Migrants in Culture is led by artists, designers and organisers with lived experience of the UK’s Hostile Immigration System. We began in 2018 as a volunteer-led advocacy network aiming to make visible and to challenge the impact of the Hostile Environment on the culture sector and its workers. In 2021 we pivoted into acting as a design agency and community interest company (CIC), responding to organising elder Zrinka Bralo: “You are culture workers; make me a new culture!” Governments spend billions on militarisation, surveillance and bordering, rather than invest in conflict prevention, community building, and climate change adaptation. Migration may be framed as a ‘threat’ by a hostile media and politics, but migration is also a space where our struggles and solidarities meet. In our politically locked times, social movements play a critical role in driving positive social change. Our role is to support movements to become more imaginative and resilient. Culture work in all its in/formal manifestations has always enabled the Global Majority to resist, survive and dream despite colonisation. We reclaim the power of art and culture as integral to social change. We prioritise the imagination of those most oppressed and grow more joyfully accessible, anti-racist and sustainable movements, better able to rehearse and vision beyond the status quo.
