Refugees in a Multimedia Dialogue: A Methodology that Inspires the Creation of New Narratives on Migration in an Evolving Process of Change

Abstract

Based on the project No child’s play this chapter describes how arts-based methods and, especially, (visual) storytelling can inspire the creation of new narratives on migration in a slow process of change. No child’s play is a long-term project of more than 13 years that deals with the consequences of persecution, war and flight for refugees and their families as well as the Swiss public. The project is a good example of participatory action research (PAR), as it contributes to the empowerment of and awareness among the different groups in society which participated in the project. The analysis shows that arts-based methods create an emotional access and awareness, serving as a ‘teaser’. They can move, especially young participants, to reflect and talk about personal experiences or attitudes related to origins, war, trauma, home or discrimination. Many would speak about their past in front of others for the very first time, suddenly realising that their stories matter and that it is important to deal with them. This chapter illustrates this process of change with various examples. Moreover, it analyses two prominent perspectives that shaped the narratives. One is the family and its ambivalent role as a place of refuge and (over)protection. The other is the role of religion and faith as coping strategies and cultural ties for refugee families.

1 Introduction

In Switzerland, up until the 1990s, scant data and knowledge existed on the traumatic consequences of war, flight and persecution in the daily lives of refugees. The topic was practically unexplored in academic research and unknown amongst the public and professionals working with traumatised refugees – such as therapists, doctors, social workers, teachers or the administration. This unsatisfactory situation first began to change with the Swiss Red Cross commissioning a broad study on the topic at the time of the Yugoslavian war in 1991: Die Sprache der extremen Gewalt (The language of extreme violence) conducted by former Professor of Ethnology at the University of Berne, Hans-Rudolf Wicker (2001). The results of the study clearly demonstrated how many refugees living in Switzerland were suffering from the consequences of violence. Based on the study’s results, the first national therapy centre for victims of torture, today known as the Ambulatorium für Folter- und Kriegsopfer (AFK, Ambulatory for victims of torture and war), was set up in Berne in 1995. Its inauguration has been followed by an ever-increasing number of clients asking for support or on-site assistance. Since then, four further ambulatories have opened their doors in the cities of Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne and St Gallen. Together, they form the national network “Support for Torture Victims”.

Despite these changes, however, it took a long time for knowledge on trauma to spread. As late as 2010, Thomas Maier and Mirjam Straub stated in an article that “the needs and expectations of traumatized migrants requesting treatment are often unknown to health care professionals; even more unknown are those of patients not requesting treatment, and communication ends up being complicated” (Maier & Straub, 2010, p. 1). This lack of knowledge on trauma was all the more true for the wider public, including all those working with refugees, such as civil servants and teachers, to name but a few. This lack of knowledge may lead to behaviour that prolongs the trauma of refugees whereas raising the awareness of trauma may facilitate healing (Jörg-Zougli & Holzer, 2015), as has particularly been shown for schools (Fazel & Stein, 2002, p. 368). This was the point of departure at which we began to work on the project No child’s play in 2007. The project aimed to gather narratives on the consequences of persecution, war and flight on refugees and their families and to present these to a wider public. This meant inventing a whole new set of methods for both gathering the data and presenting them. These methods aim to give refugees control over the process, strengthen their mental health and personal resources under difficult life circumstances, inspire an atmosphere of trust between the interlocutors in the research process and provide a safe space for the public exhibition and discussion of the results. The project combined social science research methods – such as guided interviews to gather personal narratives – with participatory arts-based methods, such as photography, storytelling, video and film. The results were presented at exhibitions which, again, included participatory arts-based elements meant to inspire our audiences to become involved. This not only provided new input for the further development of the project but also led to the creation of further narratives that allowed us to observe cultural change in narratives over the years.

This chapter first describes the four parts of our project. We then elaborate on our methodology by referring to participatory action research (PAR), highlighting the artistic methods we used as a good practice to actively include participants in projects and reflecting on ethical questions and concerns. In the last section, we examine the processes of change of narratives inspired by our project by taking a closer look at the participants’ reflection of their own past and by looking at the roles of family, religion and faith.

