Visual Artist & Community Art Practitioner 

As a team Paria Goodarzi and Mia Gubbay have developed a creative project with the group over six sessions as part of the Rediscovering the Antonine Wall Project – a National heritage lottery funded project initiated by West Dunbartonshire Council that aims to raise awareness about the Antonine Wall amongst communities living locally to it. This was a collaboration with the Arts Development Officer at the Refugee Council Scotland and the Regional integration co-ordinator in Falkirk.  

The 'rediscovery' of historic sites serve as a metaphor for the migration process - like moving from one place to another these sites takes on new meanings in theirs remote new home in the present. As a group we have also adopted new ways, changed the languages we speak and the ways we see the world within the rapid political and social changes that we have witnessed. The work comments on the group's migratory reality - re-centering experiences of movement within stories of Scottish and global heritage.’ 

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The initial concept for the collaboration on the Rediscovering the Antonine Wall project drew from the the metaphor of the distance of the past as a sense of foreignness. Distance through this metaphor becomes a space for possible re-invention -  a way to re-imagine and connect our own experiences with the places we visit and the museum objects we engage with– the stories and traces of the peoples of the past whose skills, strengths, histories of movement, improvisation, contributions  and multilingualism constitute a wealth of hidden histories.