overnight

I was Digital Artist in Residence at the Museum of Oxford June-November 2017, culminating in an exhibition forming part of the Journeys to Oxford project.

Using methods developed in previous work, I spent the first few months making contact with recent migrants to Oxford who had not been part of an arts project before, as well as people who were engaged with asylum or community services in Oxford. I conducted long-form, unstructured interviews with participants, discussing their experiences of arriving in the UK and particularly, the importance of technology in their journey. Maintaining contact with home, finding work and shelter in the UK, being monitored by governments and much else was a critical part of participants' experiences.

I then wrote a short narrative, comprised of experiences described by participants, but with a fictional central character. We filmed in London (an almost universal stopping point for participants on their journey), and I also filmed in other European cities that participants had passed through on their journeys.

For the duration of the residency I updated my work on the Digital Artist Residency site.

The finished work was exhibited in the Museum of Oxford for six weeks, and the film and edited, anonymised audio recordings from interviews are now in the Museum's permanent collection.

You can watch an extract from the film above, and listen to a selection of the audio recordings below.

Commissioned by: Museum of Oxford, Digital Artist Residency (DAR)