2 The Long-Term Project no child’s Play (2007–2021)

• Part I Photo-exhibition “Living with difficult memories in a safe country” (2007–2011)

In the first part of the project, we wanted to find out how refugees affected by post-traumatic stress disorder are coping with their tormenting memories in daily life and how difficult living circumstances, such as an uncertain asylum status, affect their health. Our interdisciplinary team aimed to gain research insights and gave 16 refugees and their families the opportunity to express their experiences, fears and hopes. We met the portrayed refugees together with their families several times over a period of 3 years and this close collaboration formed the basis for the second part of our long-term project No child’s play. Eventually, 16 portraits (texts and photos) were presented in a publication (Kamm & Schade, 2008) and at an itinerant photo-exhibition (Figs. 11.1, 11.2, and 11.3) which formed the kick-off for a research and arts project – lasting more than 10 years – which has since been evolving continuously. The itinerant photo-exhibition was set up in close collaboration with the medical Ambulatories in Zurich and Berne and co-financed by the Swiss Red Cross.

Fig. 11.1

Photo-exhibition Berne. (Photo: Jérémie Dubois)

Fig. 11.2

Photo-exhibition Chur. (Photo: Meinrad Schade)

Fig. 11.3

Photo-exhibition Berne. (Photo: Meinrad Schade)

• Part II Film and publication No child’s play (2012–2015)

Throughout the first part of the project, the role and experiences of the children of the refugee families drew increasing attention from specialists, young participants and researchers; after the photo-exhibition, the necessity of providing the children with the space to express themselves became ever more evident. We therefore decided to produce a portrait film in German, French and English accompanied by a bilingual publication, under the title No child’s play, that follows the story of four young adults, three of whom belong to families which had already participated in the preceding project (Kamm et al., 2015a, b). The four protagonists – named Deniz, Lindita, Haron and Khûe – originally come from Turkey, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Vietnam and live, with their families, in the German- and French-speaking parts of Switzerland. We started to collect their personal stories through guided interviews and video clips – interviewing their parents, sisters and brothers together with them – and documented these discussions.¹

Subsequently, we presented the film to a wider public followed by various round-tables (Fig. 11.4). These were the first public presentations about the (traumatic) impact of war and persecution on the second generation of refugees in Switzerland (for a detailed evaluation, see Kamm, n.d.). Again, this second part of the project was realised in cooperation with the by-now-five Ambulatories of the Swiss Red Cross in Berne, Zurich, St Gallen, Lausanne and Geneva. Some of their medical experts answered questions from our protagonists in the publication and provided background information for young adults with traumatic experiences as well as guidelines for an interested public (Kamm et al., 2018).

Fig. 11.4

Film and publication No child’s play, Berne. (Photo: Meinrad Schade)

• Part III Interactive Video-Box and interventions in professional schools (2015–2017)

Aiming to involve more young adults in the dialogue with refugees, we decided to build an interactive Video-Box and place it in several professional schools across Switzerland. The Video-Box offered a virtual space in which students were stimulated to respond to the collected narratives of three of our four protagonists – Deniz, Lindita and Haron. These latter tell their personal stories and ask the visitor sitting in the Video-Box several questions about war, refuge, the meaning of family, memories, freedom, trauma, their sense of home and about their hopes for the future. Students then had the opportunity to answer each of these questions or to skip them by pressing a red button. Throughout the sessions, students were either filmed or only recorded and stayed anonymous by putting a sticker in front of the camera; they were informed that the data could be used for scientific purposes. Between 2017 and 2019, the interactive Video-Box was placed in several professional schools across Switzerland (Vocational School Basel, Technical College Zurich (TBZ), Vocational School Berne (GIBB) and Cantonal School Schaffhausen) with the aim of integrating the element into the school curriculum for a couple of weeks (Fig. 11.5). In advance we handed the teachers an information set and several exercises to help them in preparing and discussing the relevant issues with their students. More than 30 classes visited the Video-Box and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, of which the more than 300 registered statements were proof.

Fig. 11.5

Interactive Video-Box at professional schools (Photo: Face Migration)

• Part IV Interactive video installation and itinerant exhibition No child’s play (2017–2021)

We collected the video clips recorded in the Video-Box, made a selection and cut the clips together into three video installations before projecting them on three different screens. These video installations formed the last section of a final itinerant exhibition which presented all refugee and student narratives from the beginning of the project until its end, displaying all four parts of our project in chronological order.

