1.1 Situating the motivation
As a storyteller, perhaps it is most appropriate to start this reflection by telling you a little story. I tell this story as it functions like an allegory to situate the sentiment of why I consider this research to be important. Usually, I would ask the listener to close their eyes, but since you will need them for this task, I would like you to open your imagined third eye as you read the story.
Imagine a house, a big house, more like a mansion, that has been built over many centuries by successive generations. This is evident as one can see that some parts of the design were built in a certain style by one generation and how it was later extended by the next generation. It is clear that a lot of time and effort has gone into its construction, and despite the patchwork done by different generations, the overall exterior of the house has turned out quite nicely, giving it a nice, unique look.
They may not be the biggest house in the land, but there is plentiful shelter and food for all the members of the house, at least enough for them live in relative harmony. In this big house also lives a big family with many branches of its extended family members, including relatives and friends.
Now imagine that you are welcomed to live in this house and be part of the family. When you enter inside the house, the first of its many striking features is the large collection of artworks that captures the story of the family, including drawings, photographs, and paintings ranging in scale to cover most of the walls. All this effort has been to document the history of the family, tracing it all the way back to the foundations of the house and family tree. You meet the entire history of the family; who they are and where they come from. As far as you can tell, everything looks great, and for the most part, things are good, you get along well with those closest to you in the house, and apart from maybe a few occasional squabbles here and there which are normal for most families, you really feel at home, and you have no plans of going anywhere and they have no plans of throwing you out or anything like that. You could say you live more or less in relative comfort.
In fact, you get so comfortable that after some time, you start having your own children, your children have their children, etc. You now have a family of ours within the larger family.
Life has been kind to you, but after many decades have come and gone, you are now old and frail. One day as you are walking whilst looking at the walls, much like going down memory lane of your first tour of the house, admiring the expansive family collection and the people you now recognise, you know who they are and why they are displayed on these walls, but when you get to end of your walk, it suddenly dawns on you: there is no picture of you anywhere on the walls. Why? And you begin to wonder, as someone who is welcome here and enjoys living with this family, what else would it take for your picture to be put on the wall? For you to be a part of their family collection? Part of the family history?
I have titled this story ‘Mi casa es su casa’, which is a common Spanish expression, literally meaning "my house is your house”. This is like the English expression typically said to indicate that a guest is welcome, namely, to ‘make yourself at home’. Like most democratic countries, this is what Norway also says about itself to all the (legally recognised) inhabitants of its house, but when we look at its public inscriptions; family pictures, memorials, memoirs, and collections, we don’t see the diversity of the house as yet to be reflected. It is in this light that I often joke that the point of my PhD project is attempting to take new family pictures of Norway, to add new faces that will show how different, colourful, and beautiful the house has grown over the past decades.
On a personal level, when I started this work, my world was a different place. I was new to Norway, and this work was mostly a professional inquiry, with little attachment to me as a person. But fast-forward four years later, not only have we the lucky ones managed to survive a pandemic (and I promise to say as little as possible about this saga), but in that process, I also became a father to a little girl who calls Norway her home. This once-distant land is now permanently going to be part of the closest and dearest part of my life. This has made doing this work necessary not just for what I think is important in Norway but also for my own family. I want my child to grow up in a house whose walls remember and reflect not just the stories of one part of her heritage but a rounded view of her world.
1.2 Context
For an artistic PhD project of this nature, it is useful to start by providing a brief overview of the relevant immigration history in Norway. Historically, Norway was founded with two basic societal groups: Norwegians and Sámi (who experienced massive state and social oppression and discrimination). Additionally, there were ethnic and religious minorities present in the Norwegian society. In his article, Immigration and National Identity in Norway, Thomas Eriksen, the renowned Norwegian anthropologist, gives a succinct overview of this account:
This precise image of Norway as a family is what sits at the core of my opening story. But how did this modern-day idea of the family come to be? Who/what is it modelled after? What/who is at the core of it? At the start of my PhD, I spoke to social and political scientists like Tonje Vold and Susanne Søholt who mapped out the history of Norway and its immigration story. For a long time, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then later Sweden. However, after declaring its independence in 1814, the question of establishing a distinct Norwegian identity became important. The most uniquely Norwegian culture was found among the farmers and peasants in rural districts in Norway who were influenced less by the Danish and Swedish rule. The decade that followed even saw the creation of Nynorsk by Ivar Aasen, which was based on a selection of Norwegian dialects, including also having a foundation in the Old Norse language. During the period of romantic nationalism that followed, the ‘Norwegian farmer’ became considered to be a representative or a symbolic figure of ‘Norwegianness’.
Following more than a decade after its independence, from 1830 to 1920, Norway saw a record number of about 1/3 of its population emigrating abroad, mostly to North America (but also other countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, etc.). Among other factors, it is believed job opportunities and the lure of America drew most Norwegians to emigrate (Jan Myhre, 2021). After WW2, Norway transitions from being a net exporter of people to being a net importer, especially starting in the 60s (Thomas Eriksen, 2013). This brings us to the contemporary picture of Norway which has historically been dominated by one ethnic group, which is well reflected and celebrated in its public inscriptions.
Modern immigration to Norway began in the 1960s with the discovery of oil, which created a sudden demand for workers. Many individuals, particularly men from Pakistan, Turkey, and northern Africa, came to work in the oil sector. The Norwegian government initially believed these workers would earn money and then return to their home countries. However, many of them stayed and brought their families to Norway in the 1970s. From the mid-1980s, there was an increasing number of asylum seekers from Iran, Chile, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and the former Yugoslavia. Since the start of the 21st century, Norwegian immigration has been marked by a more liberal stance on labour immigration and stricter policies for asylum seekers. From the late 1990s, new groups of asylum seekers arrived from countries such as Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. More recently, Norway has seen a rise in refugees from Ukraine.
