Ashish Ghadiali on lessons from Kenmure Street and Migrant Futurism

The reason? In the middle of the street two men – Sumit Sehdev and Lakhvir Singh – were being detained by officials in an immigration enforcement van as part of a dawn raid. But before the van could move off, members of the local community surrounded it. What followed was an eight-hour grassroots protest, as residents and protestors refused to let their neighbours be taken away. Eventually the authorities relented and the men were released to huge cheers from the crowds that had gathered.

This moment of hope and solidarity was the focus of one of three talks put together for 2023's Refugee Week at the Southbank Centre by filmmaker, activist and founder/director of Radical Ecology, Ashish Ghadiali. The talks are part of the launch of Migrant Futurism, a long-term curatorial strand of research and public programming which is led by Radical Ecology, in collaboration with Counterpoints Arts and ourselves.

Ahead of the talk we caught up with Ghadiali to find out more about Migrant Futurism and its purpose, and also to see what it was that drew him to the events of Kenmure Street, and what we can take and learn from what unfolded in Glasgow on that spring day.

I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit more about what Migrant Futurism is, and what it intends, or hopes, to do?

Do you know the song ‘My Queen is Doreen Lawrence’ by Sons of Kemet? With the lyrics ‘Don’t want to hear your racist claptrap, anyone chat that crap get clapped back; don’t want to take this country back, mate, I want to take my country forward’? Well this is very close to my heart.

To be human in the 21st century is to be confronted by the great crisis of our ecological failure, our collective failure to imagine and enact viable futures for ourselves on this planet. We’re all confronted by this failure right now in some way or another, but to-date the response of dominant cultures around the world has been defined by strategies of nativism and nostalgia. 

These are the cultural dynamics that run through obsessions like Hindutva or Brexit, that drive the politics of violent borders in the north coast of Australia, the south coast of Europe or in the hinterland between the USA and Mexico. They inform nation states’ recurring failure to meaningfully progress the intergovernmental conversation on climate action in a situation where we are faced with the rising prospect of climate collapse and soaring inequality and I think they’re also present in the latent ecofascism that runs through so much mainstream or White environmentalism. 

I guess it’s a human response, to cling to what we know when we’re faced with the end of what’s familiar, even when we know in our heart of hearts that it doesn’t add up. It’s cognitive dissonance. But in the same situation, migration is another potential response and I think, in the long run of human history, it’s been the source of all our innovation, that commitment to clear sight in the face of disruption of what we always took for granted, the facing up to the possibility of futures that our ancestors could never imagine. That impulse drives our movement forward, engendering new visions of existence that in turn inspires the emergence of new cultural movements, new technologies and new creative forms. With time it gives birth to new political institutions as well and new forms of collectivity. 

I think all the time about how the abolition of slavery in the USA gave rise to the great migration of so many African American people from the Deep South which in turn manifested as the Harlem Renaissance in art and literature and drove the project of decolonial worldmaking on the global stage. I think every visionary of human culture had migration in their backstory and in their bodies. Picasso was a migrant futurist. So were the cave painters of Lascaux and Chauvet. So is Angela Camacho. So is Pinar Aksu. So is Francoise Verges. To name our creativity in this way is an act of love and self-empowerment through which we begin to liberate ourselves from the failures of the past.

You’ve curated three Migrant Futurism events for the Southbank Centre, one of which focuses on the 2021 immigration raid on Kenmure Street and the response to it. What was it that drew you to this story?

It was such a moment of hope! I think the hostile environment can really land with us as a manifestation of what cultural theorist Mark Fisher termed ‘capitalist realism’ – where we imagine the way things are is the only way they can be or will be, where we believe that the state will do what the state is going to do and so we become bystanders without hope or agency. The images that came through from the Kenmure Street protesters so profoundly disrupted that sense of reality, reflecting a community insisting on its own humanity when confronted by a dehumanising system. 

I was in touch with all the participants that will come together for our panel discussion on 25 June – Pinar Aksu, Mohammad Asif and the Anti-Raids Network – within a week of the protest. I was keen to bring lessons from that action into play within the COP26 civil society coalition where I was active at the time, and two years later it was still fresh in my mind when we started to put this programme together for Refugee Week at the Southbank Centre. Our culture of image consumption fires moments like this across our consciousness for a fraction of a second and then discards, and I think it’s crucial for our political culture that we go back to these moments. Beyond the headlines, I’m keen to understand the human stories of how a moment like this comes together, and what such a moment of jubilation leaves behind.

Does what happened in Kenmure Street on that day show the power of community, or the power of grassroots campaigning networks? Or both?

Both, for sure. And that’s what we will get into in the discussion on 25 June. That complex interaction between diverse actors; how it comes about; how it’s sustained. We sometimes think of community as a static entity but it’s very dynamic. It’s something we create.

People will be familiar with the images of the two men being ultimately released at the end of the stand-off, but what happened next for these men, and this community?

Sumit Sehdev and Lakhvir Singh are, as I understand, still currently awaiting a decision on their applications for asylum.

What do you think is the biggest thing we can learn as a society from the events of Kenmure Street?

That we do have the power to shape our own destinies when we think and act and imagine our futures together.

And beyond what we can take from it, do you think the government has learned anything from what happened at Kenmure Street?

For more than a decade this government has been explicit about the threat it sees in multiculturalism, and throughout that time its approach to refugee and asylum policy has been a response to this perception – dispersal, the AARC contracts and now the barges driving the increasing isolation of refugees and asylum seekers from the ordinary flow of life here in Britain. I imagine the Kenmure Street protests simply emphasised concerns that have driven policy in this direction. Certainly, what we’ve seen since then is renewed commitment to the architecture of dehumanisation that for a very long time has driven migration policy in the UK.

Lastly, and more broadly, the theme of Refugee Week this year is compassion. What does a compassionate society look like to you?

A compassionate society would also be a society that works! The systematic stripping back of the welfare state, the underfunding of local authorities and the privatisation of all kinds of public space across the UK have been a disaster for society as a whole, driving the ongoing extraction of resources from ordinary people towards the elite and undermining the resilience of our whole society in relation to shocks – like the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost of living crisis – that are only going to grow more frequent as climate breakdown escalates in the years and decades to come. We urgently need to turn that culture around so that resources are reinvested into society in a way that promotes inclusion and access to resources and where human lives are valued as equal and brimming with potential.

Refugee Week events at the Southbank Centre are produced in partnership with Counterpoint Arts. The leading national organisation in the field of arts, migration and cultural change Counterpoints Arts is a Southbank Centre Associate Artist.

by Glen Wilson