The opening of the exhibition in Berne on 18 October 2018 formed the highlight of the project and was a great success, counting a total of 1109 visitors and eight accompanying round-tables with more than 500 visitors (Fig. 11.6). The exhibition lasted for 2 months and was set up in collaboration with the museum Polit-Forum in Berne, the Swiss Red Cross, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Swiss Federation of Protestant Churches. Younger public and school classes came to visit the exhibition in groups, whereas experts, stake-holders and artists visited the accompanying round-tables and conferences. In the city of Chur, the cantonal office for integration invited the exhibition and organised more than 30 guided tours for school classes from all over the canton. After Chur – and due to the Covid-19 pandemic – there was a break of 2 years before the exhibition was presented in Zurich from November 2021 to February 2022 (Fig. 11.7).

Fig. 11.6

Itinerant exhibition No child’s play, Berne. (Photos: Susanne Goldschmid)

Fig. 11.7

Itinerant exhibition No child’s play, Zurich. (Photos: Niklaus Spoerri)

3 Applying Visual Methods as a Journey to Oneself and Each Other

The long-term project No child’s play used artistic elements such as photography, text, video and film, combined with social science research methods such as guided interviews. This resulted in an itinerant exhibition which has been travelling throughout Switzerland up until today. These different artistic elements were continuously adapted to the next step of the project and were always discussed with the audience involved. We collected narratives in a sort of “feedback loop”, directing the participants to switch between the roles of audience and of active participants. This mirroring process was particularly appropriate for observing the cultural change in narratives over the years. The fact that we combined virtual with live dialogues motivated young participants to tell each other their life stories in a relaxed and also humorous way. An important result of the use of arts-based methods – and storytelling in particular – was that it created a transformative sphere for understanding issues around migration outside of established and polarised discourses. As Umut Erel points out in this volume (Chap. 10), these methods are useful both for generating research and for public engagement around this research.

The fact that we never knew in advance what our next step would be became the signature and main characteristic of the project. Its processual character, with a duration of more than 13 years, allowed us to strengthen the relationships between the families and ourselves as authors. It turned out that this was a successful element in the process of identification between the audience (the public receiving and listening to the stories) and the participants (the refugees and/or young students, creating and telling their stories in the different project phases). The strong and year-long relationships created trust, mutual understanding, familiarity and emotionality in the highly sensitive field of traumatic life experiences – which are extremely difficult to capture and share. Two students who visited the interactive Video-Box and final exhibition in Berne experienced it as follows:

The different elements of the exhibition are put together in such a way that, in the end, the visitors feel a certain familiarity with the single portrayed humans and their stories. This might be due to the fact that you could always feel the work in progress and the processual character of the project (Baumann et al., 2019, p. 2).²

Visual methods, especially film, were of particular importance in our project design (Kamm et al., 2016). This has to do with the specific advantages which these methods have, as they were aptly described by Desille and Nikielska-Sekula in their introduction to their recent publication on visual methodologies:

Visuals enable to ground research in places, and focus on the embodied experiences of persons who have experienced migration; secondly, visuals tell stories and hold the potential of multiplying and complexifying accounts of migration; third, visual methodologies increase the possibilities for cooperation, and therefore the need to recognise the competency of participants in knowledge production (2021, p. 3, italics in the original; see also Barsky & Martiniello, 2021).

These points also turned out to be very important for the outcome of our project. We fully agree with the authors that there is significant epistemological value in visuals, which allow us to go beyond boundaries and to link research with practice, as illustrated below. This particularly concerns the dimensions of place and body that have become more important in academic literature, migration research and visual methodology (Becker, 2019; Casey, 1996; Löw, 2019). As Casey (1996) writes, places and human beings are not only constituting each other but are also very elastic and characterised by a process of change and interaction. Places can be seen in terms of social interactions that tie together and define categories such as time and space, so that the latter “remain, first and last, dimensions of place, and they are experienced and expressed in place by the event of place” (Casey, 1996, p. 38).

The creation of artificial places such as the interactive Video-Box, where you can sit down alone or in pairs and chat, intensified the identification with the portrayed refugees. With its filmed story-telling as well as questions and answers, the Video-Box stimulated visitors to engage in interaction, discussion and dialogue around migration-related issues. Once one entered the Video-Box, refugees virtually addressed questions and students gave live answers, creating a sphere of intimacy and familiarity between the audience and the refugees. After having visited the interactive Video-Box, two students described it as follows: “In the end, we have got a very good impression of the protagonists [i.e. refugees] and you have the impression of having shared their personal stories ‘alive’” (Neelakumaran & Thirunavukkarasu, 2017, p. 20).

