It’s Time to Move

"This performance speaks to both ‘Crossings’ and ‘’Future Memories’ through its exploration of forced displacement, asylum, and the lived experience of navigating the UK immigration system. It reflects on crossings between places, identities, and temporalities, while examining the systems of power that determine whose memories are recognized as legitimate and whose futures are made possible. 

The UK Home Office demands people seeking asylum to reveal intimate and often traumatic life events to suspecting strangers in a coherent, detailed, and chronological manner. The work questions this linear understanding of time, recognising that trauma, displacement, and the passing of time fragment and reshape memory and the self. 

An asylum applicant is expected to reproduce a linear, progressive account of forced displacement: a journey from trauma, to escape, protection, and ultimately to freedom. Such a narrative reproduces the colonial logic that frames the applicant’s country of origin as the savage, backward ‘Third World’ while positioning the UK as the progressive western savior. Complicating this reductive narrative with the complexities of lived realities would risk losing the possibility of living the future an asylum applicant dreams of. 

The performance explores how the asylum regime demands that people reshape their memories of the past into a narrative that can be accepted by the Home Office, in order to secure the possibility of a future they dream of. In this sense, memory becomes both a site of survival and negotiation, where the past is continually rewritten in relation to an uncertain future. "