ABSTRACT
The ‘Our True Colours’ (OTC) storytelling project brought together a group of four women from refugee backgrounds in the process of resettling in the city of Brisbane, Australia, to explore life narratives using visual arts and participatory video. This project is one of the outcomes of a programme of applied research that formed part of my PhD studies at Queensland University of Technology. The project grew out of a partnership in 2013 and 2014 with a local nongovernment organisation (NGO) providing support and advocacy for refugees and asylum seekers. Using a participatory action research process, we worked in a zone where life stories, participatory media, and human rights advocacy intersect. As a group our activities shifted between several communicative spaces on a continuum from personal interaction, to community development, through to public performance. For storytelling facilitators, this mobility between communicative spaces is significant. It requires a self-conscious, flexible practice framework that foregrounds relationships, power and positionality, and extends across personal, community and public domains. This chapter is primarily descriptive and its purpose is to chart how the project evolved as a series of ethical evolutions hinging on the collective project of ‘becoming public’. Working through the narrative of the project’s development, I unravel some of the creative and ethical challenges that we faced as cocreative media facilitators working in this context. I use the co-written script and the women’s artwork as illustrations of the practice. As a conceptual exercise I explore questions of place, space and scale, analytics drawn from cultural and feminist geography, to draw attention to some of the tensions and opportunities we encountered mediating refugee life narratives.