In order to give these encounters enough space, we always tried to put exchange or the in-between and unforeseen at the centre of the long-term project and to let things happen. Our intention was to step back from the scene and give the floor to young adults, specialists and/or refugees. They should interact, ask and answer personal questions that we had framed beforehand in a complex process. With the Video-Box, we built a sort of Black Box to challenge the audience and to prevent us methodologically from stigmatising refugees as the “colonial other”. Leitgeb and Mokre (2021, p. 2) write about this possible trap:

The frequent aim of projects involving refugees is to give those refugees a voice and make them visible. But visibility can be a double-edged sword, especially if it involves displaying differences that are already a focal point in mainstream discourse and in which that discourse is heavily invested.

While being attentive to what the two authors say, we would nevertheless strongly emphasise the advantage of participatory projects as an important form of empowerment and sensibilisation.

3.1 Actively Involving Participants in the Process of Co-constructing Knowledge

Our long-term project was genuinely participatory from its beginning. This was due to the arts-based method of storytelling that we had chosen – and, as just introduced before, the visual storytelling in particular, where participation is a central element. Our project is a typical example of so-called participatory action research (PAR). Following Umut Erel in her contribution to this volume (Chap. 10), PAR not simply considers research participants as providing raw data that can be transformed into knowledge by researchers but values research participants’ knowledge itself. Erel underlines that PAR aims to actively involve participants in the process of co-constructing knowledge. This was the case in the first part of our project, when traumatised refugees and their families decided about situations and places by choosing where to take their pictures and where to be interviewed over the 3 years. They also collaborated with us during the editing process of the written stories.

Co-constructing knowledge was an equally strong element during the second part of the project. Participants’ knowledge and aims were the core and heart of the film No child’s play, in which the whole set up and dramaturgy were based on the extensive interviews. The participants helped to choose the settings, organised the family get-togethers for the filming and were involved in the discussion of the next step of our project, the Video-Box. We collected their answers to the filmed interviews and put them together, formulating several questions and stories for a virtual dialogue in the Video-Box. After we launched the film, we regularly asked the young refugees and their families to participate in public debates about the consequences of flight, trauma and asylum on the second generation.

The four young adults played a particularly important role in the publication No child’s play in the form of written interviews between medical experts and themselves. In the end, we edited these interviews in the form of questions and answers and handed them out to teachers, students, experts and the public.

Active participation was also crucial in the third part of the project, letting young students participate in the virtual dialogue with refugees in the Video-Box. They could decide for themselves whether they wanted to answer the questions of the four young refugees and whether they wanted to be filmed or not – and to thereby agree or disagree to become part of the exhibition planned at the end.

PAR acknowledges participation itself as an important value and underlines the importance of engaging migrants as experts on their experience that is increasingly being voiced (Flynn, 2020). In our case, the huge echo that the project generated in a large audience proved that there is a great interest in hearing stories and seeing the faces behind the stories in the context of flight and migration. The same echo was achieved in conferences and debates, where experts discussed relevant topics linked to the project.

Bradbury-Huang (2010) notes that participatory action researchers have at least two main audiences: firstly, an audience of participants and practitioners, who tend to be interested in practical outcomes and social change. Multi-media outputs such as websites, short video-clips or visually engaging reports and toolkits are often appropriate to engage this audience (see also Erel’s Chap. 10 in this volume). The second audience is made up of academics who might be interested in the theoretical, methodological and other research findings which are addressed in academic publications such as books and journal articles. As our project proved, we reached both audiences: practitioners/participants and academics – the former in a surprisingly large number, as the whole project primarily aimed to reach them.

3.2 Dealing with Ethical Questions and Concerns

The active participation of refugees in the delicate field of the traumatic consequences of flight and asylum required a sensitive ethical handling, be it with guided interviews, written or filmed narratives or visual stories. In the first part of the project, we embedded the interviews on refugees’ traumatic experiences and post-traumatic stress disorder in a clearly defined medical context. To this purpose we signed a contract on ethical guidelines with the medical director of the Ambulatories, defining how we should deal with the interviews and their output (all participants were patients of the medical centres at that time and were being treated for their severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder). During the production process we regularly handed over all texts and photos to the involved patients and they had the right to withdraw from the project at any time (which happened with only one of the 17 patients). This procedure was demanding and asked for tact and sensitivity as well as constant interchange over the period of 3 years. It helped to build up a relation of mutual trust.

