Paper short abstract:

Curating Development uses 'museum as method' to explore the lives of migrant care workers in a participatory exhibition-making process. Working beyond the museum, we explores how curatorial strategies sustain migrants, advance public understanding of migration issues, and support NGO advocacy.

Paper long abstract:

'Curating Development' works with migrants from the Philippines, largely female, doing care work in London and Hong Kong (www.curatingdevelopment.com). It culminated in an exhibition that reversed the typical museum practice of displaying artefacts and artworks from existing collections (Thomas, 2010). Instead, project participants shared their own store of social media images, sentimental objects carried with them, and gifts to be sent home to family. They made these into art, accompanied by video installations and drawings from collaborating fine artists, intended for public display as a single collection and archive - their own museum of migration. With this approach, we extended Andre Malraux' work on Museum without Walls/Musée Imaginaire (1965), taking the work beyond the museum's walls. Our exhibition enters migrant's private spaces, their dreams, their contributions to family and country. Rather than using our archive as a store, their creating, curating and displaying from within it became a way to make hidden things public and foster debate.

Our analysis evaluates the outcomes of this exhibition-making process for participants. For them, and for the wider Filipino community, our curatorial methodology gestured towards new ways of visualising migration and thus approaching migration policy and regulation. We show how this happened - through the making-public of what was usually hidden, private and individual. In breaking the museum's walls, the collaborative arts process shifted migrants' understandings not just of their role in development in the Philippines, but of the collective impacts of their practices of investment and self-care.