Birds Crossing Borders
by Khadija Baker
Birds Crossing Borders is a site-specific sound installation combining audio, video, waterfalls and other effects. Through this interdisciplinary installation, Khadija Baker shares the collected stories of refugees in Canada, in particular those displaced by the current conflict in Syria, focusing on collective and individual memories of crossing borders. The project is a conceptual reflection on displaced movement and the process of belonging; it is to examine the processes of feeling at home and integration. This is a reflection on the connectedness of human movement, but also on the feeling of displacement in relation to a new land and new people. A question will be tested here: How will the host society own the collective memory and generate the sense of understating? How will it grow more familiar with the newcomer? This moment of connection is when the acceptance or at least their real image of these refugees is imagined. The project was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (CAC), and images are at MAI (Montreal, Arts Interculturels) Gallery.