Desille and Nikielska-Sekula (2021, p. 15) speak about the “right to disappear”, allowing participants to withdraw from public attention during an ongoing project. We gave that right to our participants – which proved to be reassuring for both sides – and decided to also build the second part of the project on trust and free will. So our young adults who participated in film and publication signed an agreement which gave them the right to withdraw from the whole project at any time. This remained quite a risk for us as producers. Eventually, all the participants agreed that the film (DVD) and publications could be used for debates, conferences or professional development courses and itinerant exhibitions. As with the first project, every use of material on social media or in the media as such was excluded from the agreement and had to be negotiated separately. In the third part of the project, we agreed with the teachers and school directors on using video material (more than 300 video-clips) only for the itinerant exhibition or anonymously for research purposes. All students and scholars had the choice of entering the Video-Box and answering either anonymously or while being filmed.

Looking back, we are convinced that, due to excluding the publication of the stories on social media, we managed to gain the trust of the participants and professional institutions such as clinics and/or schools. This allowed us to also publish politically delicate stories. Some of the participants nevertheless took active roles as ambassadors and gave interviews on national radio stations and in national newspapers. However, when an interview with one of the young adults had erroneously been posted on social media by a journalist, we knew we had made the right decision about excluding the use of social media as, only hours after the publication, the young woman and her family received threatening reactions and were verbally attacked for what she had said.

The fact that we are working as independent researchers or artists and not for established institutions probably played a positive role in gaining the trust of the participants – the lack of an institutional hierarchy created a certain intimacy in our collaboration with them, which allowed us to build relationships that sometimes went beyond the purely professional interaction. Especially during the first part of the project, there was a certain danger of losing our healthy distance from the participants and their stories. We thought that we needed to shield them from the “outer” threatening world or audience.

4 Narratives in a Process of Change

The project, with its duration of almost 15 years, formed an ideal field of observation of a possible process of creation and change in narratives. We were indeed able to observe creation and change of narratives through the active participation of the protagonists, as well as through the reception of the audience. Senders and receivers of messages and narratives changed their roles in the sense that former receivers could become senders of messages in the consecutive part of the project. This happened, for example, when the four young protagonists in the film changed their role from being initially passive listeners to their parent’s stories to a more active role as senders and ambassadors during the film and, finally, when they took part in the Video-Box or in conferences.

This process of going public not only created a dialogue with the audience but also changed the personal narratives of the participants – depending, for example, on whether they were told in a private, half private or public sphere. Through the process of publishing, you could see that narratives became independent and were transformed and reframed into a (semi-)public discourse among practitioners, refugees, schoolteachers etc. An impressive example of this transformation took place during the series of conferences and debates that accompanied the final exhibition No child’s play. Very often topics such as the legalisation of undocumented migrants lead to emotional and polarised debates which somewhat hinder a constructive discussion. In our project this polarisation did not happen: the fact that we started the debates with personal testimonials and stories of the participating refugees seemed to change the narratives and discussions into a less-polarised and more far-reaching dialogue. This observation confirms that arts-based methods can create a transformative sphere for understanding migration issues outside of polarised discourses (also see Chap. 10).

The following three sections illustrate the process of going public and its influence on some domains of personal narratives and their change, be they autobiographic, family related or concerning religion and faith.

4.1 Getting Conscious and Going Public

During the project, some of the most memorable moments occurred when participants admitted that they had never spoken to anyone about what they were just telling us. This courage to speak out and to create awareness about their own past was touchingly emotional and turned out to be a recurrent element of the project. The process of finding words for one’s own, sometimes traumatic, experiences in the context of flight and persecution not only helped to create narratives but these narratives also changed through interaction with others and the audience, as the following examples illustrate. When we met traumatised refugees who belonged to the first generation, they would start telling us hesitantly about their sometimes terrible experiences of years in jail, persecution and loss of family and children during war or in their home country – things that we cannot imagine and even less put into words. However, the more we met and as time passed, they sometimes could not stop talking about what had happened to them. Voicing past experiences in a way that they can be heard and find the way to an audience seemed to be essential for recovering:

Victims shall become survivors who are not only living memorials for their family and people, but fulfil their roles as fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and examples. That they agreed to be portrayed is linked to their wish not to remain in speech- and namelessness. In this exhibition, they bear witness to their lives and to the fact that they did not perish but returned from the ‘circle of hell’ to the living (Thomas Maier, in the introduction to Kamm & Schade, 2008).

