Aidan Jolly - Virtual Migrants

I am a core member of Virtual Migrants, a Manchester based Digital Arts Association that explores issues of race, migration and globalisation. In 2015 we produced ‘Continent Chop Chop’, a national touring production and participatory workshop programme that looked at austerity, climate justice and the scapegoating of migrants. This toured again in 2019 to the Interdependence Festival. In 2019 we also collaborated with Numbi Arts as part of the 2 Degrees Festival to create 'Breathe!', which examines the wholesale internal displacement of communities of people of colour, and working class communities in Tower Hamlets; and the InterplayNow crossover music and journalism project, with the Refugee Council and MusicWorks in Sheffield.

In 2016 we were involved in a research project devised by the University of Manchester Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice and a series of interactive drama-based workshops led by TiPP to faciliate conversations about radicalism.

The project was devised as ‘a collaboration between young people, school staff, interdisciplinary researchers, and creative artists, that focuses on developing an inclusive and open discussion about how schools approach extremism that speaks to, and is led by, young people’.

The government’s Prevent strategy has been accused of being more damaging than enabling; acting as a mechanism of exclusion that represses rather than encourages conversation. It was fascinating to hear the views and frustrations of teachers and pupils in dealing with Prevent and Safeguarding legislation highlighting even more the need to “talk about this”.

Here’s the poem that resulted from these conversations: