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Beverly Hills, 90210 (tv Series 1990–2000)
Millions of refugees fleeing war and persecution in Syria have received significant attention in both the public sphere and academic research. This article examines body mapping and augmented reality (AR) as artistic methodological tools that allow refugees to articulate their experiences of forced migration. Body mapping enables the creation of life-sized images which trace the contours of the individual’s body on canvas allowing refugees to express their emotions creatively through their own participation. AR adds another layer to the body map as it animates the artwork and brings it to life. Through body mapping and AR, refugee women from Syria are able to co-create research outcomes and counter gender-biased narratives of vulnerability and victimhood often associated with female Muslim refugees. This project critically engages with the use of art as a sensorialized medium to generate knowledge and examines the impact it shows on viewers during exhibitions. Based on research conducted in the United Kingdom, Germany and Jordan since 2017, this article discusses the use of these new technologies as novel research methodologies in refugee and migration studies.
1. IntroductionI miss my sofa. This sofa was in my living room. When my friends came to visit me in the morning we sat on it and drank coffee after our children had left for school. I wonder whether I will have that sofa again or have coffee with my friends again. We were forced to leave by the Assad regime. We are all in different places now. We have become different people. Now I have a new sofa, but I miss my old one. I miss my old friends, and I miss my old me.(Interview with a Syrian refugee in Germany, 2018)
This article discusses the different methodological tools that can be used to address and examine contemporary forced migration. Diversifying research methods facilitates the examination of the multidimensional aspects of forced migration and the complex experiences of displacement. As ethnographers, we tend to use interviews and focus group discussions to access participants’ lives and analyze the social contexts of their environment. Visual arts-based methodologies are useful tools to add to such data collection, which have proven to offer researchers new perspectives and insights into the lived experiences of participants (Ball and Gilligan 2010; Shanneik 2018). We applied arts-based methods in our current project on Syrian refugees in Europe and the Middle East to examine the lived realities of displacement from the refugees’ own points of view. In this article, we examine the role of art and new technology as tools that enable refugees to communicate their physical and emotional states: the combination of body mapping and augmented reality (AR) is used for the first time in the context of refugee and migration studies. The application of AR to body maps allows participants to connect further digitized data to the physical artwork to express their feelings in non-verbal and non-linear forms, irrespective of language or literary skills. Such methods are more inclusive and have proven to provide new insights that may not be captured in full by conventional interview methods. In our project, this non-verbal way of expression is tied with verbal information gathered through interviews conducted with refugees before and during the production of the artwork (see Figure 1).
Brandon Lee Wise Art
The use of arts-based methods in refugee and migration studies is primarily driven by the intent to create new combinations of research approaches and to inform representations through interdisciplinary collaborations between academic researchers and non-academic stakeholders. Arts-based methods are proven to be an additional tool for data collection, which position the participant at the center of knowledge creation. So far, studies on art and migration consider either migrants who are artists—i.e., artists, who have some form of education or at least experience in art production—or migrants who have joined art groups, such as theatre, dance or music groups. There has been increasing interest in recent years in researching arts, culture and migration (Martiniello 2022) to examine immigrants’ and ethnicized minorities’ cultural and artistic contributions to existing popular culture (Martiniello 2015). This led to the investigation of the role of art as a tool for political mobilization and resistance (Tripp 2012, 2013; Hasso and Salime 2016; Shanneik 2022) as well as political participation (Martiniello and Lafleur 2008) or as means to participate in and belong to a community (Damery and Mescoli 2019). However, the intersection between artistic techniques and refugees’ lives and their displacement experiences on a bodily and emotional level has not yet been investigated. Different from other studies, the refugees we worked with had no prior experience using artistic practices, nor had they created art themselves before. The work they have co-produced using body mapping and AR is part of a traveling exhibition1 that seeks to shape the public perception of refugees and intends to influence public discourses on refugee women in particular.
