Right to Narrate

This documents a one-day symposium on human displacement and the stories that result, with emphasis on the roles that illustration and visual arts can play in their communication, dissemination and reception. Presentations were given on visual storytelling, refugee experiences and the unofficial, unrecorded and remembered narratives of war and displacement. Held on: Wednesday 22 November 2017, at the Main Gallery, Museum in the Park, Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK. Chaired/led by Dolores Phelps, MPhil/PhD Researcher, Illustration. The presented work covered : - Picture books, especially those that widely employ devices such as allegory and fable, anthropomorphism, symbolism, magic realism, and simplification can be used to aid understanding, and it has been widely stated, (especially by an expert in this area, the author - illustrator Shaun Tan), that as these books are not necessarily aimed at children, they can be used across ages and cultures to help transmit and disseminate common experiences and emotions. Andrew Melrose, Professor of Writing for Children, University of Winchester will present his project The Immigration Boat Story, an Arts Council funded project that designed to challenge the perceptions of immigration via an illustrated children’s story book. - Visual journalism, such as that of Olivier Kugler and Fumio Obata, re-presents facts and situations in a way that meld form and content seamlessly to produce a highly accessible and effective, yet aesthetically rich and pleasing, form of communication. New and unfamiliar audiences may be accessed, with an attendant rise in awareness ans empathy with the issues covered. - Graphic novels, - a category that defies categorization, and which includes the whole gamut of ‘comic books’, ‘comix’, ‘commix’, superhero and fantasy genres, manga, Two examples are exceptional: Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-91) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.(2000) Presentations by : Olivier Kugler Visual reportage – Refugees in Europe Olivier studied MA illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Since then he has been working as an illustrator based in London for clients all over the world. Olivier creates intricate drawings which combine reportage with illustrated scenes of the lives and living conditions of refugees and migrants. Over the past few years, he has been interviewing refugees and others affected by the current crisis, drawing their pictures and telling their stories. He will show and discuss his latest work which is about to be published as a book in Germany. Andrew Melrose, University of Winchester The Boat: Word & Image & Refugees is a presentation about a creative writing, illustration and multimedia project – The story of the project begins with an early refugee story when his mother put Moses in a basket on the Nile and it leads into a boat sinking off Lampedusa. The theme being the highlighting of the plight and the problem of refugees who take to boats in search of a better life for a specific child-centred audience. What this presentation will do is elaborate on the visual, critical and creative rationale while demonstrating how such a project is developed and delivered for a very specific child-centred audience. It will demonstrate not just the role of the writers and the technologists but the way a story can be constructed for an audience whose verbal and visual literacy is limited by their experience. And it will emphasise that the people we call children are temporarily the inexperienced branch of the human family and thus writers and artists ought to have this as a consideration in the development of child-centred culture - which I will explain through a visual demonstration. Adelaide Morris, University of Winchester Remember this man? : freeing an object from its history This presentation demonstrates how applying a range of theories to an image can inform creative practice, allowing multiple layers of meaning in a creative work: a hybrid post-memoir. At its core, the work is about two settled members of the post-World War Two generation of migrants; people forced to cross countries, cultural boundaries, and identities. Their stories have in common something long in existence and ongoing: flight from peril and the inter-generational challenges of discussing the catastrophes of the past, present and future. To understand the historically constructed schemata that these individuals carried, and which directly influenced their decisions and, ultimately, their sense of being, I will discuss the potential of a dialectical image - a photograph, which stands in for dialectic in standstill - using the notion of textual intervention as a method of breaking into a range of creative opportunities. Dolores Phelps, University of Gloucestershire My Name Is Aurelia ‘My MPhil/PhD illustration research project is a visual response to a memoir left to me by my late mother, who was one of the 4,000 children evacuated from Bilbao by the ship Habana to Southampton in May 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. An interpretation of my mother’s direct recollections of living in Bilbao - air raids, starvation, the terrible voyage and starting life in the UK, where she spent the rest of her life - with extensive research into the collective experiences and memoirs of other Basque refugee children, has resulted –so far- in a daily graphic visualization, sentence by sentence. By taking the bare words and directly translating them into images using a range of mark-making tools, I hope to connect her memories and especially her emotions with colours and shapes in a kinaesthetic and phenomenological way – affect to effect.’ Fumio Obata, University of Gloucestershire Fukushima Project Fumio is a graphic novelist and illustrator. Just So Happens, his first book, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2014 and has been translated into several languages. His comics-form reportages of the aftermath of the 2011’s tsunami disaster & the subsequent nuclear accident in Fukushima have been featured in the Italian magazine Internazionale and he is now forming them into his second graphic novel. This is the latest & biggest project Fumio has ever undertaken and the research has taken him over 4 years.