Other Spaces: Migration, Objects and Archives

Other Spaces is a collaborative creative arts exhibition project that explores visual and material expressions of cultural identity with a particular focus on museum collections. This project aims to provide a rich examination – visual, emotional and intellectual – of the multiple cultural narratives that contribute to the social fabric of Australia through a unique marriage of contemporary photomedia and creative writing practice. This project explores the ways that migrants and refugees have found to express their cultural identity through the material objects they have brought with them to Australia. Many of these objects are not only of great personal value but often of cultural, historical and religious significance. Some are very ordinary everyday objects but they can be highly evocative and symbolic of the relationship between culture and identity, and between the places of origin and an individual's present home in Australia. This article, through a combination of photography, creative text and scholarly discussion, will focus specifically on Italo-Australian migrants and on some of the material objects that they have donated to museum collections, and use these objects to explore notions of cultural belonging and identity