Visualising

The visibility of slavery – and the ways that it is visualised – determine the nature of our responses

Visualising

The visibility of slavery – and the ways that it is visualised – determine the nature of our responses

Visual materials connect communities with causes.

An artwork or a photograph can raise-awareness, have a powerful affective impact and compel action. A public theater performance or an exhibition can challenge social taboos and create spaces of dialogue. A mapping of data or a documentary film can inform policymakers and propel socio-political change.

But each of these visual tools must be used with caution as each can be used to sensationalise, mis-represent, or re-exploit those who have experienced forms of modern slavery. Employing methods that are ethically-informed, survivor-centred and locally-rooted is key to developing visual practices and materials that are both just and effective.

The Power of Portraiture

LESLAN

Forms of descent-based slavery can be particularly pernicious and intractable

The Legacies of Slavery in Niger (LESLAN) project – a collaboration between Timidria and the University of Birmingham – sought to improve the circumstances of persons of slave descent in the Republic of Niger through public recognition of their lived experiences. In an effort to start an unprecedented dialogue about slavery and its legacies in the country, LESLAN held a national art competition that asked participants to reflect on contemporary slavery and its legacies. Apsatou Bagaya was one of the prizewinners with a powerful photographic series featuring dignified portraits of women survivors of the Wahaya practice.

Through initiatives such as this the LESLAN project was acknowledged by Nigerien officials through engagement and public statements on national news by the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Education, representatives of the Support of Human Rights Office and Office of the Presidency.

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As these women told me about their suffering as girls and then as women, I realized their courage, their strength, their capacity for resilience. I said to myself then, why show their suffering again? They have suffered enough! Rather, I will pay homage by dignifying them ... By participating in the LESLAN project … I wanted above all through this small photographic work; to take part in this fight.

Apsatou Bagaya

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SURVIVORS VOICES, STORIES AND IMAGES

Portraits can take many forms

Azadi, a survivor-led NGO based in Kenya, worked with the University of Nottingham’s Rightslab to explore a creative approach that centres the empowerment of survivors and makes a concerted effort to break with any visual tropes of victimization.

Within the Survivor’s Voices, Stories and Images project, participatory photography was used to facilitate survivors narrating their own stories and experimenting with creative alternatives to traditional modes of photographic portraiture including non-figurative forms.

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Credit: Mamuu Juma

Survivors, Voices, Stories and Images

Portraits can take many forms

Credit: Mamuu Juma

Portraits can take many forms

Credit: Hope Zawadi

One of my friend told me there was an opportunity and i was to go with her since i fit all the requirements, asked about the payment and due to my naive reasoning i never questioned her rather i felt blessed and lucky. I remember fantasizing of all the good things i would buy my grandmother and also get her out of that shack we called home for years.

Cynthia - My Flawless Life

Credit: Hope Zawadi

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VIOMEREN

Ufan Aii, A Fighter’s Emancipation

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VIOMEREN

In Nigeria, the VIOMEREN project has worked closely with survivors of human trafficking. Returnees were paired with artists from the NLAAC collective to create original artworks.

Artist Ufan Aii, one of 15 winners of the Art Speaks competition, created A Fighter’s Emancipation through this process.

His work alludes to the hope of freedom, the importance of family reunification and the challenges of community reintegration for survivors of forced marriage, forced pregnancy and sexual abuse.

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Seeing Legacy in landscape

Forms of Enslavement in Ghana

A research team at the University of Ghana Legon has been mapping sites and routes of historical and modern slavery that traverse the country, with a focus on the Northern, North East, Upper East, Upper West, Savanna, Volta and Oti Regions.

Sites were identified through both tangible and intangible markers of a place’s connection to either historic or contemporary forms of enslavement: through buildings and baobab trees, caves and shackles alongside oral histories, placenames, community stories, and festivals.

The team noted that there was much resonance between areas of the economy where enslaved labour was used historically and where it is used today in Ghana pointing to continuities in agriculture, mining and manufacturing as well as domestic service.

For example, mapping historical sites in coastal towns of the Volta Region allowed the team to also reflect on the mass emigration of vulnerable youth populations to contemporary fishing communities where exploitative contracts are entered into with owners of fishing vessels looking for cheap labour.

When sharing these findings with affected communities, the team found that long-standing practices of child and youth apprenticeship in exploitative industries posed significant barriers to exploited groups recognising their present situation as constituting a form of modern slavery.

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Visualising Liberté

Descent-based slavery can hide in plain sight.

Embedded within local social structures, intergenerational exploitation can be invisibilised and incomprehensible to outsiders rendering international development frameworks ineffective.

In Mali, Donkosira have been working with survivors of the Kayes Slavery Crisis, as well as residents of the village of Bouillagui, to raise-awareness of the ways in which historic and contemporary forms of enslavement and resistance can intersect.

A graphic novel and an animation have been produced, primarily for children and young people in West Africa, which recount the history of Bouillagui: a village founded by formerly enslaved communities who rebelled against their ‘masters’ in the 1910s to live freely in this settlement of their own creation.

This work of historical remembrance draws attention to ongoing human rights abuses faced by the descendants of enslaved persons in contemporary Mali. It demonstrates the potential for visual materials to act as a witness to exploitation in the face of political intransigence.

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Re-viewing Rehabilitation

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Bila Pi Kuc

Youth Leaders for Restoration and Development (YOLRED) is an NGO run by and for former child soldiers in Northern Uganda. YOLRED’s community of survivors are well-experienced in sharing stories of exploitation and survival with the international development sector, but have expressed feelings of dissatisfaction with the negative impacts of dramatic rescue stories and associated visual materials that reveal their identity and expose them to local stigma.

Through AKN, the Bila Pi Kuc project led by YOLRED, demonstrated that alternative storytelling practices for effectively conveying the experiences of survivors are possible. The project produced an animation and a multi-frame comic, which each visualised the experiences of girls and boys who have been exploited as child soldiers and as women and men are navigating the complexities of rehabilitation and reintegration.

Each method poignantly visualized the experiences of survivors, allowing them to share their perspectives at an international level, without exposing individuals’ identities.

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Healing Spaces

Working with survivors of human trafficking in Uganda, BuildX Studio has created a design framework for bespoke rehabilitation centres that better serve the needs of their users. The Healing spaces project responded to strong evidence of the impact of architectural and environmental design characteristics on healthcare outcomes, and specifically the need for research focussing on the psychological benefits of treating and supporting survivors of slavery and human trafficking in well-designed physical environments.

BuildX partnered with the Dream Revival Centre (DRC) in Uganda and worked with communities of survivors currently residing in rehabilitation centres to visualize a physical environment that could better aid their process of recovery. These designs made recommendations for architects and policymakers on the function and form of spaces, their sonic aspect, the lighting of interior spaces, decorative and security features as well as suggesting how such centres could be situated within and affiliated to local communities.