According to the Norwegian Statistics Bureau (NSB), at the beginning of 2024, is estimated to be 20.8 percent of Norway’s population consisted of residents/citizens classified with an ‘immigration background’. In the year I started my PhD back in 2019, this figure was at 17.7 percent. If you go back another 5 years earlier, that figure was 14.9 percent in 2014. It is clear to see that Norway’s demography is changing. However, this has historically and presently not been a transformation without resistance from an active, anti-migrant, militant-far right political and ideologic spectrum, which, in its current form is especially against Muslims. From the movement of Arne Myrdal’s Folkebevegelsen mot innvandring (FMI)[1] established in 1987 (which was largely dedicated to stopping immigration from third world countries to Norway), to Arne Tumyr’s Stopp islamiseringen av Norge (SIAN)[2] established in 2000 (a Norwegian anti-Muslim group dedicated to working against Islam). More internationally known, the terrorist attack on July 22, 2001, by Anders Breivik has shattered any denial claims of this reality. But the one literally closest to me and my home is the memorial of Benjamin Hermansen, a 15-year-old boy with a Norwegian mother and a Ghanaian father, who was killed by neo-Nazis in brought daylight in 2001. My family lives only a few minutes’ walk from the memorial.
My daughter and I walk past this memorial, which often has floors on it that she likes to point to and call out ‘blomster’[1] every time we go to the convenience store nearby. As a mixed-race child herself (Norwegian/South African), it is hard to dispel the fear that if something like this were to happen again, it could be her. I am also already rehearsing my speech of what to tell her when she’s old enough to understand why it is there. Even though this incident happened a long time ago now, what worries me as a new parent are the routine reminders we live with that the problem still hasn’t been fixed. In fact, some of these reminders can re-open wounds that I thought as a society Norway is supposed to remember and carry only as scars. For example, just three years ago, the NRK reported a story in which Benjamin’s memorial was vandalised with the text “Breivik was right”. This is like pouring petrol to the dread I already feel towards having to imagine what such acts would mean for my family and I if people who holds these ideological positions still live in y/our community.
It is these kinds of incidents, which the police characterise as ‘serious’, that also make me uneasy about creating monuments celebrating Norway’s diversity. But it warms one’s heart to also know that these are extreme, marginal voices within Norwegian society. Today most Norwegians welcome this transformation. For example, according to Statistics Norway, who measure attitudes towards immigrants and immigration, reported 82 percent of Norwegians agree that most immigrants make an important contribution to Norwegian working life.
Research questions
As part of these ongoing efforts to understand how Norway is changing as a result of its shift from being a society characterised by one dominant social group to a society characterised by multi-ethnic and -cultural diversity, I became curious to explore how Norwegians with heritage or background from ‘elsewhere’, who carry or have brought with them diverse cultures, histories, philosophies, foods, beliefs, etc. are playing a role in (re)shaping the Norwegian identity. While this is not a homogenous group, their collective size should necessitate public visibility or inclusion in the construction of the modern-day Norwegian story and public memory, particularly through its (permanent) public inscriptions i.e., monuments, plaques, street names/signs, public art, etc.
It should be stressed that I am only interested in the permanent public inscriptions, not temporary ones. Even though they are also important, I am narrowing my focus only to the permanent ones because often they convey a sense of authority and legitimacy. The very act of creating a permanent inscription symbolizes a significant intent to memorialize or enshrine a particular message or event. This act can imbue the content with a greater sense of importance and gravitas, as it reflects a deliberate choice to make a lasting impression on the public consciousness. Furthermore, permanent public inscriptions often become landmarks or integral parts of the public space. They contribute to a place’s identity and collective memory, serving as focal points for public engagement, education, and reflection. They can promote a sense of pride and continuity within a community or nation. Thus, if we take a nation’s (permanent) public inscriptions as one of the fundamental parts of the story it tells about itself both to its people and the world, then it becomes clear that Norway is still in its infancy when it comes to recognising and addressing itself (identity) as a multicultural society. In fact, by many indications this demographic expansion is not a temporary or short-lived feature of the Norwegian society but an ongoing reality. For me, this raised a question that is twofold, 1) how is Norway responding to this present reality to integrate its multicultural identity into its (permanent) public inscriptions, 2) but also how these individuals – via their quotidian lived experiences – writing themselves into the fabric of the Norwegian society. Since Norway is still lagging in addressing the former, it is the latter that became the focal point of this artistic research project.
It is obvious to many who live in Norway, especially in big cities, that the contemporary Norwegian society is multi-cultural, multi-ethnic. But why is the obvious not reflected in the public inscriptions to the extent that would seem appropriate? Sara Ahmed, in her book, On Being Included, argues that “Diversity work is typically described as institutional work. Why this is the case might seem obvious. The obvious is that which tends to be unthought and thus needs to be thought.” This artistic research project is my attempt to think out loud about the unthought. As such, I don’t even see it as a critique of what is yet to be done, but a critical reminder and demonstration of what needs to be addressed on an institutional level by the Norwegian public institutions, especially since Norway accepts/embraces itself as a diverse nation. This couldn’t have been clearer than in King Harald V’s now most famous welcome speech during the Royal Couple's garden party in Slottsparken on 1 September 2016:
(The whole speech can be read here: https://www.royalcourt.no/tale.html?tid=137662&sek=28409&scope=27248
Or seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s61hsjJ_7ww
It is fitting, perhaps, that following the King’s words, this artistic research project then asks how can the stories of all Norwegians be reflected in its public inscriptions, especially stories of Norwegians who have emigrated from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Poland, from Sweden, Somalia and Syria.?
Another underlying question that has informed the project’s design and execution revolves around ethics. Throughout the research, I've asked myself, how can I work with an ethical-centric approach, exploring how to integrate ethical considerations into my work and how they impact my artistic process and outcomes.
In the beginning of my research, I was only interested in creating an interactive/participatory process between my collaborators and I, but later I also became curious to see how it would further challenge me artistically if I included the public as well. How could I create artistic results that would also allow the public to play an active, meaningful role in shaping them? In other words, I wanted to explore how to work with this interactivity/participation not as something tokenistic or superficial but something that would give the different stakeholders, including the public, space to meaningfully shape/influence the work itself. I saw the potential of activating all the relevant stakeholders in the process of translating/transforming the stories into monuments on both ends of making and sharing the work as a holistic approach and a viable strategy to forge a collective voice (or a sense of a ‘we’).
