Luis Lujan - Project proposal

What do you want to make?

I want to document my experiences and reflections as a volunteer for an organization that provides play and artistic practice to displaced children living in the region of Calais, France.

Through this documentation, I will reflect on my positionality as a volunteer and I will also document my attempts to find the limits of my own personal and facilitated collective artistic practice in this context. I am planning on generating a short film and possibly a gallery installation.

How do you plan to make it?

My work has two main perspectives. First, I aim to document my personal experience in the day-to-day work of the organization, and, second the processes that I aim to facilitate with migrant children as a “voluntartist” (volunteer-artist) guiding artistic workshops.

As a first step, I am keeping both an audio and visual journal of my experiences while I clarify a more specific research question. Among the places I plan to focus on is 'the warehouse', a site where volunteers from around the world come to join NGOs. In this place, discussions about "white-savourism" and "voluntourism" are constantly heard and expressed in its walls. I am paying particular attention to anecdotes, reflections, and questions from other volunteers and the children that we are encountering. A form of collective harvesting.

In terms of my participatory artistic practice, I have to deal with different uncertainties, firstly the freedom of work and specific parameters I will get from the institution I have not worked with before, and most importantly, in motivating the migrant children and their tutors to participate. What I am currently doing takes the form of social work, and I am exploring possibilities to expand its reach into the artistic.

Questioning my own motivations and ways of relating to refugee children has been an endless quest. This project is an extension of my artistic practice and experiences as a volunteer during the past six years in Mexico. From collaborative portraits to participatory photography classes, and more recently centering listening as the center of the creation of films. There are too many worries, implications, and risks in portraying their lives, and it takes me long discussions with myself and others to feel at peace with my decisions.

My intention with the pedagogical work that I carry out, document, and share with this population is to generate impacts on the collective imagination on issues as complex as discrimination against people in the context of global mobility. The last six years have been dedicated to documenting my experiences through documentary photography, followed by more participatory projects. Participatory film projects with children in the context of forced migration have been the focus of both my recent and current work. As part of my previous work, I produced a participatory horror short film.

With both my recent and current work, comes the questions I want to keep exploring: how can I avoid participatory work that ends up being exploitative? How can I design a co-creation dynamic with children that both acknowledges the unbalanced power relation and follows an equality principle? How can this process adapt to the real needs and desires of children migrating? Does relational art need to be displayed in an art context? Can art be activism?

To counterbalance the anxieties and state of paralysis I feel constantly, I now believe that understanding and accepting the ethical challenges involved is not something to be resolved to then get on with the production of socially engaged art, it is the work itself (Goldbarg, Matarosso, 2021, p.8). Over time, I have come to realize that this work is ultimately for the children who participate, and that art can serve as a way to relate to the people I meet in these harsh contexts.

What is your timetable?

This year I have been expanding my theoretical framework and critical reflection. I am currently researching topics about ethics, art therapy, decoloniality, participatory art, and filmmaking. I will be working in Calais until December, but I may extend my stay there until February if the project demands it. I expect to narrow my research focus along the pace set by the deadlines for our project and thesis proposals. In this fall semester, I expect to collect a vast amount of experiences and audiovisual material, followed by an editing-intensive spring semester.