RECORDING BY DR JEAN MORRIS for

Poverty, Migration and the Consolation of Friendship

INSTALLATION

 
 

The voiceover reads from a report conducted by the United Nations International Organisation for Migration (IOM, 2020). Both the medieval fable and the contemporary IOM report are intended to direct governance. The fable presents us with a personal and emotional description of how poverty feels. The IOM report is impersonal and presents us with the economic impact of migration on both migrant and host. By juxtaposing these two approaches to poverty and their relation to migration, we experience how these modes might work together.

  • PANEL 1

  • PANEL 2

  • PANEL 3

  • PANEL 4

‘Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.’

— Saidiya Hartman

EXHIBITION ARTWORK

‘Poverty, Migration and the Consolation of Friendship’

The mouse’s description of destitution in The True Friends is uncannily resonant with contemporary stories of forced migration due to extreme poverty. ‘I knew I would have to move from my hole’ the mouse claims when he discovers that everything he owns has been taken from him. Written many centuries ago, the mouse’s account is by modern standards, a profoundly psychologised depiction of the indignities of poverty, the urge to change context and the hope for a better future amongst friends.

In my response to the fable, I will create a dialogue between the mouse’s tale and contemporary accounts of forced migration. This is done in the hope that the wisdom embedded in The True Friends will generate more compassion for those peoples who are forced to undertake perilous journeys for economic reasons. 

Dr. Jean Morris

Jean’s method applies creative-writing practices to historical research. Her work is immersed in medieval worlds, exploring migratory themes such as radicalisation, border crossing and the lure of promised lands. Jean’s explorations circumnavigate the periphery of the archive, a place where primary sources are unstable or most often, absent. It is alongside these voids that she turns to storytelling and the lyrical, creating a neo-archive which re-members that which has been either misrepresented or omitted. As well as working on academic articles, Jean is currently completing her first book, based on her PhD thesis. 

Writer Page