Exploring Cultural Narratives at Art Summit 2025 Echoes of Migration

Speaking at the RSA Echoes of Migration

Echoes of Migration Summit took place at the Royal Society for Art on Saturday. The event was a platform to bridge art, education and cultural responsibility in shaping inclusive futures. I spoke on Panel 4 'The Role of Cultural Institutions in Supporting Migrant Artists' with Bengi Unsal (Director of ICA), Jonathan Burton (CEO Cockpit Studios) under the guidance of moderator Roxane Zand (Zand Fine Arts Consultancy). The discussion explored how institutions can foster participation, amplify migrant voices, and create spaces of equity and belonging.

Below are my responses to the 3 questions.

1. Introduction /opening by Roxane:

"When we speak of artists on the move, the terms ‘migrant’ and ‘immigrant’ are often used interchangeably, yet they imply different relationships to place, belonging, and cultural production. Migrants are often in transit (‘nomadic’) – for work, safety or creative opportunity. They are often within a precarious state, with mobility as a central concern. An immigrant implies a more stable or settled status, and these creatives are frequently preoccupied with juxtaposition of heritages or living between cultures. From your perspective, how should cultural institutions recognise this distinction. What does it mean for the ways they support artists?”

My response:

So, I wear multiple hats — artist, researcher/academic, educator — and I’m going to put on my academic hat for a moment and start with the etymology of two key words, because it’s important to understand where they come from before we think about how we use them today.

The word “migrant” comes from the Latin verb migrāre — meaning “to move from one place to another,” “to change one’s residence,” or “to depart.” It entered English through Middle/medieval French in the 16th century. In early English usage, “migrant” referred to animals or birds that moved seasonally — migrant birds — and only later was it extended metaphorically to people moving across regions or borders.

The Latin root migrāre was neutral — simply about movement or change of place. Over time, however, the word acquired layered meanings — economic, social, and political — as human mobility became tied to ideas of labour, borders, and identity. In modern English, “migrant” still carries that sense of being in motion, rather than settled – as you implied by Roxanne

The word “immigrant”, by contrast, also comes from the Latin, immigrare — meaning “to move or go into” or “to settle in.” It first appeared in English around the 17th century and became widely used in the 18th and 19th centuries during European industrialisation and colonisation. By the 20th century, “immigrant” referred specifically to people entering a nation-state to live there permanently.Again originally neutral, “immigrant” gradually took on legal and emotional weight — tied to border control, citizenship, and belonging – as we see in the media frequently today.

So in short: Migrant means one who moves.Immigrant means one who arrives and settles.

Both began as neutral descriptors but have become socially and politically charged terms that shape how we think about movement, belonging, and identity.

2. "As both an artist and an educator, how do you see migrant and immigrant identities shaping the pedagogical role of cultural institutions in supporting emerging artists?"

My response:

As both an artist and an educator, I see migrant and immigrant identities as reshaping the pedagogical role of schools, museum’s and galleries, which is particularly evident in urban areas — (we talk about educational turn) I would argue that schools/educational settings not just as places of instruction, but as spaces of belonging, translation, and creative negotiation. Department for Education guidance frames inclusion and safeguarding as legal and moral imperatives: every child, regardless of immigration status, has a right to education and must be welcomed without delay. Yet beyond compliance, the challenge — and the opportunity — lies in how schools/educational settings respond pedagogically and culturally. Each school is different, each school should reflect its community and its pupils/audiences.

Good practice, as seen in trauma-informed and English as an Additional Language (EAL) -responsive schools types of practice, begins with care: the creation of a safe, consistent environment where difference is neither erased nor exoticised. Teachers/educators act as cultural mediators, making visible multiple ways of knowing and expressing. When schools/organisations adopt inclusive policies, engage families in their own languages, and build whole-school cultures that value multilingualism and migration stories, they model empathy, adaptability, and creative thinking — qualities essential to both education and the arts.

For emerging artists, many of whom are themselves migrants or the children of migrants, such environments nurture the capacity to work between worlds — to translate, hybridise, and imagine otherwise. Art classrooms can become microcosms of cultural encounter, where materials and perspectives intersect to form new narratives. The pedagogical task, then, is not simply to “support” migrant pupils, but to let their experiences re-shape what and how we teach — to see them not as subjects of inclusion, but as co-creators of knowledge and culture. In this sense, migration expands the artistic and educational imagination: it compels schools to become creative communities that mirror the plural, entangled world their pupils already inhabit.

3. "Given your collaborative work with museums, universities, and community hubs, what kinds of institutional partnerships do you believe are most effective in creating long-term spaces for migrant artists to share their practices and influence mainstream narratives?"

My response:

As both an artist and an educator, I’ve learned that migration isn’t just a story about movement — it’s also a way of knowing. To migrate is to translate — between languages, between cultures, between systems of meaning. And when artists bring that experience into education and into cultural institutions, they carry with them a unique, embodied intelligence — one that teaches us about adaptation, resilience, and imagination.

In art education, we often speak about creativity as a form of freedom. But for many migrant and immigrant artists, creativity is also a form of survival — a means of rebuilding identity and belonging in the aftermath of displacement. When we listen to these practices, we begin to see that art itself can be a pedagogy of belonging — a way of learning how to live in more than one world at once.

For cultural institutions — museums, galleries, art schools — this means shifting from being authorities on culture to becoming spaces of encounter. I love the ICA and its a space of encounter for me. Rather than teaching about migration, institutions can learn with it — learning from the uncertainty, the hybridity, the in-between spaces that migrant artists inhabit every day. I’ve seen this in projects where institutions invite artists from refugee or diasporic backgrounds not as subjects of representation but as co-curators, mentors, and meaning-makers. These collaborations re-educate institutions: they transform static collections into living dialogues, and they remind us that cultural heritage isn’t a fixed archive — it’s a continuous conversation.

For emerging artists, particularly those navigating migration or mixed identities, this approach is vital.Their work often blurs categories — crossing media, languages, and traditions. They are teaching us, through their practice, that knowledge itself is migratory — that to learn is to move, to translate, to risk misunderstanding and begin again. As educators, our task is to create pedagogical structures that honour that fluidity — studios, classrooms, and residencies that welcome complexity rather than demand coherence.

But transformation also requires care, and consideration given to well-being. Many migrant and displaced artists face precarity, trauma, or invisibility. So if we claim that art institutions are spaces of learning, they must also be spaces of care — providing mentorship, fair access, and the emotional safety to tell difficult stories. Pedagogy, in this sense, isn’t just about teaching art; it’s about learning how to host humanity — learning to make room for grief, for multiple identities, for unfinished narratives.

In the end, I think migrant identities teach cultural institutions a profound lesson:that education is not a transmission of knowledge from one centre outward, but a process of shared becoming. It’s about cultivating empathy, flexibility, and humility — qualities that our global moment urgently needs.

So when I think about the pedagogical role of cultural institutions today, I imagine them less as temples of expertise and more as workshops of connection — places where artists, educators, and communities in dialogue, learn from one another how to live creatively in a world defined by movement.

To summarise: Migrant and immigrant identities challenge cultural institutions to teach and operate differently — to become less about authority and more about hosting plurality, developing agency, co-learning, caring spaces and shared authorship. They turn pedagogy into a dialogic, creative process of world-making — one that reflects the fluid, entangled realities of our global present.