Intertwined Journeys-Refugee Poetry Performance

October 11, 2019 - 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

As a compliment to our exhibition Recreating Home, ArtRage will hold a poetry reading featuring work from local refugee and immigrant youth.

The poets were part of the 2019 Narratio Fellowship & Artist-in-Residence Program which was created in collaboration with Syracuse University and the North Side Learning Center.

Designed and facilitated by writer and social entrepreneur Ahmed Badr and Syracuse University professor Brice Nordquist, the program brought resettled refugee youth Fellows together with artists  to participate in an intensive four-week storytelling program. The program offered opportunities for refugees and recent immigrants to tell and share their stories.

The program  included workshops, guest speakers, and site visits, culminating in a week-long trip to New York City (July 28th-August 2nd), with sessions at the United Nations, Squarespace, The New York Times, and a performance of original poetry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Free to the Public.

More about the Narratio Fellowship & Artist-in-Residence Program
Unlike popular representations of resettlement, this program is not aimed at highlighting experiences of displacement. Instead, we seek to create space to explore and represent a fuller range of experiences of those who happen to be displaced. Narratives of refugee experience have too often been limited to that of war and conflict. While violences of displacement must be remembered, this project extends these narratives to include experiences beyond conflict.

Through this program, Fellows are given the opportunity to reclaim the complexity of their own narratives by embracing the plurality of their identities as new Americans, critically engaging with their personal experiences, and finding new avenues for self-expression. In these ways, the Narratio Fellowship is not focused on giving power to refugee youth, but rather on activating the power they already hold.