Sometimes these narratives changed when the refugees spoke publicly about their difficult living experiences here in Switzerland – a sort of liminal status in a provisional waiting zone, which made it difficult for them to get in touch with daily life again. The fact that some of them had become ambassadors and key persons during debates, at exhibition openings, in media interviews or during discussions, helped them to strengthen their self-confidence and build their self-esteem (also see Chap. 13 in this volume). It also helped to lighten the burden of an insecure present and future. Narratives, with time, changed their focus on the very personal living circumstances and the feeling of being at the mercy of one’s narrow accommodation, into an active handling of everyday tasks and a higher degree of abstraction and objectification. Furthermore, the personal stories created a deeper sense of understanding and empathy for the refugees in the audience and also an awareness for the extremely difficult or even inhuman living conditions of asylum-seekers in Switzerland.

This process of change worked the other way around when it came to the children of refugees. To these adolescents it was not the immediate past but the actual living circumstances which were predominant. Children often accompanied their parents to social services or doctors’ appointments and translated for them. Some of them had not spoken to anyone outside the family about what they had gone through. Deniz, the daughter of a Turkish refugee family, heard about her father’s experiences during his 11 years of imprisonment for the very first time during an interview we had conducted with her father. The daughter had been silently listening when she shouted: “Why didn’t you tell me that before?” and, turning to us, the interviewer and photographer, said: “And who asked us, how we are dealing with all this?” Actually, this turned out to be the momentum which later motivated us to realise the project on the second generation. Since then, Deniz has changed her role and the narratives have become different. Initially, a rather passive listener, she now took on the role of an active participant, trying to find words for her own past and her own perception of the difficult living circumstances in Switzerland as well as mental health issues. With growing public attention, Deniz went through the process of first being an advocate for her parents and then seeking for independence and the development of her own personality. She even rebelled in public against the dominance of her politically very active father. She openly asked questions about traumatic consequences on the second generation and was eager to discuss the answers with experts on stage and with her father. The exchange with professional audiences and communities seemed to help her to achieve a certain distance from the burden of the past and to find a way to connect with the present. On the audience side – practitioners and therapists – it was interesting to notice the growing awareness and discussion of the possibly traumatising effects of flight, war and persecution on young adults. It seemed that this age group had been forgotten and that nobody felt responsible for the professional and health situation of younger refugees – who were not yet adults but were no longer children.

Adolescents are in search of life and of their own personality, continuously comparing themselves to others. The question “Who am I?” is essentially linked to that of “Where do I come from?” and “How have I become who I am?”. Emigration and flight are putting those narratives in the foreground. This became evident in the third part of the project, where young students, both with and without a refugee background, met in the Video-Box with the overall aim of a) answering these essential questions or reflecting about them very individually and b) discussing their own past with their peers or classmates. The Video-Box enabled an autobiographical narration and offered students a physical and virtual space for dealing with personal experiences. The intimacy of the box created an internal self as well as an external perception enabling direct consternation.

The vocational schoolteacher Karolin Linker from Zurich explained to us, in a personal interview, that the interactive Video-Box – with its simple construction – and the videos in which protagonists asked personal and direct questions, helped to create interaction with a certain depth. It struck her how much impact the stories in the Video-Box had on her students. These latter actively engaged in discussions about migration and the asylum system – realising, for example, how arbitrary a legal system can be for asylum-seekers struggling to obtain a residence permit or trying to prove (often in vain) that they had been exposed to severe human-rights violations. The students would also start reflecting on their own and others’ family backgrounds, realising for the first time how many people around them actually have a refugee and/or migration experience. Karolin Linker articulated this as follows: “It was impressive to get to know the sensitive, thoughtful and personal side of my students.” It seems that some of the students told their story for the first time in the intimate atmosphere of the Video-Box or, as Linker observed, “The box encouraged them to talk about their own history in the collective or to question certain things such as their family background. That does not happen very often.”

Almost half of the students visiting the Video-Box had a migration experience and talked about their own life history. Some of them told their story for the very first time while speaking either directly to the protagonists on the screen or to their peers sitting next to them. Most students related their situations to one of the protagonists in the box and, in this way, linked with them, as some of the collected statements demonstrate:

We also had many problems, like you. Political problems, military and police. Every day they came to our house and made problems. My father spent 8 years in prison […]. I was in a war and lived on a mountain and now I am in Switzerland. (Zurich).³

With me it was the same, I was around ten or nine years old when I fled from Eritrea. It was not a nice time. We had to flee because of the dictatorship, it was never good. (Basel)⁴

4.2 The Family as a Place of Protection, Exchange and (Over)Burden?

The important role of the family in this project shaped the narratives from the beginning. In the first part, severely traumatised refugees from the first generation spoke about their family as the place where they would seek refuge and emotional security, especially when it came to hostile and threatening situations. In the second part, it surprised us to discover the family as a unique place of debate, where members of the second generation started talking about their experiences in front of their parents, sisters and brothers.

