RISD Grants Support Artists and Designers Working in the Arena of Forced Displacement

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a fully dressed man walking out into the sea

According to the UN Refugee Agency, an estimated 122.6 million people around the world were displaced from their homes as of spring 2024 due to war, persecution, climate change and other disasters. The issue, known as forced migration, is bringing together activists, humanitarians and scholars working to envision new ideas, technologies and solutions that will improve the living conditions of these vulnerable refugees.

In recent months, RISD researchers have joined the effort, bringing their unique creative perspectives to the table with support from internal student and faculty grants related to research in forced displacement. “Many RISD community members have expressed interest in being part of this critical conversation,” says Associate Director of Strategic Partnerships Katherine Cooper. “RISD Strategic Partnerships is committed to exploring the impact that artists and designers can make in this arena, and we’ve developed a mutually supportive relationship with the Boston University Center on Forced Displacement [BUCFD] led by distinguished health researcher Muhammad Zaman.”

Last April, Assistant Professor Sara Jordenö, a filmmaker and visual artist who teaches in RISD’s Film/Animation/Video department, presented their ongoing research, film and book project Impermanent Passage (The Swimmer) at BUCFD’s annual border conference. Later that month, they presented their documentary film Kiki, which focuses on the drag and voguing scene in New York City, at the 60th Venice Biennale in Italy.

Katherine Cooper and Sara Jordeno at the Venice Biennale
Sara Jordenö (right) presents work at the 60th Venice Biennale alongside RISD’s Associate Director of Strategic Partnerships Katherine Cooper.

Impermanent Passage is a collaboration with social scientist A Horning Ruf and uses methods borrowed from observatory documentary, nonfiction experimental cinema, creative nonfiction poetry and prose, documentary performance and theater to shed light on the vulnerable “in limbo” space migrants find themselves in when reaching their host countries. At the center of the project is a young man from Afghanistan who Jordenö and Horning met and interviewed in 2016, and who after several years of contact has gone missing.

“There is a perverse burden of proof placed on the refugee: to prove their worth, trigger empathy and pitch a good story about their own human rights,” Jordenö explains. “In the midst of these so-called migrant crises, we might ask ourselves what exactly is a border environment? Ayelet Shachar suggests a ‘shifting border’ not fixed in time and place, but rather maintained by sophisticated legal constructs intended to control the mobility of migrants. Time—and the representation of time—is crucial to this work. It commonly takes many years to obtain asylum, and many of the refugees waiting end up committing suicide.”

Jordenö notes that the work has introduced them to RISD community members with similar passions, including grad student Mawra Tahreem MFA 25 IL and recent alum Nina Martinez MFA 24 IL

illustrations of downtown Manilla
  
page from Martinez' comic showing a timeline of workers organizing
A graphic narrative by illustrator Nina Martinez focuses on an organization committed to empowering Filipino migrant domestic workers. 

Martinez also served as a BUCFD graduate fellow last summer, conducting visual research around migrant communities in Massachusetts and Manila, Philippines. She earned a grant from RISD in support of her related project The Home We Made: The Story of the Filipino Migrant Domestic Worker, a comic book-style narrative examining the difficulties faced by migrant domestic workers, including trafficking, wage theft, abuse and separation from family. 

“How might the narrative of one reveal the story of many?” Martinez’ project asks. “How could the visual-textual form of the comic help record the Filipino domestic workers’ history?” 

The project focuses on the Damayan Migrant Workers Association, which was founded in 2002 by Linda Oalican, a Filipino migrant domestic worker, activist and labor abuse survivor. Led and staffed by migrant workers, trafficking survivors and their children, the organization seeks to empower community members by providing legal assistance, health services, financial aid and education about their civil rights. “My goal in creating the project was to use illustration as a tool for committing to memory the untold stories of marginalized populations,” says Martinez, who is now teaching illustration at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR. 

“RISD Strategic Partnerships is committed to exploring the impact that artists and designers can make in this arena.”

Katherine Cooper, Strategic Partnerships
a stack of copies of Amalgam
AlieNation, the fifth installment of Pouya Ahmadi’s Amalgam journal featured Metabolizing the Border by RISD alum Tanya Aguiñiga on its cover (photo by Gina Clyne, courtesy of the artist).

RISD Associate Professor of Graphic Design Pouya Ahmadi, whose long-standing engagement with issues of forced displacement and alienation shapes his research, participated as a lecturer at BUCFD’s interdisciplinary summer school on forced displacement in Belgrade. During his workshop, he further developed his critique of European/Global North border regimes, particularly their externalization into the SWANA region, which culminated in the creation of the fifth installment of Amalgam journal—AlieNation.

Edited and designed by Ahmadi, Amalgam is an independent press and journal that interrogates the imbrications of typography, language and power as sites of ideological contestation and resistance. By grounding its transdisciplinary projects in critical inquiries, Amalgam challenges hegemonic epistemologies, envisioning abolitionist futures and dismantling systems of oppression at both textual and cultural foundations.

Amalgam #5, which was launched in Berlin during MISSREAD (the Berlin Art Book Fair) in October 2024, delves into the politics of alienation, analyzing how these dynamics channel violence across various scales—from forced displacement and imprisonment to erasure, annexation and genocide. It interrogates the interconnected forces of border regimes, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, hetero-patriarchy and technocratic futurism that foster the hegemonic language of othering and perpetuate systemic violence. “Through the strategic engineering of material and discursive languages, these forces create and maintain divisions along lines of ethnicity, race, gender, class and nationality,” Ahmadi explains, “reinforcing the divide between the dominant and the oppressed or subhuman.”

RISD Strategic Partnerships continues to collaborate with researchers at the BUCFD, bringing art and design expertise to the challenges faced by the growing population of forced migrants around the world.

Top image: still from the documentary film Precarious Record by RISD faculty member Sara Jordenö.

Simone Solondz
January 24, 2025

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