Creating images of belonging through diasporic touch

Davies, Sara Kristina (2024) Creating images of belonging through diasporic touch. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

The process of making artworks has become a way to feel at home, yet, I also use it to share my Anglo-Swedish experience with others, to claim a space for my barely visible diasporic subjectivity in my adopted country. Drawing on my experience as a first-generation Swedish migrant in the UK I created a unique body of work that articulated my particular bi-cultural experience, it conveyed my homing desire—elements from Swedish national narratives, influenced by my longing and veiled by my loss. My art-based research is a practice of belonging that binds times and places together in composite cultural forms that undermine the idea of nation and national identity. This work is urgent, as nationalism and even far-right nationalism is on the rise, the acceptance of difference is reducing. It is also timely, as the aftermath of Brexit continues to transform our identities and leave many migrants and diasporics with a deeper sense of loss. Situated in the wider field of Scandinavian migration and diaspora studies it explores the role of artistic processes in subjectivity formation, from a maker’s perspective. However, it says something significant about creativity and diasporic subjectivity formation more generally. Previous research on creativity and diasporic subjectivity formation identifies it as an entwinement of inner world and outer environment that transforms both self and the surrounding environment (Bhabha, 1998; Papastergiadis & Trimboli, 2017), however this theoretical research does not account for the experiential, sensory aspects of this process. As a maker I knew that engaging in art practice counteracted my sense of self uncertainty arising from the effects of migration. My contribution to knowledge is the development of a process that I named diasporic touch, an activity part of my art practice that has a soothing effect. It utilises a combination of performative strategies to harness moments of connectivity and the medium of photography to frame these intimate encounters. When making images through diasporic touch, I discovered that the unconventional selfportraits externalising my internal world, materialised my self fragmentation—my diasporic melancholia, as dissonant montages with visible joins. My losses worked themselves through my body, marking the surface of my artworks. This research has led me to a position where I can challenge some aspects of psychoanalytic theory, in particular Butler’s account of melancholic loss. Instead of diasporic melancholia being impossible to overcome, as Butler (2003) claims, my unique contribution to the field shows that, although still undefined in language, melancholic loss can become externalised and mourned. Utilising psychoanalysis, specifically, object relation theory (Melanie Klein Trust, n.d.; Winnicott, 2005 [1971]; Ehrensweig, 1995 [1967]) helped me understand that art practice, by instigating a process of mourning, can help migrants and diasporics to work through their difficult palette of emotions.