Migration Now!
ORGANIZERS: Favianna Rodriguez and Roger Peet
EDITION: 140
YEAR: 2012
PRINTING INFO: Thirty-seven prints with custom paper encasement. Printed at Mullowney Printing in San Francisco and at Flight 64 in Portland, OR.
“Migration is a lens through which we can interpret contemporary society and the focal point around which so much turns: race and culture, gender and sexuality, class and representation, economics and the natural world; new ideas, bad ideas, the harshest cruelty and the most open arms – all are there, spinning in tight orbit around people’s innate desire to move.”
Migration is a phenomenon, not a problem – something that simply is. The right to migrate and to move freely is our human right. When societies restrict or choke off the movements of their citizens, they end up doing the work of a dam- they generate power and control floods, but in doing so they destroy life and wreck the surrounding space.
Migration Now! was a print portfolio co-produced by Justseeds and CultureStrike (CultureStrike is now part of the Center for Cultural Power) which explored the social, cultural, and emotional facets of immigration.
We attempted to re-imagine migration as an inevitability, a social practice not to be prevented but to be related to. All migration starts with social relationships. When people move, they are going either towards their families or communities, or more often, away from them. They move to help their relatives, or support them by leaving. People migrate because their homes stifle them, because those homes become burdens they need to shed in order to have full lives. They move in search of opportunity, or to escape their past, or to simply survive. They move because of lies they are told and that they come to believe, and they move to fulfill the most beautiful and fragile of dreams. Migration is fundamentally about our right to move freely across planet Earth, in search of our fullest and best selves.
Check out all of the individual prints in this portfolio, and bios of the participating artists, on the Migration Now! website.
We offer exhibition copies of all of our portfolios for loan to schools, galleries, libraries, community spaces, and other institutions and organizations that want to temporarily exhibit our work! Check out this page for more details and to get started!