Project description
This artistic research project is aimed at exploring narrative accounts of Norwegians who self-identify with a multicultural and/or immigration background(s). It has collected stories of their lived experiences, with a special interest in an event that happened in a public space and has been experienced as a life-changing moment. The stories are being used to produce monuments that will be installed on the sites where the narrated events took place, taking over the public spaces and infusing them with gripping personal narratives to shift how we read and (re)negotiate their past/meaning, generating a ‘capital’ that will demand a ‘new’ way of relating to, and/or understanding, the place, its people and history. This is to create an ‘alternative history’, dedicated to writing and inscribing these voices into public spaces and our broader collective imagi-nation.
The project will happen in three related parts or phases.
Phase One
The project will collect and record the narratives, focusing on lived experiences of events that happened to them in public spaces. The starting place for this phase is to capture a detailed account of ‘what happened’. The data will be written into stories only using the words of their narrators. The main idea is to find out how the narrators – through their lived experiences – are writing themselves into the fabric of the Norwegian society and story. These personal narratives will form the basis of a book, which is expected to be published as a collection. The book itself will not only be printed as a paperback/hardcover but will also be realised in some interesting way as a monument that will encourage collective reading. So far, over 50 interviews have been conducted and the data is currently being turned into stories.
Phase Two
As a follow-up, this phase is concerned with the question of ‘where did it happen’. The location of the story will be treated as if were a sacred, national ‘site’ – A Place Where Something Happened. Each story will be turned into a ‘monument’ that will be installed on the location or site where it took place – to commemorate the narrated event. By manifesting their stories, aspects of the lived experiences will be physically or emotionally inscribed on and through the landscape. It is hoped that each monument will have an interactive element. The project will seek possibilities for the monuments to be installed as permanent inscriptions that will be available as a fixed feature of the city/country. The outcome is expected to be curated into a programme of guided tours and walkabouts, offering the public and tourists the possibility to experience the alternative histories of the city.
Phase Three
The data from phases 1 and 2 will be used as source material to create a devised performance that will explore the intersections between the individual narratives, to see what collective storyline emerges from them. This will happen in collaboration with a professional cast. This is expected to culminate in a performance that will be performed either in a traditional theatre space or outside in public spaces as a site-specific piece.
This was the original plan I started the PhD with, but as we will see later, things didn’t exactly go according to plan.
1.5 Situatiating myself as an “unreliable narrator” and ‘undisciplined artist’
Before moving to Norway to start this PhD, I don’t think I have paid as much attention to describing myself as an artist as I did my work as an artist. In South Africa, so much is always about the work and the why or the relevance question. The artistic and research orientation is often directed outward. This is probably enough to frame why I am undertaking a PhD inquiry of this nature. And it has been a fascinating thing to observe what is seemingly (and largely) the opposite trend here in the Scandinavian context, where a significant amount of the work I see has an orientation that is directed inward. I have come to call it ‘the theatre of the self’, at least as it appears from my perspective. That is, I often hear and understand a lot about the artist and less about the intention(s) of the work. This is quite revolutionary to me. And it is perhaps in this revolutionary spirit, that over the years, I have also been tempted to look at the artist more, to talk about him more. This could also be the effect of a PhD in artistic research where suddenly one is getting paid to study oneself and how one work in greater detail than what the free/independent artistic world demands. It is in this context, that I would like to situate two notions that have influenced how I have attempted to think and position myself throughout this PhD period.
The “unreliable narrator”
I am an unreliable narrator. Well, sort of.
I have been aware of the concept of an unreliable narrator as a literary technique[1] for many years. I have even used it several times in some of my own early work, especially during my university days. But I have never thought about applying it to myself as the artist until I encountered the work of Kara Walker who refers to herself as an ‘unreliable narrator’. In a video talking about her work Fons Americanus, which was 2019’s Hyundai Commission, Walker states that:
"I'm not an actual historian, I’m an unreliable narrator. I sort of let characters or caricatures sort of emerge. Sometimes they are culled straight from pop culture, looking at the types of depictions of blackness or of slavery as they have emerged, you know, specifically in the 19th century moving through the 20th century and changed somewhat over time."
- Kara Walker (2019)
Her words struck a deep chord in me. This idea that she doesn't consider herself a traditional historian who presents objective facts and analysis. Instead, she sees herself as an "unreliable narrator," meaning she might take liberties with historical accuracy for the sake of storytelling or artistic expression, which implies that her approach to history is more interpretive and subjective rather than strict adherence to factual accounts.Even though she does not go into further details about this idea of being an “unreliable narrator,” this was enough to touch a nerve in the way that I see and began reflecting on my perspective/position within my own practice. I, too, am not a historian, even though I have embarked on an artistic research project aptly titled/evoking ‘alternative histories’.
It gave me a language to talk about a facet of how I see myself in my own artistic practice. I like to tell fictional stories against the backdrop of real historical events or take a historical event/moment as a basis upon which insert my fictional situations. I can’t remember a time when I have tried to depict a story of something as it happened. So, my unreliability here is not related to being untruthful, but to taking the creative licence to fictionalise the truth. And I love being an unreliable narrator because it allows me to speak back to the world around me but through an artistic lens which allows me to be an active/subjective creative filter in the stories I tell. A position that a real historian doesn’t enjoy.
This made me see the unreliable narrator as something akin to Aristotle's poet. In his Poetics, Aristotle discusses the difference between the poet and the historian:
…the poet's function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse—you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
This idea of the poet captures my sense of what it means to be an unreliable narrator. Unlike a historian who is confined to the individual facts of a historical event, as an unreliable narrator, I am interested in how and what we can learn or take from those situations, to critique and build upon in the future.
