Mobile Diaspora in HAM Helsinki Art Museum and Turku Museum Center 2017. Finnish Labour Museum Werstas 2018. The Mobile Diaspora team is Amir Jan, Anna Knappe and Pekka Niskanen.
Mobile Diaspora is a series of videos in which asylum seekers talk about their lives and their journey to Finland. The videos were made in collaboration with the asylum seekers themselves. The aim of the project is not to tell Finns what asylum seekers are or what they have to offer Finnish society, but to ask them what they want to tell us. Mobile Diaspora is first and foremost about doing things together.
As the title suggests, Mobile Diaspora alludes to mobility, mobile technology and mobile phones, the lifeline through which asylum seekers tell about their experiences and aspirations to each other, to their families, friends and social media audiences. Diaspora means scattering. It generally refers to the forced migration of a religious or ethnic group to a new country or region.
