Drawing New Relationalities with Migrants and Immobile Exiles

Abstract

In this paper, we explore how drawing can be used as transformative educational practice in the context of climate change shifting our relationships with the living world. As a starting point, we share our understanding that we are entering times where the relationships with living systems around us are no longer stable and predictable (Morizot, 2023). Some people experience this instability through forced exile and migrant journeys. Others do not travel but become immobile exiles (Morizot, 2023). This context has invited us to start a co-inquiry into relationality through the practice of drawing. We ground this exploration in four examples from our respective work in the fields of systems change, education of the arts and participatory arts-based research. Each of the examples illustrates how small groups of people - both children and adults - can develop awareness of changing relationalities between humans, other living beings and vibrant matter (Bennett, 2010). In the workshops we have facilitated, the images themselves come alive as quasi-organisms (Simondon, 2022). With a phenomenological gaze, we reflect on their capacity to support the becoming visible of micropolitical agencies with the potential to reconfigure systems towards decisive mutations of plurality (Glissant, 1996).

Keywords

• drawing
• art-based research
• transformative education
• systems change
• relationality
• climate change