Panel 03: Migrant Artistic Communities: Transnational Trajectories and Practices of Inclusion (EN)

Chair: Szabolcs Musca (University of Bristol & University of Lisbon)

Part I: 15 April, 2:00 pm | Room A 002

Affectivity in Migration: empathic performance practices vs. mass spectacles of deportation

Graça Corrêa (Centro de Estudos de Teatro, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa)

Contemplating Henri Bergson’s concept of “creative emotion”, in 1988 Gilles Deleuze observed how the affect of love is not love for a particular person or object, but instead subsists as a realm of pure potential; it is an emotion that preexists us – that preexists all objects – and such “affectivity” may be expressed in different ways, for example in a piece of music. Both Bergson and Deleuze were evidently inspired by seventeenth-century Baruch Spinoza (Ethics, 1677), who defined affects as active energies that provoke changes, differentiating between affects that have a potentiating effect of joy or happiness, upon oneself and the Other, from those that have a reducing effect of dejection or sadness. Accordingly, different affects mobilize contrasting transnational ecologies of inclusion and exclusion.

In the present day, we are confronted with sensational performance practices driven by hate towards the Other, that celebrate the creativity of destruction, as when we witness authoritarian forces stage mass deportations of migrants in some regions of the US. In contrast, we follow the performance practices dedicated to inclusion through art, held at Casa Novo Bowing (“Center for Planetary Relations” in Odemira, Alentejo, as of March 2025. Coordinated by Madalena Vitorino (Cooperativa Lavrar-o-Mar), this artistic-social project aims to strengthen ties between the eastern and western communities of Odemira, particularly between south-Asian migrant workers and elderly Portuguese natives.

Within the conviction that a performance is declarative of our shared humanity, although it utters the uniqueness of particular cultures, and that we may know one another better by entering one another’s performances and learning their grammars and vocabularies (Victor Turner & Richard Schechner), Novo Bowing functions as a laboratory where art intersects with social reality, and where bonds between cultures are forged.

Keywords: affect theory; emotion theory; empathy studies; migration and performance practices; performance philosophy

Migrant Artistic Communities: Accessing Otherness in Inua Ellams’s Web Poem and Caleb Femi’s Photo-text Poetry

Maria Festa (University of Torino)

Located in south-east London and as one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the United Kingdom, Peckham has a long history of hosting African and Afro-Caribbean communities who are still regarded as the Other. Furthermore, the process of gentrification Peckham has gone through in recent years only resulted in exacerbating the sense of displacement, marginalisation and estrangement of its lower-income black people. On these grounds, this paper focuses on Inua Ellams’s and Caleb Femi’s poetry, which sheds light on their life experiences of growing up in the periphery of London as young Nigerians who moved to the United Kingdom in the late nineties. Specifically, Ellams’s web poem “Directions” (2010) and Femi’s debut photo-text poetry collection Poor (2020) are analysed through the lens of intersectionality (Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge) and precarious lives (Judith Butler). In their literary and artistic works, Ellams – poet and performer − and Femi − poet and photographer − emphasise the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race and class and how these intersecting power relations create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination. These lead, as a consequence, to a category of marginalised human beings who are disconnected from one another, their personal space is regularly violated, their existences are not secure and can be easily disrupted and or terminated.

Keywords: Inua Ellams; Caleb Femi; poetry; performance; photo-text

Part II: 15 April, 3:25 pm | Room A002

Translingual Art as Inclusion: Autoethnographic Interventions between Berlin, Lisbon, South Poland, and Macau

Kin Man Cheong (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Universidade Federal de São Paulo)

