2 - Migrant Children Mediating Family Relations

Summary

MY FAMILY is the simple title of several collections of family pictures taken with disposable cameras by children of different origins. The pictures were taken at their individual homes in Roosendaal, a relatively small city in the southern province of North Brabant in the Netherlands. The pictures were the result of several children joining a media club as part of a European research project called Children in Communication about Migration (CHICAM). The assignment was to introduce their families to people “who do not know their cultures”. The first responses to the assignment were ambivalent. The children very much liked the idea of taking a camera home to play around with. However, not all children were comfortable with the idea of taking pictures at home. For them, this would mean taking their families out of the privacy of their homes, into a public space, where their family members would be “available” to a potentially wide and unknown audience. Nevertheless, after finishing their photographic work, all of the children gave their permission to show their work to others. They wanted their pictures to be seen; they wanted to be seen themselves. In many ways, the picture series are relevant for an understanding of the concept of family in Diaspora communities.

The stories that were written along with the pictures and presented together in a small exhibition gave us only a first glimpse of how family life is experienced by refugee and migrant children, and how it has become a site of negotiating identities and memories and of reconstructing the very notion of family as a place called “home”. As the CHICAM club work continued, the children produced more media works about how they experience family relationships. The children photographed family members in various situations mainly related to religious and ethnic circumstances. The photos, for example, show images of family members in their living rooms, at their kitchen tables, outside, praying, celebrating, sitting together, eating; we also see shots of a Somali tapestry, a Moroccan vase, and many other objects from their home countries. In this chapter, these representations will be discussed in the context of processes of identity formation.