Remote…Local Zine
A zine created by young migrants of St Leonards, exploring who and what counts as local.
The Remote…Local Zine marks the end of a programme of creative workshops by the same name. Over the course of six weeks, the young people explored what it means to be local in relation to their own experiences, while learning about writing, poetry, photography, do-it-yourself publishing, collaging, sound art, creative mapping, and other ways of making.
Each workshop was led by a different artist; the zine captures some of the ideas they developed throughout the project and was curated and put together by them.
Free copies of the Zine will be made available from May 2023 in many of our favourite local St Leonards venues including at Afri-Co-Lab, 3 Marine Court, Saint Leonards.
More about Remote…Local
At the core of Remote…Local is a diverse migrant collective. The project was conceived by a steering group of people with experience of migration who live in St Leonards, in collaboration with Critical Interruptions, a migrant writing cooperative working from London and Belfast.
Once devised by the steering group, the project was handed over to artists to lead individual workshops, and most importantly, to young participants, first, second and third generation migrants, aged between 12 and 16.
What we all shared was a drive to create a space in which migrancy would not be a story to tell someone else, but exist as the entanglement of roots and routes, bonds and connections, the many kinds of border-crossings we know it as.
In this space, we collectively imagined how migrants make and remake the ‘local’ to contain differences and multitudes.
During the first Remote…Local workshop, the young people introduced each other to their own landmarks of St Leonards. They mapped out places they cherished and places they missed, places they felt connected to but never been, places that hold their stories, and those that needed inventing or importing:
A cat cafe.
The mosque.
A cafe in the sea.
Next to a football pitch.
And there, in the cat cafe, in the mosque, on a beach next to a football pitch, all of the people who are not here.
On this map of St Leonards, the real and the imagined town merged. Across six weeks, this counter-mapping continued, each time through a lens of a different artform.
The zine is a snapshot: of some of the work the participants made and some of the answers they found to the question of ‘being local’. It was shaped by a group of young people whose visions of St Leonards are expansive, intimate and unbordered. Selected and edited by them, the materials in the zine are glimpses into how the migrant and the local find each other, intersect with each other, and encompass each other.
Remote…Local was imagined and made by
Remote…Local workshop participants: Olivia Chaiz, Shaffa Katz ,Lilly Katz, Lelyan Dodaki, Nareen Dodaki, Frank Holland, Rodian Streizonoks, Trevor Nyambura, Malak Bilal Nazar, Malak Babiker Balla Shom, Awab Mohammed Adam, Mazen Abdalla Ibrahim
Artists: Critical Interruptions (Diana Damian Martin and Bojana Janković), Danne Jobin, Anna Maria Nabirye, Charles Osaji, Fraser Carr Miles (Unit 33), Tara Fatehi Irani
Zine design and print: Unit 33
Sound design: Ted Barrow
Remote…Local Steering Group: Agata Read, Anna Goszczyńska, Balasz Szabo, Chamroen Podini, Nichelle Kelleher, Rosanna Leal, Yeser Mansour, Bri O’Reilly
Khadija Khan (Community Arts Coordinator)
Hannah Fox (Good Stuff Project Manager)
Vanessa Farinha (Project Coordinator, August 2021 – May 2022)
Chris Pierre (Remote…Local Volunteer)
Thank you:
Afri-Co-Lab, Claudine Eccleston
Other info
Remote…Local was part of our Good Stuff in St Leonards programme funded by Creative Civic Change, a partnership between Local Trust, the National Lottery Community Fund, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