Having this conscious language of understanding myself has illuminated some interesting questions/insights about certain choices made in this PhD project. For example, when it comes to particularly the phase of collecting other people’s stories and wanting to write them in their words (instead of fictionalising them), I wonder if a part of this intuitive decision is not about dealing with myself and my own ‘unreliability’ as an attempt to account for being an unreliable narrator. It almost feels like this phase and the ethical framework designed is exclusively to shut out my unreliableness as a narrator (i.e. a creative filter) so that you can actually meet as close as possible the real narrators of the stories. Given that if you leave the narrating to me, my ‘unreliableness’ will interfere. Therefore, it is perhaps worth making a case that, in fact, the reason why I am working in this way is because I am trying to stop myself from corrupting the stories that I have been told. I am trying to deal with the core of how I've approached other people's stories and used them in the past because I have always used them in ways that were unreliable. Again, I should emphasise that the unreliability here is one of fictionalising. So I am talking about the impact of a creative license in the process of (re)telling other people’s stories.
I've always liked to have my creative license left to me to decide what to do. And I'm wondering now more and more if perhaps the unreliable narrator, as a concept, could be reintroduced more forcefully now so that one could locate how phase one of the project is about trying to lock out the unreliable narrator. And then, of course, in the second and third phases, you see him being allowed out of his cage to begin to mediate the representation of the stories. But in the first place, where I'm trying to deal with the presentation of the stories, it's more important to negate or to limit the unreliable narrator from being a part of that process as much as possible, because as soon as you throw that dude in there, you know chaos is going to ensue. And I wonder if this is not an unconscious decision on my part to stop that trend of myself. And so, what you actually have now with this notion of an unreliable narrator is that I've unconsciously tried to stop myself from influencing how the presentation of the stories is put across.
And of course, um, this is something that I don't think I necessarily thought about until now. So, it says a lot about, you know, how the layers involved here are so manifold and so layered that it's not always possible to see them when you are doing the actual work. Um, because I don't think I knew to explain and describe, uh, myself in this way, where, um, you know, a part of this could be driven by the fact that I know I'm an unreliable narrator, and I love that I'm an unreliable narrator, because that's where the freedom of the artist kicks in. And I'm able to mould the stories that I tell to my creative direction or artistic mission. Uh, because I'm not some empty vessel in this process. No, no, no, no, I'm a very much active one, one that is constantly filtering.
Silencing the unreliable narrator is me trying to negate that in part one of the project. So, I think this is worth exploring and unpacking because I think it brings an interesting dynamic into the conversation of how I've been working.
In the world of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary practices/artists, I choose to identify as undisciplined. To contextualise why a playwright/director is working outside his established artistic practice in this PhD project, I have been describing myself and the approach taken, as an ‘undisciplined artist’, a term I was introduced to by one of my fellow peers, Manuel Pelmus (who was quoting someone else). This term resonated with me and my practice to the point that I have used it to describe myself in the process of doing this PhD. For that reason, it is critical to qualify what I mean by it because I do not seek to suggest some kind of dissolution of disciplinary boundaries and competencies that exist.
The ‘undisciplined artist’
I was first introduced to this notion of an ‘undisciplined artist’ by Manuel Pelmus (2020), who recently just graduated as a fellow researcher from the dance department at KHiO. And I will always remember the moment when this was introduced to me because it felt like a ‘pocket of my experience’ was suddenly given a word or a name. When I used to work for the writing centre back at my alma mater, Wits University, we had Kei Miller, a Jamaican poet and fiction writer, who came to give an artist talk. When talking about why he writes, he said people often experience things that they have no words to express or name, so they hold or carry these pockets of experiences with them often without knowing, and he writes to give these pockets of experiences an expression, so that his readers can finally release their experiences into them. This is something that has stayed with me since. And when I heard the notion of an undisciplined artist, it was one of those moments where I suddenly discovered ‘a pocket of experience’ I had been holding, which could now be named and expressed.
As a playwright/director who describes himself as being undisciplined, my sense of being undisciplined does not come from a wish to necessarily work across other disciplines. Put differently, I wouldn't start at artistic project by saying I want to make or record a song because I don't have the formal competencies nor the talent to make a song. So that would never be a starting point for me in my work. But what could happen, and this is really what I mean by being undisciplined, is that if I, let's say, in the process of writing a play, have a moment that I'm trying to express and as I'm writing it and it twists and turns in such a way that the writing ends up turning into a song. I would then follow that intuition[2], to explore and find a way to see where it leads. Of course, it is not always the creative intuition that can influence a diversion, sometimes serious practical considerations can also alter the direction of my process. And that's my sense of the undisciplined-ness. So, if I'm trying to write a play and it turns into a game, I'll follow that intuition, because I trust that that's taking me to a place where, organically and creatively, it makes sense for what I'm trying to explore and communicate.
That is, I wouldn't transgress the disciplines for the sake of transgressing the disciplines. And transgressing the discipline would never be the starting point of a process. It would always be something that comes as a response to something happening in my process so that my departure point is always grounded in what I know. I hardly ever try to go out of my way to do things I don't know. And, of course, one could imagine a situation where you are trying something out to learn a new skill or approach, but that's completely different to how I'm conceptualising this idea of being undisciplined.
It is with this in mind, that I want to situate the journey I have undertaken in this artistic exploration.
[1] A technique where the person telling the story lacks credibility or reliability. This can happen due to various reasons such as mental instability, deliberate deceitfulness, limited understanding of events, or a biased perspective. Essentially, the reader cannot completely trust the narrator's interpretation of events, or the accuracy of the information presented. Unreliable narrators often add complexity to a narrative, inviting readers to question the truthfulness of the story and to analyse the narrator's motives and perspective more deeply.
[2] Creative intuition involves a subconscious process of making connections and generating ideas without deliberate, logical reasoning. It's the "gut feeling" or instinct that guides creative individuals towards novel solutions and original concepts. Intuition in creativity is often built from a foundation of experience, knowledge, and exposure to diverse ideas and practices.
