Film short abstract:

I am concerned about the identity crises that I assume migrants face and the various methods employed in resolving them. Using the Yorùbá diaspora in Peckham (in South London) as a study lens, I explored W.E.B Du Bois’ double-consciousness theory.

Film long abstract:

I am concerned about the identity crises that I assume migrants face and the various methods employed in resolving them. Using the Yorùbá diaspora in Peckham (a South London district within the London Borough of

Southwark) as a study lens, I explored W.E.B Du Bois’ double-consciousness theory as a panacea and corrective lens to understanding the problems of a multicultural world.

During my fieldwork, the stories of second and third-generation Yorùbá British-Nigerians spoke of struggles and victories, losses and gains, letting go and moving on, and how London’s hybridised environment shaped their

identities. In this third space, they found ways to hierarchise parts of their identities in moments or situations that demanded it, and these different parts were not in conflict. To my interlocutors, identity is seen as a performance. I was astounded.

My astonishment led me to find the principle of elasticity in the Yorùbá philosophy. A philosophy that I found serviceable enough to strive to develop an ethnography that focuses on Yorùbá consciousness – one that embraces the views of Yorùbáness as a creative process of becoming. As a consciousness, its plastic nature allows for opposition to Yorùbáness as a race rooted in a place. Culture is then seen as a consciousness that is simultaneously closed and open, allowing for additions and modifications.

My experience at Peckham instilled the notion that recreating home or finding oneself, although a herculean job, is possible and that the double consciousness lens is a serviceable heuristic in identity studies.

Film short abstract:

We others - Collaborative hybrid film in which migration stories of the past and the present are intertwined.

Film long abstract:

This fictional documentary was created through a collaborative process with contemporary migrants who embody and appropriate European emigration stories of the past and combine them with their own migratory experiences. A poetic and political film, in which autobiographical tales, archives and dreams of the past and the present, blend to evoke a sensory and epic experience.

Locked up and hidden in a truck, eight contemporary migrants from various countries try to survive the hunger and anguish of a long illegal journey across borders. Little by little, in the darkness of the lorry trailer, they get to know each other and share their life stories.

But the stories they tell are not only their own journeys, but also personal stories of a century ago from European emigrants (Ukraine, Russia, Italy, Belgium). This film articulates many resonances between past and present migrations, and reveals how historical amnesia is alive in our perception of migration.