Belongings

Belongings is an interactive installation that shares stories of displacement, resilience, and hope from six refugees who took safe harbour in Australia.

Produced for the Biennale of Sydney with SBS and Google’s Creative Lab, this XR work reinterprets the documentary form as a large-scale, multi user immersive experience. Integrating traditional documentary storytelling with emerging technology, we harnessed the power of each medium to offer a contemporary take on how digital techniques can promote empathy between culturally and linguistically diverse groups in a surprisingly intimate way.

We took our inspiration from contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei and his Law of the Journey artwork which highlighted the scale of global refugee crises around the world and the inevitable loss of identities and histories.

We asked ourselves how we could convey the humanity of his imposing artwork to a broad audience while also giving it a local context. In developing our concept, we started with this high-level thesis: Over the past century, lengthy and large-scale waves of human displacement have stripped millions of people of their histories and identities. The refugee crisis – no matter where it transpires – is a problem so pervasive and seemingly unsolvable that it has detrimentally impacted Western perceptions of the asylum seekers themselves.

This helped to frame the project while also providing a lens through which to examine it. However, it was still too broad. We needed to find a hook to centre the concept, something relatable that a wide audience could immediately appreciate.

Countless news reports have documented the plight of refugees and one image kept reappearing during our initial research – that of bags, backpacks or suitcases being carried with what we could only imagine were priceless possessions. We wondered what stories or memories might be contained in these bags and whether they could be a catalyst to open a dialogue with displaced people about their personal experiences.

So we set out to connect with Australians who have a lived experience of being a refugee.

Our goal was to challenge many of the stereotypes that had formed around these communities and partnered with refugee community facilitators to run storytelling workshops. We invited participants to bring with them a possession that reminded them of their home or a loved one.

The technology underpinning Belongings is a massive orchestration of elements; at the heart is a Node server that delivers content to our audiences’ mobile phone, in no less than 7 different languages, and supporting hundreds of concurrent users. Combining interactivity, WebGL motion graphics and streaming media, across the physical space and the web. Available in English, Arabic, Vietnamese, Hindi, Punjabi, Mandarin, Cantonese and Spanish, the installation is a powerful implementation of our multiuser Storyteller technology.