Curating connections: Exploring a British national park with young asylum seekers

Abstract

This article reflects upon the authors' involvement with a walking project in the New Forest, a national park in the United Kingdom, for which we collaborated with a group of young male asylum seekers, community partners, and multimodal artists. Through the use of visual and digital media as sensory and collaborative tools of sense making, we explore the nested meanings of walking and of curated nature contact. The article reveals how walking may not be a (politically) neutral act, but rather a process of solidarity, support, and unfolding experience. We consider how walking and the arts activities of the project resulted in a form of conversation with the landscape and took on an affectively involved, empathetic orientation. We further elucidate how the project became entwined with the inherently interrupted nature of relations and experiences for those trapped in the asylum system. In conceptualizing “curation” as both in(ter)vention and care, we argue that research in the politicized sphere of forced migration and asylum has to integrate with the ethical commitment to create safe spaces of encounter and connection. In so doing, this article makes an original contribution, both theoretically and methodologically, to anthropological debates on migration, interculturality, and sensory ethnography.