When it came to flight, war and persecution, mothers were at the centre of the storytelling. One adolescent remembered that their mother did everything to protect the children and made them believe that war was a game and bombs were fireworks in front of their buildings. It was this recurrent narrative of protection which, in the end, gave the whole project its title No child’s play, stating that, contrary to what the children had been told by their mothers, war was no play. The focus in the filmed narratives on the family as a safe haven was echoed by the audience, as two students wrote after having visited the exhibition:

In the filmed portraits we could see that the family ties were remarkably strong and that they formed the strongest pillar of support during flight and during the first years in the new surroundings. (Baumann et al., 2019, p. 2)

The narrative of the parents – and the mother as a quasi-supernatural hero – changed over time and also during the active participation of the second generation in the project. Through their exchanges with the audience during debates or interviews, children started to reflect critically on their role within their family. On the one hand, they felt responsible for protecting their parents and to give back what they had received during hard times and, on the other, they felt pressure to succeed in school and to get a higher education, thus exceeding the expectations of their parents. This overperforming attitude is quite typical for many families in similar situations. Lindita, the young daughter of the Kosovar refugee family, says in the film that her mother had sacrificed everything for them and that now it was the children’s turn. Similarly, Haron, the eldest son of an Afghan family, underlines the fact that he and his sisters would do anything to offer their mother peace, relief and a good life now. However, through the exchange with the public, the protagonists also started to realise that they had to find their own and independent way into Swiss society and that they needed to look after themselves instead of living the life of their parents.

Again, through interaction and live exchange with the audience, it became clear to the protagonists that their self-imposed role as family mediators could be an over-burden and that they would need to find their own roles and positions in life. Thus, the opening of the narrative setting also changed its content, away from family-centred cocooning and towards a strive for autonomy. The feedback which we received from the audience showed us how the narratives in film and discussions surprised or impressed many visitors – who were unaware of the challenges which young adults with refugee experiences face in daily life – and, therefore, altered certain prejudices in perceptions. The narratives revealed the daily lives of young adults who are highly ambitious, reflective and sensitive and who struggle, over the years, to find their place in Swiss society.

Also in the third part, students indicated that family is the most important value as you can always rely on them. The importance of family became apparent when the students answered questions about what gives them strength – for the majority of them, family seemed to be a safe and protecting place that gave one a feeling of support. Or, as one of them described it: “It means home to me and you know that they take care of you” (Basel).⁵ Another student said: “My family gives me strength; even if I don’t want to say anything, they always know what is happening” (Schaffhausen).⁶ Another student proudly mentioned the following:

I am proud of my family, that they got so far. From a hard, dangerous and horrible country. Iraq is now not so good and they made it from such a country to here. That is very nice. (Basel)⁷

Hence, in the third part of the project, the questions in the Video-Box invited young students to reflect on their family situation and revealed how important the role of family is to most of them.

It would be interesting to see whether the crucial role of the family in narratives might lose its importance or might change with the duration of the stay, the coming of age and integration into society. Or, as a young student asked one of the protagonists while sitting in the Video-Box: “How do you look at your life after your flight? Maybe you first focused more on family and now you focus more on your work? This is what I wonder” (Berne).⁸

4.3 Religion and Faith as a Coping Strategy and Cultural Tie for Refugee Families

Religion and faith run like a common thread through the narratives and play a crucial role, especially during flight and after arrival. This contrasts with a usually somewhat critical stance and the shrinking importance of religion in many secularised societies, observable also in Switzerland (in the context of migration, religion is instead seen as a danger for fundamentalism and the conservation of traditional role models in the family, a fact that might result in political ignorance of its importance for certain groups). Nevertheless, our project showed that, for the participants, religion and faith are coping strategies and contribute to personal strength and resilience. The presence of God as a “higher instance” on whom one can rely in difficult situations and during flight has been considered existential by almost all the refugees participating in the project. It is in line with the important historical and cultural role that the Abrahamian religions traditionally played in the context of persecution, flight and exile (Metzger et al., 2020; von Däniken & Kamm, 2018). From the audience, two students wrote, in a short report after having visited the final exhibition:

The question of whether you can trust in God or in a “higher instance” plays a crucial role in the film No child’s play. Several statements prove that faith and religion offer a certain safety to the life of refugee families marked by trauma and flight. Faith offers an outlet to breathe deeply and take the burden off your shoulders. The trust and conviction that you have to carry on only as far as you can is being seen as a motivation to persevere. Here, the religious orientation of the families can vary a lot […] but mostly the religious ties seem to help in maintaining the cultural ties to the country of origin. (Baumann et al., 2019, p. 2).

