Luis Luján - Thesis outline

Luis Luján

Key issues:

I want to write a thesis that reflects on my artistic practice as I volunteer for Project Play, a grassroots organization that provides play and artistic practice to displaced children living in the region of Calais, France.

I aim to reflect on my personal experience in the day-to-day work of the organization, and, the artistic activities and processes that I aim to facilitate with migrant children in outdoor informal living sites as a volunteer. I will use this thesis as a space to reflect more deeply and think through the ethical issues at stake, and how they reflect in my current artistic processes such as my graduate project. I also expect this thesis to reflect on questions that are part of a longer research process that might continue in France and Mexico.

I will present different modes of address as I believe this fits the complexity of the sociopolitical context in Calais.

Outline.

Chapter 1: An artist as a volunteer? From Chihuahua to Calais.

Mode of address: Narrative report on practice and debriefs for past and current projects.

This chapter will consist of a narrative based on my methodology working as a volunteer with the organization Project Play in Northern France. Part of this chapter will include how my experience during the past seven years has shaped this methodology.

First time as a volunteer.

I will share how seven years ago I was invited to document artistically and be part of a new organization that would create a safe space for people on the move in Chihuahua, Mexico. I will detail part of the political context and how this trust influenced decisions in my practice.

“So what’s a volunteer”?

I will share this question made recently by a young Eritrean man to my partner, Luz, who is also volunteering with me in France. I have been thinking about what to answer next time I am asked this question. I will also share on perspectives of other volunteers on this. I will relate this thinking to my practice as an artist and its relationship to activism.

Reading of previous practice

This chapter will include reflections on my artistic practice and experiences as a volunteer during the past seven years in Mexico, first through documentary photography, followed by collaborative portraits, participatory photography workshops, and, more recently, listening as the center of the creation of participatory films. I will detail how each process informed my current methodologies. I will be adding a summary in a debrief format, mirroring the structure that Project Play uses daily after each session with children. In the debrief I will include aspects such as dates, participants, organizations involved, activities, challenges, highlights, and actions points. I might include this in visual form (photograph of notes or screen capture).

Reflection on ‘mi maestro de contar historias’ (“my storytelling teacher”), a film that shares my encounter with Angel, a pre-adolescent boy from Honduras. This short film is about how creation and experiences in this context are subject to the underlying forces of migration beyond control.

Reflections on “Si nos vieran”(“If only they could see us”), a participatory short film. Last summer I facilitated a two-week participatory film workshop with children in the context of mobility from five countries in Querétaro, México. Now, working with children in France whose mobility context is much more fast-paced than the children in Querétaro, I reflect on this experience to face the challenges of attempting to facilitate a participatory project with them. This reflection on past work will serve to contextualize and as a comparison reference for my present project in France.

Project Play - Finding play in the North of France.

This chapter will be centered on my experience as a volunteer artist at Project Play. Approaching. First, my partner and I’s visit to the Northern part of France to look for an organization to collaborate in response to the news of the largest refugee camp being destroyed by the French State in recent years. Then how we approached different organizations and finally how we got accepted into Project Play, and she at the Women Refugee Center. It is important to me how I approached the organization, shared my past experience, and set the possibilities of collaborating.

Landing in Project Play.

Second, in my reflection, I will include the challenges I found in this context and in adapting to a different work culture from that of Mexico. I will share thoughts arising from conversations with my fellow volunteers and the organization, and my notes in my written journal. Also, I will share the situation I found, and what I was able to contribute from the start. I want to portray as well the high emotional toll that this work has taken on me as a volunteer trying to work and create an artistic project simultaneously.

Reflections on finding a space for art in Project Play.

Third, I will reflect on various questions around the idea of “art as a skill”, in relation to how Project Play has to cope with attracting people with sufficient experience and skills for a demanding job. A question that brings this is, what can a socially engaged artist bring to this context? Is it insight and sensibility into the symbolic relation of the organization and its context? Is it the technical mastery of his/her medium? Is it methodologies of social engagement? Is it finding possibilities where some are not?

The recreational activities with children organized by the organization tend to take the form of social work, and I am exploring possibilities to expand its reach into the artistic realm.

Chapter 2. Reflections on the context of Calais.

Mode of address: Storytelling/journal (incorporating ideas of critical autoethnography).

For this chapter, I will reflect on my positionality as it relates to the context of Calais. I will gather personal reflections from voice recordings I am generating as a journal practice. I am unsure if I will write a narrative for my whole time in France, or focus on specific days.

For this, I am paying particular attention to anecdotes, reflections, and questions from other volunteers and the children we encounter. A form of collective harvesting. Most of my day is spent in '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 on its walls.

Alongside this, I am developing different strategies to evoke my understanding of the politics of the region visually. One of these is using the territory, land, and nature around the refugee settlement without filming at the site itself.

Chapter 3. Conversations with children in Calais.

Mode of address: To be defined, possibly narrative (such as a children’s book or fanzine). Something playful considering the way we engage with children is through Play.

This is the chapter that currently is the most open as I think is a reflection on the open nature of my experience in Calais. I do not want to impose any preconceived form on a process that is currently unfolding. While I will attempt to include a part co-written with the kids at Calais, conversations have language and logistical barriers. I will both attempt to do it but also think about other more guided strategies such as map creating and using moving images arising from the activities at Project Play. A source of inspiration for this chapter will be of Fernand Deligny.

Another strategy I will consider is reflecting on the artistic work children leave and share after each artistic and play activity. These works include free painting activities or mask-making. I could make an annex with some of the work I have collected. In my mind is also the possibility of answering harvested questions such as “Are we monsters?” or “What’s a volunteer?” in a children’s book format. I think in February, once my time at Project Play is finished, it will be easier for me to determine how it will be best to work on this chapter.

Notes on research process

Challenges

In terms of my participatory artistic practice, I have to deal with different challenges, firstly my ability to work alongside the limitations we follow as an organization, and most importantly, in facilitating a safe space and artistic possibilities for the children in a hostile environment. In positioning myself as an artist in precarious social contexts that are not directly related to me, ethics becomes fundamental. Questioning my motivations and ways of relating to refugee children has been an endless quest. There are too many worries, implications, and risks in portraying my encounters with these children, and it takes me long discussions with myself and others to feel at peace with my decisions. With both my recent and current work, comes the questions I want to think about in this thesis: how can I avoid participatory work that ends up being exploitative? How can I design a co-creation dynamic with children that acknowledges the unbalanced power relation and follows an equality principle? How can this process adapt to the real needs and desires of children migrating?

I will use this thesis to reflect more deeply and think through the ethical issues at stake, and how they reflect in this process. 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). I intend that my participation in Project Play will be a practice of “tantear en la oscuridad”, this is as decolonial thinker María Lugones describes putting one's hands out in front of oneself as one walks in the dark, slowly, and feeling one's way to new possibilities (Lugones, 2003, p.22).

Bibliography

Goldbard, A. and Matarasso, F. (2021). Ethics and participatory art.

Lugones, M. (2003). Pilgrimages = Peregrinajes : theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.