Case study 1: Have you heard?

In Edinburgh, I encountered the first community out of six. The case and its specific stories are discussed from the perspective of narrative identities in Article 3.

The art intervention Have you heard? was carried out in Edinburgh, UK, in July 2014 by a team of four artist-researchers: myself, together with two Finnish and one Portuguese colleagues. We asked ourselves what are the conversations and acts of participation that take place between the social and the spatial and how does one become a part of those? The main focal point of the research and the intervention resided in the migrant presence, and related narratives and Edinburgh and Scotland were in an entirely peaceful state back then, in the time of the upcoming independence referendum.

The motivation of rendering audible the individual voices of the local community, while bringing to light wider contexts derived from “the personal is political” argument of the 1980s (e.g. Hanisch, 1969; Crenshaw, 1991) that further became central to a lot of filmmaking and art practices (e.g. De Lauretis, 1985;

Seiter, 1985; Aristarkhova & Wilding, 2009; Tay, 2009). The narratives communicated by the research participants lay ground and provided inspiration for the subsequent art intervention. These narratives referred to in Article 3 grounded the focus of the research and artistic inquiry within the themes of migration and belonging, home culture, community and place. The plurality of identities in flux that were narrated by the research participants brought the discussion of narrative identity into focus as a central issue in Article 3 and further research. The abstract social and spatial spheres also became actors and contributors to the collection of stories indirectly, for example, through a newspaper advertisement, a conversation overheard from passersby, symbolisms in the shop windows and signboards. Noticing and employing artistically the narratives that place communicated led further to the reflection on the topic of narrative identity of places that is formulated as one of the findings in Section 5.2. The participants’

narratives were documented audiovisually or in a written form during fluid loosely structured interviews. The narrative data was processed in two ways—

immediately, in order to become a work of spatial fiction, and later on in the scope of the wider study.

The group of research participants was constituted by eleven first or second generation immigrants living in Edinburgh, seven of whom were approached by us directly, while the other four responded to an announcement we had published on social media. The participants were of Portuguese, Spanish, Lithuanian, Dutch, Pakistani and Polish origins. Seven of the participants were shop owners or

employees of four shops in Leith Walk, an old street of Edinburgh that was referred to by the famous nineteenth century novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1881) in his letters as “dear mysterious Leith Walk”. Nowadays it is a multicultural street and neighbourhood with a strong presence of residents and businesses of foreign backgrounds. The participants were united by shared practices of trade and hospitality, as well as migratory practices they all underwent at least once in life. Besides, they were a community of place, although a less interconnected one in comparison to those in further research encounters. The Portuguese pastry shop owner Michael regretfully admitted how they did not really know their immediate neighbours despite navigating the same spaces on a daily basis.

For many research participants their respective shops held a sentimental value and references to different timespaces, such as a memory of what felt good about their place of origin. This can be seen in the narration of Patricia, a shop owner of Portuguese descent who emigrated with her family at a young age and finally settled in Edinburgh, but holds the memories of her homeland close to heart:

Obviously, we could not be just another coffee shop, because there are 500 more on the same street. So we thought, why don’t we do a Portuguese pastry shop, where we can give all our customers what we once enjoyed?

Often it is simple things, such as traditional food, that tend to instigate cycles of memories, narrations and related identity work among people involved in migratory practices. The feelings of safety and familiarity, too, are fundamental for a displaced person in a situation where her identities are rendered vulnerable due to being away from that place, as exemplified by Shanzay from Pakistan:

I’ve seen ladies who cannot really speak English properly, but they come here with their children to find company, get some advice. It is a kind of community centre, more than just a shop. I think there are more facets to the shop than it might look from outside.

This narration touches upon the notion of identities in flux, which are equally relevant for people and places. The shops run by migrants in Edinburgh would always fluctuate between at least two identities: a place that provides services and a safe space of community support.

As a result of immediate engagement with the participants’ stories, my colleagues and I came up with a fictional character, a collective personage compiled from the variety of personal narratives heard, overheard, written, photographed, filmed and hand-drawn. This personage was someone who inhabits and navigates the same spaces as the people of Edinburgh, someone they might have seen or heard of. The character’s origin was kept ambiguous due to the variety of cultural inputs included in her portrait.

The character’s story was written according to the basic structure of storytelling: divided into three principal acts, introduction, development and resolution, and incorporating an inciting moment, a mid-point and a climax (McKey, 1997). After defining key events, storylines and supporting characters, the final story was developed in the form of a personal diary that covered a period of five years, from the day of the character’s arrival to Edinburgh, through her struggle to belong and relate to the unfamiliar, heartbreaks, new friendships, challenges of unemployment and fluctuation between decisions to stay or to leave. The story is a collection of both negative and positive experiences narrated by research participants, as well as several observations made by us, the researchers, in Edinburgh. The aim to make the story personal and first-hand prompted the choice of the style of a diary, which, in its turn, helped to determine a unit of intervention–a diary entry. The entries varied in subjects and mood:

Day 11. Everyday I overhear people talking languages from all over the world.

It fascinates me. I try to guess the meaning of those phrases before they fade away.

Day 150. I sit in a group interview in a restaurant. I am surrounded by high school students and young people looking for a job. A voice in my head keeps repeating that I do not belong here. I look at everyone’s faces, and ask myself why I put myself through this. I want to leave. Instead, I will wait.

Creative choices regarding physical representation of the determined artefacts led to the manufacturing of 86 rectangular cardboard placards, sixteen by ten centimetres each. The placards were wrapped in newspaper jackets, the choice based on the availability of the material, as well as, on the objective of highlighting the temporal dimension of the artefacts. The diary entries were all formatted in the same manner, printed out and glued to the newspaper-covered placards. The inspiration behind the form came partly from the city of Edinburgh where benches in public places are often marked with thoughtful placards of affection for loved ones who have passed away, for example: “For Léan Scully who made a festival of this city” (Ross, 2012).

The story was told by placing the placards throughout the city on the surfaces of mundane features, such as phone booths, bus stops, mailboxes, pub windows (Figure 16). The entries were placed in portions over the course of one week. We aimed to cover multiple areas of the city, not just the neighbourhood where the stories surfaced—the intervention spread mainly through central parts of Edinburgh, as well as popular districts, such as, Portobello beach and Stockbridge.

However, there was an element of spontaneity to the process of intervening:

occasionally the site-led nature of the project would manifest itself and the discovery of a fitting location through walking would lead to placing an artefact in it.

Figure 16. Examples of photo documentation of the intervention Have you heard?, Edinburgh, UK. July 2014. Photo credits: Daria Akimenko.

An important stage of every act of the intervention was observation and embracing of its transience the moment after placing each artefact. That is, the moment when a story fragment had been told and started its independent journey.

During implementation of the final acts of the intervention, a stronger public response was being observed, such as passersby slowing down and verbally recognising the artefacts as similar to the ones they had seen previously in a different location.

Every placed artefact was documented in an identical manner—photographed from three different viewpoints. The first point was a close-up allowing viewers to read the entry and to establish a relationship with it. The second shot opened up the space allowing the viewer to understand the kind of context the artefact was placed in. The third image was a very open shot almost inviting the viewer for a walk in the neighbourhood where the artefact was placed. This last shot pictured passersby, traffic and other indications of life in this specific cityscape. Some images managed to capture the response of the space to the intervention through human presence.

This case study led me to reflect on the methods that mediate empathic narrative sharing and on the immediate and future audiences that can potentially encounter these stories. Through colliding together the narrative identities and life histories of the research participants into the transient spatial intervention and more lasting outcomes, the documentary film and online map, I explored methods for expanding the spatial boundaries of local audiences.