What Do We Take Away?
Our guest curator, Howl, shares his thoughts on a challenging and unusual year for the Festival. Now he asks the question: where do we go from here?
Migration Matters Festival 2021 is just around the corner, this year we stand on an interesting period as it will happen ‘on the edge’, when restrictions are about to ease, as we are about to step into the post-COVID era.
People started to talk about post-COVID since the first month of the lockdown, and now we have been in the pandemic for more than a year. During it, we were shocked, devastated, paralysed, and still finding our feet for what was happening around us. The light at the end of the tunnel keeps flickering - Is that it? Will it really finish? Will it come back again? We are eager for living the way we did in 2019, but part of us also know it cannot be the case. This year brings us lots of changes.ome are temporary, and some are permanent.
As an art practitioner in performance, our current time makes me feel like we are just about to wake up from the nightmare, but is there anything we can take away from this troubling time? More precisely, are we going to abandon all digital skills we learned and go back to the way we did things like nothing happened? I don’t have an answer for this yet.
Meanwhile, this pandemic exposes and intensifies the ongoing social injustice, which will extend into the post-COVID time. Last month, a racially motivated attack towards a Chinese student in Sheffield city centre has left us feeling worried. The discrimination and xenophobia towards Asian communities have escalated to racial violence since the start of the pandemic. We saw cases in London, Southampton and other parts of the country, and it has happened on our very doorstep.
Bearing these thoughts and issues in mind, I would like to invite you to join the Migration Matters Festival 2021 in-person programme. A platform to gather, to speak, to experience, to celebrate, and to grieve. Let’s not forget the time we’ve been through, let’s address the challenges we have going forward - together.