Contextualising and defining key terms
The following are key terms that are crucial to define to clarify my use of them in this research. As several of them have been revised through the research process, I will also offer some contextual discussions to situate both how they have changed and why I have ended up with key terms presented here.
I. Norwegians of multicultural and immigration backgrounds
Perhaps the obvious place to begin with this are the research participants, to qualify and contextualise why and how they came to be referred to as ‘Norwegians of multicultural or/and immigration backgrounds’. When I started this project, I had classified the research participants as ‘immigrants’ in Norway. As someone who is called an immigrant myself, I have learned to accept with this categorisation with no protest, so it never occurred to me to abandon the presumptions and explain or define what/who this ‘immigrant’ is. This oversight only became apparent when I observed people’s reactions to who they assumed to be an ‘immigrant’. Whenever I talked about my research and the search for participants, I was only offered names of people of colour, better if they were also from Africa. Just as I had, even those closest to me and the project were ‘guilty’ of this presumption.
According to the Norwegian Statistics Bureau (NSB), the definition of an “immigrant” is divided into two categories: people who immigrated to Norway but were born abroad to two foreign-born parents and four foreign-born grandparents; and persons born in Norway but whose parents and all four grandparents were foreign born. It is interesting to highlight that according to this official definition, even Harald V, the current king of Norway, is an immigrant. A fact that does not enjoy emphasis in our public discourse and perception of the king. I thought this said something interesting about which ‘bodies’ are allowed to ‘pass’ scrutiny of being referred to as ‘immigrant’ and which aren’t. There is a collective and self-censorship involved as well in who is/isn’t an ‘immigrant’. And I suppose we don’t have to look further than the history of the royal family, the message is clear: those who are ‘white’ were largely not recommended nor did they ever recommend themselves. Somehow, even if they were not from Norway, many had never quite thought of themselves in this way – as an immigrant. Interestingly, though, this ‘forgetfulness’ or assumption doesn’t seem to always cover many who are Eastern European.
Evidently, this shows how much baggage is loaded or embedded in this term. I began to unpack my own internalisation of the baggage. I moved to Norway on a skilled worker visa permit, so why I am both called and calling myself an immigrant worker when my white counterparts in a similar position are expats? It seems like there are implicit racial hierarchies embedded in terms like "expat" and "immigrant." The racial dimension seems to arise from historical contexts and perceptions. Historically, colonialism and imperialism have shaped global power dynamics, leading to the privileging of Western cultures and individuals in many parts of the world. This has resulted in biases where people from Western countries, often white, are more likely to be referred to as "ex-pats," while those from non-Western countries, particularly people of colour, are more likely to be labelled as "immigrants." And because I seem to also buy into this discourse unconsciously, there is both a collective and self-censorship involved in the regulation of this.
I don’t know whether it was because I had just arrived in Norway, but another unintended consequence of using the term was that it was associated with me interested in those who would have just recently arrived in Norway. Generally, people seemed to think that I was mostly interested in those who had just immigrated to Norway. This also gave ground to the first objection raised to challenge the premise of the project, which was that Norway can’t give a monument to every immigrant who washes up on its shores. After all, no country does that sort of thing, right? I often wish I had responded to this line of questioning by mentioning that something like Tania Bruguera’s Monument to New Immigrants (2017) would be a good start.
Still, it was interesting to see how some were raising this objection often not just to address what they perceived to be a weakness in the basic premise of project, but I felt it was used almost to wholly dismiss the project as well. It seemed like it wasn’t raised to address the issue I wanted to raise awareness of but to silence it. It was this ‘dismissive’ attitude that proved difficult to handle at first, because if on face value the objection holds, my project was then seen – at least in their eyes – to be based on an unreasonable demand on Norway, which gave them ground to stop engaging with the project entirely. This was not a desired outcome on my part. So, I had to find a way to respond that would make it harder for them to dismiss the argument or premise of the project.
Since the objection rested on the basis that immigrants couldn’t be given – to quote the eloquent words of Sylvi Listhaug, a prominent politician from the Progress Party – a "golden carpet" to Norway, or in this case, for people who have just arrived. It seemed to me like it was the fact that they were not ‘Norwegian’ that was being objected to, which prompted me to focus on those who were already Norwegian. As a result, I made it a requirement that the potential narrators must be Norwegian resident (who self-identifies with an immigration and/or multicultural background). I was clear to emphasise that this demand need only be met on a legal basis. The narrators didn’t have to primarily identify as Norwegian but must enjoy the legal status or protection of a Norwegian resident/citizen. This raised the bar – now we were no longer just talking about a random immigrant who washed up ashore and demanded to be included, but Norwegian residents/citizens who have as much right as anyone to feel represented in their own country. If democratic rights are to be taken seriously, one would expect that to be a basic human need and desire. Now, to dismiss this, one must be willing to say (or, in fact, effectively conclude that) some Norwegians’ stories matter more than others. Of course, we have read and seen that story before. Cue George Orwell's Animal Farm.
After dispelling this objection, another one surfaced, which asked about the inclusion of stories of ordinary (ethnic) Norwegians. Surely, it’s not all Norwegians who receive this honour, what about the average man and his monument? Of course, here we are talking about representation of different communities or social groupings within Norway, and not necessarily every individual. I doubt that an ethnic Norwegian would be the least represented social group. But, with that said, I did end up interviewing two ethnic Norwegians. The first one was purely accidental. I was recommended an international couple and only in the middle of the interview did I come to learn that the lady was Norwegian, something that was not anticipated. But given how unprompted it was, I decided to keep it. And to even things out a bit, I interviewed another participant who offered to invite their Norwegian male partner into the interview, which, I thought would be a great opportunity to level things by also adding a male perspective. Both these situations were not prompted, but I feel fortunate, in the end, to have their stories which, in many ways, show how those who were once ‘outsiders’ have found their way into the inner circles of Norwegian society and life, through the direct links of their partners.