Body mapping is an artistic technique in which participants draw the contours of another’s body on canvas and then fill them with visual representations of their life stories. Since 2017, we have produced a total of 67 full-body maps of Iraqi and Syrian refugees during numerous workshops organized in the United Kingdom, Germany and Jordan.2 The body maps were created by women and their families of different age groups, diverse socio-economic backgrounds and ethnoreligious belongings.3 They were produced either individually or collectively in mainly private spaces such as their own homes or, on a few occasions, in public spaces such as community centers run by NGOs, the state or local councils.
In the second year of the project, we applied AR to the body maps.4 Through the use of the platform Artivive, 5 the body maps become digitized via a computing device such as a tablet or smartphone. The refugees have not only co-produced the artwork but have also played a central part in feeding the digital information into the AR through videos, photos and sounds. Life-sized images of refugees are traced on canvas through tangible paint, colors, writings or scanned images. This is overlayed by intangible digitized visual information. Both worlds, the real and the digitized, need to be present as AR can only be accessed through the body map. The static tangible body map becomes a digitized moving space, thereby impacting the aesthetic experience of its viewer.
Star Tracks: Saturday, May 25, 2019
Our interest is placed on the ability of arts-based methods to induce corporeal communication since the body plays a central role in the refugees’ experiences of war, persecution and displacement. The involvement of the body in the body mapping process allows refugees to reflect on their displacement and stimulates their embodied awareness of the impact their displacement has had on them. This is conveyed through the use of art but also AR, which offers another layer of information communicated by refugees. Refugees’ individual experiences are made visible through both tangible body maps as well as intangible digitized AR. The bodies on the canvases and the information transmitted through the AR impact the space in which the artwork is exhibited.
The article starts with an illustration of the theoretical framework that discusses both body mapping and AR as a form of corporeal communication embedded within a sensory experience. According to neo-phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, atmospheres are spaces in which corporeal communications take place through the individual’s engagement with that space (Schmitz [1969] 2019; Schmitz 2014a). The individual may be captured/attuned by the atmospheres produced, which in turn can impact the individual’s mood (Stimmung or Befindlichkeit). Following phenomenological approaches to bodily feelings and atmosphere that distinguish between the subjectively felt body (Leib) and the physical or material body (Körper) (Schmitz et al. 2011, p. 247), we argue in this article that body mapping and AR penetrate the atmosphere impacting both the felt and the physical body. This is achieved through what Schmitz, in another context, refers to as bodily-felt affectedness (leiblich-affektives Betroffensein) (Schmitz [1969] 2019; Schmitz 2014a, p. 75). The main part of this article discusses to what extent body mapping and AR are useful tools to foster
Our interest is placed on the ability of arts-based methods to induce corporeal communication since the body plays a central role in the refugees’ experiences of war, persecution and displacement. The involvement of the body in the body mapping process allows refugees to reflect on their displacement and stimulates their embodied awareness of the impact their displacement has had on them. This is conveyed through the use of art but also AR, which offers another layer of information communicated by refugees. Refugees’ individual experiences are made visible through both tangible body maps as well as intangible digitized AR. The bodies on the canvases and the information transmitted through the AR impact the space in which the artwork is exhibited.
The article starts with an illustration of the theoretical framework that discusses both body mapping and AR as a form of corporeal communication embedded within a sensory experience. According to neo-phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, atmospheres are spaces in which corporeal communications take place through the individual’s engagement with that space (Schmitz [1969] 2019; Schmitz 2014a). The individual may be captured/attuned by the atmospheres produced, which in turn can impact the individual’s mood (Stimmung or Befindlichkeit). Following phenomenological approaches to bodily feelings and atmosphere that distinguish between the subjectively felt body (Leib) and the physical or material body (Körper) (Schmitz et al. 2011, p. 247), we argue in this article that body mapping and AR penetrate the atmosphere impacting both the felt and the physical body. This is achieved through what Schmitz, in another context, refers to as bodily-felt affectedness (leiblich-affektives Betroffensein) (Schmitz [1969] 2019; Schmitz 2014a, p. 75). The main part of this article discusses to what extent body mapping and AR are useful tools to foster
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