Migrants In Culture is a migrant-led design agency.
We resource organisers and artists to build more creative and powerful social movements.
We move towards our collective capacity to imagine and to live without borders.
Our work
We offer graphic design services & visual organising training for social movements
We convene creative learning labs for organisers to embody, imagine and design for border abolition
We activate research in creative diasporic strategies for organisers
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!”
Who we are
In our lifetime, conflict and climate change will continue, as will the necessity of migration.
Organisers with lived experience of a hostile immigration system need to be in leadership, yet are under-resourced and burning out.
Art and culture is a powerful strategy to resource migrant organisers and the movements they lead.
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.
Our values
Migrant-led
“Nothing about us without us” - Disability Justice Movement
We believe in the leadership of people who have experienced migration, diaspora and displacement, especially those most impacted by the UK’s hostile immigration regime.
We reject the false binary of the good/bad migrant, and recognise organising for migrant justice is an inseparable part of our collective liberation.
Arts based organising
“The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible” - Toni Cade Bambara
As culture workers we use our creative skills to nurture our collective capacity to imagine what we most want to flourish, not just what we must resist.
We believe that a more imaginative movement is a more powerful movement.
Design Justice
“Design justice rethinks design processes, centres people who are normally marginalised by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.” - Design Justice Principle 1
We are committed to Design Justice principles in designing more just and joyful situations and systems.
Interdependency
“Un Mondo Donde Quepan Muchos Mundos” - A world Where Many Worlds Fit -Zapatistas
We are practising the absence of borders within ourselves, our relationships and organising systems with the presence of care and accountability for our multiple interdependencies.
We believe in the possibility and dignity of a world where many worlds fit.
Support us
We are working hard to contribute to an ecology of transformation.
Anything you can contribute is welcome.
Thank you for your support.