Due to the historical baggage of terms like immigration, I acknowledge there are inherent problematic issues associated with such terms and classifications. it is always problematic to define people by what they are not, rather than what they are. The latter can often be reductive and misleading, leading to misunderstandings, stereotypes, and discrimination.
Given that I still wanted to draw a distinction between ethnic Norwegians and those with heritage from elsewhere, it was necessary to tie myself to the messiness of classifications like immigrants. On one hand, I am talking about Norwegians. But on the other hand, I still want to highlight that I am talking about Norwegians who have a heritage from elsewhere, of multicultural and immigration backgrounds. The premise of this project is based on the inclusion of the narrators into the Norwegian category, but I am by using classifications that show the exclusion. That is, I am also reproducing the same categories of exclusion to highlight them. This exposes a notable paradox of working both ‘with’ and ‘against’ categories or classifications. As such, even though I acknowledge the inherent problematic issues associated with these terms and classifications, I want to emphasise that their employment here is for the sake of convenience, as I currently do not possess more precise terminology.
II. Narrators
This refers to the people who were interviewed for this project. What is perhaps most important here is to emphasise what I am not calling them. As oral history practitioners, we use the term "narrator" rather than "interviewee" or "interview subject" to refer to the person sharing their story, as people are narrating their own experiences rather than simply providing answers to questions.
Henceforth, I will stop using all the other terms and only refer to them as narrators.
III. Narrative account
A narrative account is a detailed and structured telling of a person’s experiences and life events, providing insights into the individual's subjective experience. It aims to capture the meaning and significance that individuals attach to their experiences by focusing on the stories they tell about their lives. They often include reflections on the events and experiences described. More importantly, the process of creating a narrative account can be a collaborative effort between the researcher and the narrator. The researcher may guide the narrator in exploring and articulating their story, while remaining mindful of their influence on the narrative.
In short, a narrative account is a rich, detailed, and interpretive story that captures the essence of an individual's experiences and the meanings they ascribe to them. It is a powerful method for understanding human experiences in depth and within their broader context.
IV. Alternative histories
There are two tenets to this concept, at least in the way that I use it.
The first tenet is related to what must be considered as an alternative. According to Collins's dictionary, alternative history is a genre of fiction in which the author speculates on how the course of history might have been altered if a particular historical event had had a different outcome. It involves imagining scenarios where key events or decisions in the past happened in a different way, leading to divergent timelines, and often significantly altering the course of history. The writers often take real historical events, figures, and contexts as a starting point and then introduce fictional elements to explore the consequences of different outcomes. These stories can range from subtle changes with minimal impact to dramatic alterations that reshape entire civilizations. Unlike this typical definition, I was not interested in speculating but in looking at real stories of people, to ground the ‘alternative’ in lived experience than imagined reality. As such, alternative history in this project refers to the subjective but not speculative. To me, this means telling or constructing a sense of history that builds on the subjective.
To my alternative history, the departure point is the subjective experience, not the speculative. I am not interested in the speculative perspective, but in how to bring the marginalised, real stories of people to our public attention. The reason for this is that I didn’t want this project to remain exclusively in the imaginative/conceptual realm and make it easy for those who may take an opposing reading to dismiss it, but to ground the ‘alternative’ in lived experience. Notably, the first tenet I am interested in the alternative reference being rooted in the subjective but not speculative.
The second tenet is related to who must be considered as a subject of the said history. To explain this part, I turn to Bertolt Brecht’s poem from 1935 titled, Questions From a Worker Who Reads, which has been one of my inspirations when it comes to thinking about who as a society we choose to remember. The poem reads:
Questions From a Worker Who Reads
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them?
Over whom did the Caesars triumph?
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants?
Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War.
Who else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.
What I find most interesting is how Brecht challenges the perspective of our traditional historical narratives, which mostly focuses on the accomplishments of great leaders and rulers. Unsurprisingly, to understand a nation’s public memory, it is commonplace to look at the key historical memories or moments and often their leaders, too. They become the centre of how we define our national memory and narrative. This tendency, typical as it is, either oversimplifies or undermines the role(s) played by ordinary people. Ordinary figures rarely ever carved into picturesque sculptures that can be seen and admired by all, or are their names hardly ever recorded by history. Only ‘great’ men and women leave their names, legacies, and stories behind. History allows the rest, simply, to pass. Unrecorded. Inconsequential. Too ordinary. As I have always made the example in South Africa, many South Africans remember the historic day when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, but what of the man and woman who risked their lives by throwing stones in the face of apartheid’s oppressive military machinery to demand his release?
My problem, as highlighted by the poem, with this conceptualisation of focusing our historical narratives mostly on (great) leaders is that I find them incomplete. They only tell one side of the story. Sure, a figure like Nelson may seem worthy of his praise and place in the annals of South African history, but without the accounts of his followers, I would argue that that historical account is incomplete/one-sided. A balanced view of history is one that reflects both perspectives.
“All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.”
- Fernand Braudel, French Historian (1972)
Brecht who asks us to consider a series of questions that highlight the role of ordinary people in these grand historical events. The poem situates why it was important for me that it is the stories of the everyday wo/man that I am interested in – as a counter/alternative to this prevailing and entrenched perspective. This raises a serious question: aside from a nation’s icons and historical events, how can public memory and history remember its ordinary people? More pressing for this current project, how is that especially extended to those with immigration or multicultural backgrounds who are placed even further on the margins or fringes of the national public memory or national narrative and memory?
In my attempt to grapple with this question, particularly focusing on Norwegians with immigration or multicultural identities, these are the voices that become that subject of my alternative history. Thus, ‘alternative history’ in this project refers to the celebration of their subjective perspective of their ordinary lived experiences. It is this combination of the two tenets of the subjective perspective and insistence on telling the story of ordinary wo/man that is at the core of what I mean by alternative history. This is to seek to recover the voices of those who usually do not appear in our traditional historical narratives.
