A case study by Josephine Carter
My organisation, Origins Untold, puts on creative and cultural events centering and celebrating people of African and Caribbean heritage in Folkestone. Since the opening of Napier Barracks in 2020 as a site of temporary accommodation for asylum seekers, we have felt compelled to get involved with people living as refugees in our local area, many of whom are of African (and sometimes Caribbean) origin. As a result, we’ve become part of a network of organisations working at Napier and elsewhere with refugees in and around Folkestone.
We were supported by Counterpoints Arts to coordinate a Refugee Week programme which included contributions and collaborations from many different sources. As well as ensuring that all different areas of the community were acknowledged and involved, we also wanted this year’s Refugee Week to contribute to developing ever-closer and more supportive relationships between the people and organisations working with refugees in Folkestone. Our arts-forward programme consisted of a mixture of public events that were open to the community and closed events that centred on the people living in Folkestone as refugees, and the people and initiatives that support them.
As the coordinator of the Refugee Week programme, I was lucky enough to be involved in almost everything that happened over the course of the week! It was very special to be able to see first-hand the diversity of the events that were offered, and notice how working collaboratively had opened up exciting possibilities for creativity, community-building and solidarity with refugees in our area.
We began the week with a visit to Sandgate Community Garden, where volunteers from Napier Barracks helped to set up a new composting area. Surrounded by the garden’s flowering crops and bathed in early Summer sunlight, it was an idyllic afternoon, finishing with a well-deserved cream tea, provided by Napier Friends, a community group which coordinates volunteering activities for men living at the Barracks. There was already a spirit of collaboration, as visitors from other community garden projects such as Custom Food Lab joined us to share gardening tips and shift barrowfuls of compost from one end of the garden to the other! Gardening and food are natural partners, and over the course of the week it was lovely to see locally grown and foraged food provide opportunities for connection and celebration – both on a walk with men from the Barracks with foraging collective World Wild and at Napier Friends’ joyous community meal, which featured a tapas-style selection of dishes from five cultures, and vegetables grown at the Napier Friends Gardening Project.
The longstanding support hub for residents of Napier Barracks, The Napier Drop-in, was also an important contributor to Refugee Week celebrations. The community space played host to a dance workshop as part of ‘Living Seams’, an exciting project presented by Art Refuge and Atelier Armonico exploring the resonances of modern-day and 20th century refugee experiences while developing a new production of the Kurt Weill opera-ballet, Zaubernacht. Choreographers working on the production led a workshop incorporating hip-hop and contemporary dance, encouraging a group of men residing at the Barracks and at local asylum hotels to dance, improvise and share cultural music and dances, aided by Art Refuge’s giant world maps. It was beautiful to see the playfulness and spontaneity of people’s dances, which ranged from the Kurdish Dabke to Sudanese and Eritrean dances, and even included clapping games and hopscotch.
Physical activity was an ongoing theme of the week – as well as a walk across the Warren with Muslim Hikers, Napier Friends also organised a takeover of the Folkestone Parkrun, and men from the Barracks took part as marshalls and runners, with support from Care4Calais, The Napier Drop-in and other charities working with refugees in Folkestone. It was another blazingly bright and warm day, and everyone seemed relieved to end the run with a picnic and a drink of cold water. Community running groups Primal Runners and Moving with Markie were instrumental in encouraging the guys taking part in the run, with one of the runners finishing in the top 5! To commemorate the occasion, a team of guys living at the Barracks made a film, interviewing runners, volunteers and members of the general public about this year’s Refugee Week theme of ‘Compassion’.
Photo (right) © Josephine Carter, 2023
As ever, arts and creativity served as the connective tissue between this year’s Refugee Week events. Throughout the week, Napier Friends’ exhibition ‘New Beginnings – Art From Napier’ ran at the Tower Theatre, showing works created at an art club held at the Barracks. Empowering, political, allegorical and moving, the showcase showed the importance of self-expression for people experiencing the harshness and contradictions of the UK asylum system. Origins Untold was also involved in presenting a pop-up exhibition by Folkestone-based artist Aida Silvestri at Autograph in London, of ‘inLIMBO’, a project exploring the state of ‘limbo’ that many asylum seekers face while living in temporary accommodation and awaiting decisions from the UK authorities about their future. We hosted a conversation between the creatives featured in ‘inLIMBO’ and organisations working with refugees in the arts including IMIX and Counterpoints Arts, reflecting on creativity, representation and life in the hostile environment.
Then, as part of Creative Folkestone’s Open Quarter weekend, Origins Untold hosted a pop-up exhibition at community gallery space Fourth Wall Folkestone, showing ‘So Far’, a project by illustrator Toby Melville-Brown, featuring contributions from people living as refugees in Folkestone. A multimedia project featuring drawings of walking figures combined in an innovative live animation, ‘So Far’ provoked reflections from visitors on individuality, community and the shared humanity of walking together through life. The exhibition was opened by Chair of Folkestone and Hythe District Council, Councillor Abena Akuffo-Kelly, who honoured us by giving our flipbook machine, handmade by joiner Beth Walker, an inaugural spin. A limited-edition run of 100 screen-printed posters designed by Toby Melville-Brown and donated by specialist printers Mesh and Blade were put up for sale during the exhibition, raising funds for Art Refuge’s work with refugees in Folkestone. Over the weekend the exhibition received visits from the original contributors from Napier Barracks, and the wall display of walking figures grew to twice its original size as visitors to the exhibition contributed their own designs. To close the exhibition, artist Andre Braga-Verissimo (aka Local Foreigner) gave a performance of his piece ‘Island Folk’ which aims to tell the complete history of the British Isles in 12 minutes. A fitting end to the exhibition, and to Refugee Week, the piece presented the UK as a place undeniably shaped by its history of migration.
Images © Tiff Cryer, 2023
It was an exciting, busy, heartening, exhausting week! I was delighted that we were able to reach in so many directions in this programme – towards Folkestone’s arts scene, towards community groups and members of the public keen to stand in solidarity with refugees, and most importantly, towards people living as refugees in our local area. Between now and next year’s celebration, I hope that we will be able to continue to develop the relationships we have built and strengthened as we have put this programme together, offering more opportunities for refugees to be included in the life of Folkestone as a community – more walking, running, eating, art-making and dancing together, in defiance of the political narrative around a ‘refugee crisis’ that seeks to keep us apart. To echo the last lines of the film made, not only does Folkestone as a community “need to get to know [refugees] personally, and understand your stories,” but ensure that refugees can be part of telling the story of our community, in their own voices and with their own words.
Photographs by Josephine Carter, except where otherwise stated. Copyrighted material is © the copyright owner and used with permission.
