Embodying intimate border violence: collaborative art-research as multipliers of Latin American migrant women’s affects

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper argues for the decolonial feminist potential of multi-layered arts-research collaborations for critical research committed to advancing migrant justice. It reflects on the art-research collaborative project, ‘stitching voices, stitching bodies’, investigating the gendered, racialised, colonial and geopolitical dynamics of violence and resistance of Latin American migrant women. Collaborators included the author and visual artist Nina Franco, twenty anonymous Latin American survivors of violence, three Latin American women activists and a filmmaker, a British-Caribbean sound engineer and an Irish-Caribbean video editor. Through our art-research methodological engagements, the relationship between the researcher, artists and participants was significantly altered as we alternated between and simultaneously occupied those positions. Exchanging and complementing our skills and sensibilities, we tried new ways of working and overlapped various layers of expression to collectively produce knowledge that enhanced understandings of and multiplied affects concerning intimate border violence. Through our art, we were able to envision, explore and represent intimate border violence, coloniality and resistance to these in audio-visual and visceral ways that grasped and multiplied embodied affects not only for research participants and collaborators but also audiences.