I find this definition and approach of working with perspectives and histories of those on the periphery noteworthy in a Norwegian context where it has historically played a critical role in the work undertaken to preserve one of the Norwegian languages, Nynorsk. Ivar Aasen is said to have traveled extensively across Norway from 1842 to 1846, meticulously collecting data on the various Norwegian dialects. He visited numerous rural areas, where the spoken language had been less influenced by Danish.
1.7 Situating my ethical dilemma
Background
Since the ethical considerations have been so instrumental in shaping the design and execution of this project, it is important to include them in my reflections to situate where the ethical dilemmas I have confronted in the process came from and why it was important to tackle them in this project. To establish them, I will look at some of my previous work, to frame where and how the ethical questions I am asking myself today came about. From the onset, I want to highlight how it has been a slow, stewing process to distil them it into the current articulated ethical considerations.
In 2012, South Africa witnessed its first post-democratic massacre in Marikana,[1] a mining town in Rustenburg, during a labour strike. Suddenly, the apartheid terrors I have read about and studied stretching from the 40s to 70s were no longer distant nightmares, but a current reality. We were horrified; how could something like this happen under a ‘black’ government? The event had shaken our moral fibre as a nation, and so it was only natural that there would be responses from all sectors of society, including the artistic and cultural fields. And I was one of the many artistic voices who took to the stage to speak against it. A little over a year later, in 2013, we were rehearsing a play I wrote called The Man in The Green Jacket (2013; 2014), which ‘pose(d) questions of our responsibility, as a society, in the aftermath of Marikana, especially the continuing challenges that face(d) the affected families, especially the children’.
During the same period, several family members of the dead miners were coincidentally attending the Farlam Commission, which was tasked with investigating what happened on the day of the massacre. The commission was held in Pretoria, which is less than an hour from Johannesburg. On the premiere night, it somehow came to be arranged for the family members to see the performance. I was asked to brief them about the show, but they were mostly from deep rural areas and spoke different languages which did not include English (the only language I had so far used to clearly and succinctly formulate my own understanding of the show), so I mustered all the fanagalo[2] I could, but a lot of nuances and the emotional register of the show was lost in translation. When the house lights faded out and the show began, I still remember the visceral feeling that gripped my gut, that this show was not meant for these families to see. Even though the historical event was fictionalised in my story[3], which gave some distance to the reference, it would never be enough for people who were living through the aftermath the play was attempting to grapple with. In fact, I had never imagined that someone who was so close to the issue would see it. In the end, I wondered what the effect of seeing such a work was on them. Did I do their story justice? Did they find it necessary for their story to be told, by me, and in this way? Was it something interesting to see? Or perhaps experienced as (re)traumatising?
Thankfully, they were cordial enough to appreciate our efforts to highlight their plight. Some of them admitted to not being ready to see the work, which was understandable because unlike the often, dry journalistic reports they had grown accustomed to reading and hearing about what happened to their loved ones, this hit a much deeper and more sensitive nerve – it was just as much about those who died as it was about those left behind. After the event, the experience left me with an unsettling feeling; what did it mean to make a performance about an issue that some of its supposed victims (those I had claimed to speak for) were not ready to see? And ethically, what was my responsibility to them and their pain and loss? At the time, these questions were not so clearly formulated in my understanding of what was happening. I was a young artist too busy with a mission to save the world one play at a time and didn’t really stop to do a deeper, more critical reflection of what that feeling meant.
A year later, in 2014, a similar thing happened with my next play. I was invited to participate as one of the four playwrights in the “Inspiring A Generation” programme which is ran by ASSITEJ[4] South Africa to produce a play for teens. For this production, I had collaborated with students from the National School of The Arts and professional actors to devise a play titled Pondoland (2014). The theme, prompted by the students, was largely a response to the male circumcision initiatives in the Eastern Cape province that were run by opportunistic people who had inadequate experience and expertise, resulting in young men losing their genital parts due to the improper care provided. As if experiencing such an event was not bad enough, but to do so in a country that is still essentially and deeply patriarchal added much confusion to the identity of the boys for whom this was supposed to be a rite of passage into their manhood; ‘what did it mean, then/now, to be a man?’, many of the affected ones pondered. Again, I fictionalised the story but used a lot of the research material we had gathered in the process, especially an interview of two young men who spoke to the media on condition of anonymity about their experiences, which, as sources that offered first-hand experience of the issue, their words gave us the anchor or emotional register for the journey of our story. We wanted the work to give a voice and human face to this issue, which, even its victims refused to speak publicly for. After we premiered the work, I came to understand why people didn’t speak publicly. After a review circulated in the media about the work, for the first time, I received death threats for making a piece of theatre.
Coincidentally, those two young men also happened to be in Johannesburg working with the same journalist who had interviewed them previously, and she brought them to see the show. I was informed of their attendance, and we were quite pleased that they would be able to see the work they inspired so much. And once again when the lights went out, that visceral feeling returned, now only much stronger.
Surely, now it was time to pay attention to it. And I did. But I didn’t know what that should look like. My first attempt was to try to change my audience, which I thought might lead me to a different subject matter. Since my work dealt with ‘serious, political topics’, I thought perhaps I should write a play for an even younger audience[5], to force myself to write stories that were less political in nature, to help take the sting out of the ethical dilemma I was facing. The following year, this direction resulted in the premiere of The Orphan of Gaza (2015). Instead of finding a less political voice, I had only found a way to bring my political voice to a 7-year-old. My next attempt was to write something that was not based on real people, something purely from the imagination. An exercise that resulted in the writing of The Squirrels’ Laughter (2015), an Animal Farm-like[6] satirical allegory about a dystopian world in which people were not allowed to smile. Naturally, under such conditions, a revolution or revolt becomes a necessity. This was aimed at an audience aged 6+.