This paper examines how translingual artistic practice operates as a method of inclusion within migrant and transcultural communities. Drawing on fieldwork and collaborative art projects conducted across Berlin, Lisbon, South Poland, and Macau, the paper reflects on the researcher’s positionality as both artist and member of the Macau diaspora, working across majority and minority settings. At the center is a series of recent participatory and multimodal interventions—installations, experimental films, and performative workshops—that expand upon a 2008–2009 audiovisual archive of Macanese diaspora members. These works treat language hybridity, code-switching, and fictionalized idioms not simply as representational devices but as collaborative processes of negotiating belonging and memory. Through an autoethnographic lens, the paper discusses how transcultural art practice mediates encounters between different linguistic, cultural, and diasporic groups. It shows how artistic co-production generates spaces of dialogue that unsettle fixed categories of identity and create opportunities for shared authorship. By situating these interventions within migrant artistic communities in Europe and Macau, the paper contributes to broader debates on how diasporic art fosters intercultural inclusion and collective memory. It argues that translingual, collaborative practice constitutes an epistemic intervention in both anthropology and (informal) cultural diplomacy, opening new ways to understand how art operates within and across diasporic contexts.

Keywords: Macau Diaspora; Translingual Art; Multimodal Ethnography; Inclusion; Informal Cultural Diplomacy

Queering Utopia. Queer Performative Practices in the Artistic Diaspora of Berlin

Charlotte Bank (LMU Munich)

The past decade, especially the years following the so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015, triggered by the numerous crises in the SWANA region, has seen a great number of artists from the region settling in Berlin and adding their numbers to the international art scene of the city. A number of these artists who identify as LGBTQ+ have been drawn to the city both for its image as a queer-friendly city and its role in providing a place of refuge for displaced artists.

Due to their ethnic background, these artists move in a potentially conflictual space. As people of Middle Eastern origin, they are often perceived as “Muslims” by the German hosting society, for whom “queer” and “Muslim” are mostly imagined as irreconcilable, something that may result in latent Islamophobic attitudes and/or a lack of understanding for the particular situation of these artists. On the other hand, they may face homophobia from conservative elements of other Middle Eastern diasporic communities where LGBTQ+ activism is frequently decried as foreign to Islamic and/or Middle Eastern culture.

Queer artists from the WANA region in Berlin move between necessities to build support networks for other queer people of the region who have recently relocated to the city, ensuring visibility of queer Middle Eastern communities through documentation and participation in activist efforts, as well as building and maintaining artistic careers. This paper will discuss the practice of a number of performance artists, how these artists interact with the art scene of the city and how they situate their queer practice within it, as well as their relations to ongoing activism against racism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination.

Keywords: Contemporary art, performance, queer artists, Middle East, diaspora

Isolated and Connected: NowHere as an Artistic Home in Portugal

Cristiana Tejo (Instituto de História da Arte, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) & Mariana von Hartenthal

The paper examines the intersection of artistic practice, social networks, urban space, and national geography through NowHere, a collective established in Lisbon in 2018 by Cristiana Tejo and Marilá Dardot. Now led by Tejo, Dardot, Luisa Baldan, and Rafael Moretti, NowHere primarily gathers Brazilian immigrants in greater Lisbon, including many women and LGBTQIA+ artists. It offers discussions on artists’ production, support grant and residency application support, and opportunities to showcase work. Brazilians are the largest immigrant group in Portugal, representing over 35% of the over 1.5 million foreigners in the country (AIMA, 2023, 2025). They come from diverse backgrounds and, like other immigrants, often cluster around professional occupations (Heinrich 2005). Political instability and defunding of the arts in Brazil led a great number of artists to emigrate in the last decade. Many relocate to Portugal, a phenomenon echoing the 1970s when major artistic figures spent time in the country during its democratic reconstruction. While migration severs professional, social, and cultural networks, independent organizations represent an opportunity for artists to reestablish their practices in a new context and build up new professional networks. Being abroad, NowHere allows for a reimagination of Brazil, and for professional connections unlikely to happen if the artists had remained in Brazil. Led by women from the Brazilian Northeast proposing a matriarchal structure for the initiative, the group challenges both the dominance of Southeastern hubs and patriarchal norms. Notably, all Portuguese artists involved are women. The paper argues that such initiatives demonstrate Lisbon’s paradoxical position: while it acts as a symbolic Brazilian capital abroad, it keeps immigrants outside Portugal’s established art institutions. Amid rising right-wing xenophobia, this study seeks to deepen understanding of immigration’s cultural dynamics in Portugal.

Keywords: Immigration; Art collective; Brazilian diaspora; Lisbon; Contemporary art