Meetings of the Art: Cultural Encounters and Contact Zones in an Art Project for Asylum-seeking Minors in Denmark

ABSTRACT

Cultural encounters are commonly understood as transformative meetings across difference. Drawing on four months’ ethnographic fieldwork at an art project for asylum-seeking minors at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, this paper argues that these kinds of framings may tend to overlook important interactions on either side of the meeting. I use the notion of the ‘contact zone’ (Clifford, J., 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press) to focus on three entangled dimensions of the project: space, sociality and materiality. The placement of the project at the museum and the absent spaces of the Red Cross asylum centres and schools, where the students spent the bulk of their time, structured it in particular ways. Further, the distinct social space of the project at once allowed students to continue and transform a variety of social relations with their peers and with staff. This was of particular significance for the students in a wider social context marked by transitoriness and uncertainty. Finally, the materialities of the project, the particular tools and objects used, were also significant in marking out the project as a contact zone. Taken together these dimensions at once enabled and constrained the transformative potential of the art project as a cultural encounter.

KEYWORDS:

• Contact zone
• intercultural contact
• asylum seekers
• art project

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Zachary Whyte is an Associate Professor at AMIS, University of Copenhagen. He works with asylum seekers and refugees in Denmark and Europe. He is interested in the intersections of transnationality, state practices, uncertainty and everyday life. He wrote his DPhil (University of Oxford) drawing on a year's ethnographic fieldwork at a Danish asylum centre, and completed a post.doc.(University of Copenhagen) examining refugees' experiences at Danish language schools. He has since pursued numerous academic and advisory projects working with asylum seekers and refugees, local communities, as well as state, municipal, private and civil society actors.