ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses words, materials and objects that illuminate aspects of the migration experience and the different forms of media that help shape them into powerful instruments of communication. It argues that art and artefacts employed as modes of translation have the power to shape human association and action and can better reveal the overlap and intimacy that exists between the human and non-human and the verbal and non-verbal features of the migration experience. I consider the ground-breaking autobiographical work No Friend But the Mountains by Iranian Kurdish writer, filmmaker and scholar Behrouz Boochani, whose experience of long-term detention in Manus Island – one of Australia’s offshore island prisons – typifies the treatment of many immigrants in the early twenty-first century, alongside the work of two New York-based painters with experience of early twentieth-century migration, specifically referencing Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series (1941) and Willem de Kooning’s Excavation (1950) What connects all three as artists is their focus on people, objects and nature, their distinct experiences of migration, and its direct impact on their work.
