Micro-artworks
This web page documents our February/March 2025 experiment creating micro-artworks in response to different prompts that reflect on the past, present and future of migration and borders. The aim has been to incite imagination for future practices that centre human rights, compassion and inter-relational connection between those impacting and those impacted by border policies.
Each week we responded to a different prompt with the following three simple instructions.
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30 minutes —Set aside 30 minutes to create each artwork. You can take 30 minutes all at once, or break it up into smaller time amounts. You can take more than 30 minutes if you have the time. Try to keep this time uninterrupted.
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Use what you have— you can create in any medium - a sketch, a painting, a poem, a sculpture made out of toilet paper rolls, a song, a soundscape, a short video. Use materials you already have at your disposal.
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Upload your artwork to our WhatsApp group on Friday. (You can take a photo of it, or send a link/video etc)
Below you will find the artworks made thus far, which will likely form a more formal virtual gallery for others to add to.
Prompt 1
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'reflecting on the present, from the future'
It’s the year 2050.
Are there still borders?
Has the “crisis” resolved, evolved?
Become more or less critical?
Create an artistic expression in response to this idea, looking back to the year 2025 from 2050. How do you view this current moment we are in from the future? You can reflect on this idea through the lens of your specific research if you like, or envision it more generally. What has changed in 25 years?
(to read about each artwork, click on the images below.)
Prompt 2
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'reflecting on the present, from the past'
Think back 3 generations and consider what music connects you to each generation.
It could be a piece of music that your parents, grandparents or great grandparents listened to…or one that you associate with their generation…or perhaps this is an opportunity to find some music from their eras.
After listening to each piece of music, create a micro artwork in response. What wisdom do you hear from each generation? What do you take from the past to guide you now? Let the artwork reflect this somehow.
Prompt 3
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'reflecting on the present, from the present'
The last two weeks we have focused on the present, but entangled with perspectives from the future and the past. This week we give ourselves full attention to the present.
I am inspired by an interview I heard recently with the Buddhist philosopher Robert Thurman and his reflection on Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now’. He describes the present as an “unfolding richness”.
“So then not only do you enjoy the richness of that moment, but if, in that moment, you can make something a tiny bit better — I mean, the color could be, instead of this drab beige, it could be a more, like, rich beige, a little more yellow tone — whatever tiny thing it is, you’re growing it for the infinite future. And that little infinite positive change — if you’re a little depressed or something, you’re sad about something in the past, then you do a little tiny change. You can live within that moment, and it can — so that that moment is connected to the infinite future. Then that’s a much richer moment.” -Robert Thurman 2013, On Being podcast, ‘Loving your enemies’
Create a small artwork in response to staying in the present. What unfolds in real time in the present moments you set aside for this artwork? What tiny change can you grow for an infinite future?
Prompt 4
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'creating the future from the past/present/future'
In our final week of micro-experimental art-making we return to the future, but this time from the present.
I am inspired by two thoughts:
‘Migration is a solution, not a problem’
-Michele Klein Solomon,
IOM regional director for Central America, North America and the Caribbean
‘Reclaiming the sky, sea and desert’
-Gabriella Sanchez,
socio-cultural anthropologist/scholar
In December 2023 Michele Klein Solomon wrote an article titled ‘Migration: a solution, not a problem.’ In addition to noting the economic benefits of migration, she also discusses the criticality of cultural exchange and of wisdom for navigating climate change impacts.
Speculative fiction writers (specifically from migrant backgrounds) have often illuminated the expertise of migrants, identifying how a long history of survival positions their wisdom in a post-apocalyptic world.
In my recent conversation with Gabriella Sanchez, who is from the border and a border scholar, she talked about the view of the border beyond violence and marginalisation. Splitting her time between El Paso, Texas and the east coast of the US, she said she always longs to return to the border. And she beautifully discussed the expansive nature of the sky, sea and desert that border dwellers reclaim, return and reimagine beyond media portrayals.
In our final artwork of the series, the invitation is to create an expression of the border that manifests this idea of migration as a solution, not a problem and as a reclaiming of sky, sea and desert.