People and Things
CO M M U N I T Y GALLERY
exhibitions
What does a passport mean to you?
The "What does a passport mean to you?" project intends to promote diversity and its respect through personal narratives about the meaningful value of a passport. Individuals’ digital storytellings are used to share their impressions, feelings or stories of this singular object, covering topics from identity and gender to traveling and its implications.
Why a passport? First passports are official documents issued by the government of a country to its citizens. Depending on the countrys´ policies, the passport authorizes travel to foreign countries and authenticates the bearer's identity, citizenship and the right to protection.
This object has a specific practical use, and nevertheless, at the same time, it generates considerably different perspectives depending on your nationality, circumstances, and relation with it. Notions of diversity and interculturalism become crucial in this exhibition that draws on personal memory, political issues, and the history and resonance of passports as an object within our culture.
For the Community Gallery and for this project, in particular, personal stories based on passports are a powerful register, not only for its posterior potential but rather because people want to tell their stories. The process of recording your passport narrative and to share it gives you the possibility to be the protagonist of your history and of others´ history, appreciating your singularity and the life of others.
What evocative objects can say about your identity?
Focusing on meaningful objects for Latin American women living in Bristol, this project seeks to explore the role of memory in the construction of the identity of Latin American women. These honest and revealing women' narratives show us the potential of digital storytelling. The use of this methodology reveals that memories and personal experiences are not lineal or coherent but they are always part of a dialogic and contradictory process.
Inviting women to choose a meaningful object –a bracelet, a kitchen mixer, stones and a telegram, among others– is an invitation to encourage them to take part of a free narrative exercise, and emotional labor that allows making visible the diversity of voices of these Latin American women living in the UK. The exploration of anonymous migrant women' narratives contributes to making visible those invisible individual experiences that speak us about roots, family, gender, experiences of transformation and learnings. Just as the subjects who hold them, they are simple but revealing.
Everyone has a story to tell… and for a purpose. During this interactive journey, a collective memory has been created, and today is shared with you as a listening exercise –where a group of women speaks and another group can listen to these voices–. Even though every story talks about personal memories and experiences, these are the reflection of historical, cultural and social constructions. Due to this powerful technique of oral history, we are a witness of the movement from the individual to the political.