Dear Home Office… (Letters I’ll never send)

Workshop
Dear Home Office… (Letters I’ll never send)

This speculative writing workshop will be led by writer and academic Olivia Majumdar. Taking inspiration from invisible archives of dissent hidden in both institutional and personal collections, this workshop enables those with lived experience of migration to directly address the Home Office in a way not possible within the bureaucratic maze of the ‘hostile environment’.  

Writing offers us an opportunity to turn our personal archives of immigration paperwork, often a site of pain and anger, into something radical and creative. During this workshop, participants will be invited to write letters to the Home Office, with Olivia leading with an example. Complaints are often suppressed to appease and survive the immigration system, so participants will have the option of shredding their letters at the end of the workshop, retaining them or donating them to the Gallery archive.  

Through this participatory workshop, we ask: 

• How can we transform immigration archives, often sites of pain and surveillance, into something radical and generative? 

• Who are these archives ultimately for? 

• In the context of Whitechapel Gallery, a Gallery that showcases art from across the globe, what does it mean to encourage the mobility of objects within a political system that often detains and punishes people for exercising that same mobility? 

Participants are welcome to bring materials that will inspire their writing so long as they feel comfortable to do so. These materials do not need to be shared publicly nor do the letters themselves.