. But perhaps it’s simpler than that. Perhaps when we share our senses, when we really see, hear and feel one another, we become human again.
Welcome!