Religion as a cultural tie to the country of origin is indeed very present in narratives and has been underlined in family discussions and interviews with participants, such as Lindita from Kosovo, Haron from Afghanistan and Khûe from Vietnam. Similar to the role of the family, the existential importance of religion or faith might later change and vary with the duration of stay; it also seems to decrease, the safer the residence and life situation get. The importance of faith and religion could be also observed in narratives of students who visited the Video-Box, as the following examples show: “Faith and my family give me strength to overcome difficult times” (Schaffhausen).⁹ Another student said: “If I have a difficult situation, I try to deal with it on my own. If I cannot make it, I go to my family and otherwise I go further – I believe in God” (Basel).¹⁰ For students without refugee experience, religion and faith seemed to be less important in their daily lives; instead, friends and family were usually mentioned as playing an essential role when dealing with difficult issues.

At least for the first and directly concerned generation of traumatised refugees, religion and faith play a crucial role in helping them to cope with their traumatic past. In her dissertation on the role of religion in the lives of the portrayed first-generation victims of war and torture, the author Cristiana Nicolet concluded:

My analysis shows that religion is existential for the elected and portrayed refugees. They are severely traumatised victims of torture and war – human beings who survived miraculously […]. Their hopes remain, increasingly nurtured by a very intense belief. Religion is their primary source of power, their lighthouse in the storm (Nicolet, 2016, p. 62).

5 Conclusion

Dialogue and the active participation of a younger population were the core and heart of the project. The artistic methods we used created an emotional access and served as a “teaser” to encourage reflection and talk about personal experiences or attitudes regarding the consequences of war, persecution and torture on the first and second generations of refugees. The central aim was to make public what usually remains a hidden reality – the personal narratives of refugee families and their children living in Switzerland and how they cope with their traumatic past.

When asked whether the chosen methods contributed to a process of change, we would clearly answer “yes”. The use of methods such as story-telling through writing, multimedia, feedback loop and interviews over a period of more than 13 years, allowed participants and the audience to tell their very personal and often tabooed stories, first to an inner circle (and to themselves) and then to a broader public. Thus, we managed, finally, to uncover hidden realities and to expound on these to society through active participation from different sides. Participants gained more self-determination, autonomy, respect and independence from their families and their past. For the audience, the film presentations, dialogue, conferences and exhibitions led to a deeper knowledge and understanding of refugees’ realities in the mirror of one’s own biography. We achieved an understanding of sensitive topics through a process of visualisation and identification with protagonists in a field in which opinions are usually too quickly polarised and prejudiced.

In a nutshell, we could say that, with the long-term project No child’s play we were able to make the following contribution to a change in narratives. We helped to avoid the polarisation present in an often highly politicised discourse on asylum and migration and, instead, pointed out the consequences for individual human beings and their surroundings. We achieved a wide distribution of publications on the topic, organised sold-out film events and debates and distributed recommendations addressed to stakeholders and politicians in German and French. We reached out to a younger audience that is usually less attuned to political topics and motivated them to reflect and speak differently about themselves in a migration context. We launched a process of acknowledgment of what it means for all of us to have possible hidden migration experiences in our own biography and how to deal with them – the link to one’s own experience created understanding and tolerance towards others. Finally, we made a contribution to the identification, clarification, treatment or access to treatment for traumatised refugees – as well as the greater acceptance of this necessity in society.

A clear limitation of the project lays in its strength: whereas arts-based methods allowed us to go deeper into life stories over the years, we collected only few comparable and quantified data. To obtain this kind of data, we would have needed much more personal and financial resources. We therefore strongly suggest that more research efforts be made and academic research be conducted on the consequences of traumatic experiences of persecution, war and flight on the second (and possibly third) generation of refugees in Switzerland – especially considering the fact that more and more refugees and families with traumatic experiences continue to live among us.