HE BIRD WHO CAME FROM AFAR: BETWEEN LANDS, LANGUAGES AND DIFFERENT MEDIA — A CRITICAL REVIEW
In this Critical Review, I reflect on my Negotiated Project through the themes of migration, cultural identity, language, and material storytelling. Using the metaphor of “The Bird Who Came from Afar”, a poetic character I created, I explored my diasporic existence: living between Greece, the UK, China, Italy and the Isle of Man, while experimenting with text, fabric, sound and visual imagery. The work emerges from the tension between displacement and belonging, foreignness and familiarity, and navigates how creative practice can become a space of healing, resistance, and renewal.
The Negotiated Project served as a field where my background in literature, design, and migration experience collided. As Stuart Hall (1990) suggests, identity is not a fixed essence but a “positioning”; I took this idea further by working across media, allowing the positioning of myself, as both an insider and outsider, to constantly shift and speak through different forms.
Themes and Context
My project draws from personal narrative and aligns with autoethnographic practices where the artist’s life becomes material for inquiry. Like Sarah Pink (2009) argues, ethnography through art can reveal subtle, affective dimensions of human experience. I used writing (in English and “Greenglish”), voice recordings, and handmade objects to tell a story that was both mine and larger than me: a migrant’s story, a story of searching, of in-betweenness.
Inspired by Cavafy’s Ithaka, the journey (not the destination) became central. As the speaker of the poem longs for the road to be long, I too used the work as a form of pilgrimage through memory, language and form.
This project emerged at the intersection of language and identity, as theorised by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), where language is not just a tool of communication but a site of resistance and self-definition. Writing in Greenglish (the phonetic transliteration of Greek into English characters) allowed me to embody the liminality of cultural dislocation: “ohi edo, oute eki” (neither here nor there), as we say in Greek.
Media as Language
In my practice, I used a mixture of:
- Textiles as my moving force to move around the world.
- Poetry and storytelling, in bilingual/bi-script format,
- Voice, often layered or distorted, to evoke dislocation and translation,
- Found objects, like driftwood or scraps, echoing the migrant’s gathering of fragments,
- Photos and visual layouts, inspired by installations more than narrative film.
Each medium became a language, and their overlap, a dialogue. This resonates with Mieke Bal’s concept of “intermediality” (2002), which describes how meaning emerges not from isolated forms, but from their interaction.
From Concept to Process
Initially, my interest was focused on the personal story of my migration to China and then to the Isle of Man, using The Bird Who Came from Afar as an alter ego. Over time, however, in my perception, the bird stopped being just “me” and became a symbol for anyone dislocated by life, politics, or love.
As I worked, the project evolved through:
- Sketchbooks filled with bilingual thoughts, quick poems, and fabric swatches;
- Photo diaries, where I captured thoughts during walks;
- Experiments with writing layout, such as cross-reading poems (Greek left/English right) or visual grids.
One surprising direction was when I realised how language interferes with emotion: some ideas made more sense in Greek, others in English. The act of translation, therefore, became both creative and painful, as meanings shifted, faded, or deepened. Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “afterlife of translation” (1923/2000) influenced me: where translation is not just conversion, but transformation.
Theoretical Influence and Methodology
Three key thinkers shaped this project:
- Homi Bhabha (1994), with his notion of the Third Space: a hybrid zone where new identities emerge. My work inhabits this space: not Greek, not British, not Manx, but all and neither. In the Third Space, even silence becomes speech.
- Bracha Ettinger’s (2006) matrixial gaze also guided me. She speaks of art as a space of co-emergence, not confrontation. I wanted my project to be gentle, inviting, and full of minor gestures (Manning, 2016) that speak without shouting.
- Finally, Bell hooks’ (1995) understanding of homeplace as a site of resistance helped me see how belonging can be made: through ritual, story, food, stitching, listening even in exile.
Challenges and Reflections
This project came with emotional weight. Often, writing personal memories made me feel exposed. Sharing voice recordings in critique sessions, where my accent and hesitation were audible, was a moment of vulnerability.
But this vulnerability became an aesthetic strategy. As Eve Sedgwick writes (2003), the personal is not the opposite of the critical; it is the critical, when treated with attention and craft.
One of the biggest challenges was editing: the project kept growing. I had to learn to distill rather than accumulate. Another difficulty was how to communicate bilingual or cross-script text in formats like blogs or presentations: where Greek letters may not show properly. In that sense, my project disobeyed technological boundaries, insisting on its hybrid, outsider nature.
What This Project Means for My Future Practice
This work has opened a new path for me. I used to see myself as someone with a fragmented background. But this project allowed me to treat fragmentation not as a lack, but as a method. A method of weaving parts together. A way to speak from the margins with clarity and strength.
Going forward, I want to deepen my use of personal mythology, voice, textile, and bilingualism. I want to create installations or books that feel intimate, that invite the reader or viewer into a shared subtle space.
I also plan to engage more with other diasporic artists and writers, building collaborative or dialogic works across distance. The Bird Who Came from Afar might return in new forms, as a zine, as a spoken-word piece, as an exhibition or as a second story.
Conclusion
The Negotiated Project, The Bird Who Came from Afar, was more than a creative task. It became a personal odyssey. Through bilingual writing, textile, sound and story, I created a space where displacement could find a voice. Where home is not a location, but a relation. Where art is not a product, but a process of becoming.
This review has helped me understand how themes of migration, hybridity, and media translation shape my practice. And how creative practice, like the bird, can fly across borders, carrying memory and hope in its wings.
References
- Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
- Bal, M. (2002) Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
- Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
- Benjamin, W. (2000) ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, ed. by Arendt, H., trans. Zohn, H. London: Pimlico.
- Ettinger, B.L. (2006) The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Hall, S. (1990) ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Rutherford, J. (ed.) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 222–237.
- hooks, b. (1995) Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press.
- Manning, E. (2016) The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke University Press.
- Pink, S. (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: SAGE.
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