Art, Migration and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenship

Contemporary Europe - ridden by social, political and economic crises, overlaid onto colonial and imperial trajectories, and shaken by the shockwaves generated by Brexit and wide scale human displacement - has become a space in which citizenship and belonging are contested, disrupted, performed and produced anew.

Art, Migration, and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenshipexplores the contribution of migrant and refugee artists to the performance and production of radical democratic citizenship in Europe. It foregrounds the insights of artists and cultural actors with diverse experiences of migration and displacement to fractious public debates about citizenship and belonging. It explores how migrant and refugee artists have audaciously inserted themselves into, and are pushing the boundaries of these debates, challenging and unhinging dominant interpretations of the parameters of European citizenship and belonging.

Part I of this edited volume is comprised of a series of short provocations by artists spanning and intermixing a range of art forms and methodologies including live art, visual art and public installation, community and site-specific durational work, or the combination of writing, auto-ethnography and media activism. The second Part comprises longer, more sustained engagements by visual and live art practitioners, dramaturges, curators and academics. These chapters focus on performative, participatory, auto-biographical and auto-ethnographic artistic processes and practices.

Art, Migration, and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenship highlights the critical interventions by artists who have experienced firsthand the everyday realities of displacement, focusing on how their diverse practices offer incisive challenges to existing regimes of citizenship and democracy.

Agnes Czajka is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Open University.

Áine O’Brien is co-founder and curator of Learning and Research at Counterpoints Arts.