Europe’s so called ‘refugee crisis’ - the result of Europe’s increasingly militarised frontiers and prioritisation of border control over safe reception conditions - received a large amount of media attention. But in all this coverage, the voices of forced migrants have often been reduced to pure testimony - they are often spoken about, but rarely given the opportunity to speak.
The Hiraeth Project aimed to respond to this, and allow different voices to tell different stories. It aimed to be a space for free self-expression, self-narration and self-curation, an opportunity for the participating teenagers to offer alternatives to top-down narratives of victimhood that we often hear foisted on refugees and asylum seekers.