Wendy Ewald in conversation with Michael Morris
Michael Morris: How were the parameters of such an ambitious project first mapped out?
Wendy Ewald: I visited Margate about a year before the project actually began. At that point we had no idea who we were going to work with. We walked around and visited schools and groups and institutions; we went to the mosque; we met kids who were caring for adults. It was very interesting, overwhelming actually, as there were about ten different groups I could have worked with.
When I visited Northdown Primary School, the principal told me that there was a 50% turnover in the student population every year. That was amazing to me, that a town could change so much in one year. With that statistic, I began trying to focus on the experiences of people starting their lives over in Margate and what those experiences were for children, in particular.
Although the coast of Kent has been the gateway to the U.K. for asylum seekers over many years, I didn't want to limit my attention to foreign immigrants, because it was obvious that the 'flood' of asylum seekers was something of a cliché. The Nayland Rock Hotel, formerly one of the town's grandest hotels, now houses asylum seekers, who some Margate locals see as having a free ride while everyone else struggles. So I decided to develop a project with the broad idea of what it is for kids to start their lives over, whether fleeing war-torn places or being moved by parents from one part of the country to another. I asked the principal at Northdown Primary School and the assistant principal at Hartsdown Secondary School to identify British kids who had moved to Margate. The Nayland Rock Hotel was the obvious place to work with asylum-seeking kids, as well as the Orchard Centre (the real name of the centre has been withheld to protect its inhabitants) where unaccompanied immigrant minors are housed. These four groups formed the matrix of this project.
MM: What kind of community did the children represent for you? Did you discover common threads in their diverse experiences of departure and arrival?
WE: Some of the kids from Northdown and Hartsdown schools had come to Margate just months earlier, some more than two years earlier. They were acquainted with each other but weren't necessarily friends. They came to Margate because their families needed to make a change: Gareth's father wanted to get away from sectarian violence in Northern Ireland; Lanny's mother left Wales quickly to get away from an increasingly abusive relationship, and so on. The kids at the Nayland Rock Hotel had arrived with their families within the past few weeks. I was privileged to be able to stay there for some weeks, to get to know people and see how their lives were unfolding in this new situation. The unaccompanied kids at the Orchard Centre were in a more extreme situation. Most of them didn't even know that they would end up in England.
For the most part, the kids in each of the four groups didn't know each other before we made this project. They came together by working and sharing and comparing experiences. By the end, I certainly felt that I was working with a community.
MM: How aware were the British kids of what it means to be a refugee or asylum seeker?
WE: A couple of the younger ones had heard the term but weren't sure what it meant. Reece talked about how it disturbed him not being able to communicate with a Chinese man in a restaurant; and Max talked about how the refugees had to leave their countries and it wasn't their fault.
MM: But they didn't identify these experiences with their own sense of displacement?
WE: It was only when we began to look at the pictures and read the testimonies of the asylum-seeking kids that the British kids really recognized that they shared experiences. They said, "Oh yeah, I brought this with me, just like Christian". They realized that Christian was the same age as them, and that although he had fled something much more difficult [the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo], they all had similar reactions in terms of what to take with them and what to leave behind.
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Image: Towards a Promised Land by Wendy Ewald, 2006. Photograph: Thierry Bal.
