the border | line

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means”. Theresa May, Tory Party Conference, 5 October 2016 'Citizens of Nowhere' is a project about the experience of citizenship, nationality and identity on a political, cultural and social level. The project is a personal response to the 2016 Brexit referendum where 51.9% of the British population voted to leave the European Union, and the increased racism and xenophobia that followed. I was born in Poland and moved to the UK as a child with my mother and sister in 2001. 'Citizens of Nowhere' is based on my family’s experience of immigrant life in the UK. The Brexit referendum was the first time when I became acutely aware of my ‘otherness’ and ‘unBritishness’ as I was unable to vote. 'Citizens of Nowhere' is an experimental stop-motion animation created from medium format and 35mm analogue portraits. I shot portraits of myself, my sister and my mother in our family home in East London. I wanted to imprint the journey of migration into the physicality of the image and soaked my film rolls in English Channel salt water to mark the geographical identity of the British Isles. This results in different degrees of distortion, which visually mimics the required process of "naturalisation" and the degree of erosion of immigrant identity. I also used a process known as “red scale” where colour negative film is loaded “backwards” and the images are shot through the protective semi-transparent layer on the back resulting in reddish-orange filter. Through this process I explore my own feeling of “un-belonging” within the British culture and society. Physical journeying and displacement is what underpins any migration journey and to incorporate further movement in my work I printed out the analogue portraits and created a stop-motion animation. As a result, the portraits of myself and my family are in constant flux, forever changing and adapting, like our immigrant identity in the UK. The animation also incorporates interviews in Polish and English about our experience in the UK. The animation, is accompanied by my own version of a British Citizenship test, which is been based on reports from The Office for National Statistics, UK’s Migration Advisory Committee and newspaper articles. The form is based on the ‘real’ Life in the UK Test, which is used by the Home Office as part of the naturalisation evaluation process. The 20 questions in my version are based specifically on EU immigration experience and evaluate the contribution and presence of EU immigrants in the UK. https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/K8HG77C