refugee

Author Rachel Visser wrote a unique insta novel about Farihah, a young Afghan refugee who just like other teenagers dreams about a future. At a young age, Farihah flees from Afghanistan and arrives in the Netherlands, where she is eventually living in a refugee centre. Together with her friends Noor and Lucas she dreams of going to secondary school and to become an artist. This dream is severely interrupted when she received a letter from the Dutch government.

Opening in the center of the international refugee crisis, this playable story places the interactor in the position of the refugee. As the tale opens, an explosion sends the interactor from the comfort of a ship into the salt immortal sea. Rescued by a mysterious boat the player encounters eight other passengers, drawn from the present and the ancient past. However, one of these passengers has angered the gods, and unless the player can discover which, all will face their wrath. However, finding that secret is no easy task. Each passenger harbors secrets that pit them against each other in an allegory of contemporary global crisis. Choosing from one of nine iconic positions in the refugee crisis, the interactor can explore tales of misfortune while trying to keep the shipmates in balance by collecting and circulating secrets. In this tale, we recast figures in the contemporary refugee crisis against the mythos of the quintessential traveler, Odysseus, for the refugee likewise travels cursed, unable to return home. It is a tale of the eternal return to proxy wars and the challenge of achieving some semblance of world peace. The story of the refugee is a harrowing reality reimagined here in terms of sirens and cyclops, not to make the horrors of war fanciful but to render the tale of the contemporary global conflict in timeless, epic terms. What does it take to survive this existential journey with humanity in tact? How can one negotiate the turbulent waters and the whims of unseen gods and foreign powers in the human tragedy of a proxy war? The Salt Immortal Sea will be set up as an installation that invites a primary interactor to make choices while a larger group can watch the story’s progression play out.

The primary interface will be an iPad. LED lights spread in the room will represent the characters aboard the ship, lighting up when the player interacts with them. The reading experience can take 5-30 minutes, depending on depth of exploration. Platform: Ink + Unity Displays on IPad, (also PC or Mac).

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

This piece is an exploration of oral histories and the use of technology as a participatory and inviting medium to perform and share stories.

It is an interactive piece, which consists of a series of extracts from interviews of refugees living in London and the connection between them. They are compiled in a database and linked by common key words. To represent the fractured realities and the formations of connected memories, the viewers need to interact with the piece by clicking on the coloured activated 'common keywords' in order to generate extracts of narrations from the different participating refugees. As an installation the piece includes a microphone to invite the viewers to read aloud and share with other viewers the experience of performing the work through their reading. 

As the reader explores and experiences the work by connecting the extracts from the narratives appearing in the screen, the fortuitous position of extracts produces new relationships, and in doing so, an on going process of meanings, connections and narratives; shifting from the semantic linguistic meaning to the visual, from the literal, the legible, the transparent to the abstract memory; and simultaneously creating a poetic space of readable and visual textualities. 

As with the oral storytelling tradition, in this work, the share of experiences happens at that moment in time. There is no recording facility; the text is in constant flux of becoming.

Some of the common key words used as links: war- escape- prison -money –government-refugee-passport –kill- documents- mother–father- family –airport-fear- help- country-asylum.