By: Gillian McFadyen | stitchedvoices.wordpress.com | 17 March 2019
Documenting the Refugee Crisis: Remembering through Embroidery
This past academic year, the Stitched Voices Embroidery Group, housed at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, has been working towards a collection based around the European Refugee Crisis. This project was established when we were invited to contribute to #IR_Aesthetics, a project funded by the Aston Centre for Europe at Aston University, Birmingham. This field research project investigated the stories of migration and the refugee crisis in Serbia, Macedonia, and Greece from an inter-disciplinary perspective, including through artistic expression. The culmination of this project was a week-long event at Tate Liverpool in November 2018. Stitched Voices were invited to exhibit work on the last day and run interactive sessions with the general public on stitching, discussing the refugee crisis and a small workshop creating arpillera dolls.
In the lead up to the Tate exhibit, Stitched Voices developed and created embroidered handkerchiefs documenting, in various ways, the refugee crisis. One of the central themes of the project has been drawing upon the UNITED for Intercultural Action list, that documents all reported deaths of individuals who have attempted to enter Europe. We drew upon the list, which sits at over 34,000 individual deaths and goes as far back as 1993, focusing on individuals who died within the Balkans regions from 2017 onwards.
Below is a series of hankies developed by the group for the Tate exhibit. In addition to being exhibited at the Tate Liverpool and the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth, the work has also been exhibited at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre in connection with the “Evros: The Crossing River” theatre production.