Now it became evident that telling stories of a socio-political nature was something central to my theatre-making. And if the political nature of my work was not going to change, then it was time to look at my inspiration and source material. I needed to think anew and critically about how to work with people’s stories. Since I had never really made attempts to meet the people I was inspired by and primarily worked with source materials that were in archives and the public domain, perhaps it was time to shift that approach. If so, how could I involve them in the way that I obtained, wrote, and used their stories? Was the reason I never tried to reach out to these people – on some level – that I didn’t really want to own up to the responsibility of how I used or portrayed their stories? Was it even necessary to assume such a responsibility? After all, I don’t think that it was any person’s explicit individual story I was interested in putting on stage. A consistent pattern is that I like to take something essential and true/factual from a historical event and then build my own fictional world around it, so that I was not bound to anything other than my creative vision. Was this just a preference of how I like to work or a cover to avoid the ethical implications embedded in my work, especially since my topics or subjects are often of a politically sensitive nature? Why would I not want to be accountable to someone? And if the people whose lived experiences I was drawing on, kept finding their voices in my work, and themselves physically attending my performances, perhaps it was time to challenge myself to see how I could bring them into the room at the start of the process or collaboration where they could have a say in how their stories are to be used? Thus, I sought to find an ethical approach that would address this challenge. And I was also curious about how that was going to impact my artistic process and results.
Accordingly, I will now reflect on how I designed this PhD project to respond to this ethical dilemma or consideration. Firstly, I will situate the existing ethical issue within most artistic practices to foreground the need for a paradigm shift necessary to address this concern. Secondly, since there are always power dynamics embedded in the relationship between the artist/researcher and narrator/collaborators, I will reflect on how I tackled them in the interview process. Thirdly, while the resulting ethical framework was designed to minimize my creative influence on the stories gathered and how they were to be told, I will reveal the violence even that minimal creative 'filtration' has had on the stories in the editing or puzzling process. Lastly, I will conclude by discussing the implications this way of approaching the ethical dilemma has had on my (creative) process, particularly looking at how centering an ethical framework within artistic research can be more than a limitation or hindrance, and even lead to surprising artistic discoveries/results.
Shifting The Ethical Paradigm
Art is a powerful tool that influences society, culture, and individual perceptions. We, as artists and researchers, are presented with a unique opportunity to entertain but also address pressing societal issues, advocate for themes we believe in, challenge norms, and evoke meaningful conversations through our work. Perhaps that's why in the artistic field there is no shortage of artists/researchers who consider themselves or their work to be a 'voice for the voiceless', especially for artivists whose work deals openly with social themes affecting neglected or marginalised communities. For a long time, this is also how I understood my positionality and role as a theatre practitioner.
My artistic practice has thrived on finding the silenced or mooted voices within public discourse on issues said to affect us all. I have always been interested in who – in the room – is not talking and try to understand why. And if we removed whatever shackles preventing them from speaking, what would they say? Most of my impulse to create begins here, addressing this wish or curiosity to know what they would say. This is the spark I often take into my artistic process, using my creative intuition to fill in or colour the rest with my imagination. In this process, I will usually collect archival materials of what such (similar) voices have said in the past to contextualise the project, working with whatever information is available within the public domain, something that ironically highlights that some of the 'voiceless' have been speaking, but I/you/we have perhaps just not been listening.
As Arundhati Roy argued, "…there's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard" (2004, p. 1). If that is the case, perhaps they don't always – if ever – need us to be a voice for them. We could just find a way to pass our mics, stages, podiums, platforms, etc. so that those can, speak for themselves. Nevertheless, the implication of choosing to speak on behalf of others, even though it can be a noble path paved with good intentions, could have the (un)intended consequences of making or keeping them 'voiceless'. We often, then, too, risk silencing them in order to speak for/above them, reproducing the same structural subjugation that has put them in that position in the first place.
This has been an ethical challenge within my artistic practice that needed to be confronted. That is, there has been a need in my practice for my own thinking to shift, a need to operate within a new paradigm that embraces allyship as a radical ethical responsibility to speak with research subjects rather than for them.
Developing a New Ethical Framework
The Ph.D. project provided a good opportunity to reflect, explore, and interrogate this ethical challenge, as I now had the space and necessary time to process, digest, and work through it. At its core, this is both a narrative research inquiry and an oral history project aimed at documenting and preserving ordinary people's personal histories and stories about their lived experiences, especially focusing on a defining event that happened in a public space. I was interested in how they would story their lives around these turning points. As Riessman (1993) argues, we lead ‘storied lives’. Accordingly, the first strategy employed to allow the narrators to tell their own ‘storied lives’ was to use a narrative approach. Lived experiences are inherently subjective, and a narrative approach will allow narrators to share their perspectives and interpretations. Narrative methods often use storytelling, which is a natural and engaging way for people to communicate their experiences. They provide a rich and contextualised account of an experience, capturing this complexity by allowing individuals to weave together multiple elements, contributing to a more holistic understanding of an event or situation. They allow individuals to describe not just the facts but also the thoughts, feelings, and circumstances surrounding an event, offering a more comprehensive understanding. Through recorded interviews and conversations with the narrators, I aimed to excavate and re-inscribe traces of their lives and narratives in public spaces. Thus, the data collection process, methodologically speaking, became a narrative inquiry. Specifically, I wanted to focus on event narrative, which, according to Labov, is a specific type of narrative that focuses on recounting a sequence of events or actions that are considered significant or meaningful by the narrator (Squire, Andrews, and Tamboukou, 2008, p. 5). This is because I primarily wanted the narrators to focus on a single event that – in some meaningful sense – represented a turning point in their lives.
There were several reasons to focus on a turning point in the interviews (or what would be understood as topical in oral history). This approach could help the narrators structure their narrative and provide valuable insights into the events being discussed. Intuitively, turning points provide a natural structure to the narrative, making it easier for both the narrator and me to follow the story. They serve as anchors or focal points around which the rest of the story can be organized. By exploring turning points, I could gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of a narrator's life story. These moments often reveal a person's values, motivations, and how they navigate challenges and opportunities. They are often emotionally charged moments, whether positive or negative, and involve overcoming challenges or adversity, which can help capture the narrator's emotions, making the narrative more engaging, memorable, and relatable to the audience.
Additionally, turning points often capture a moment of transformation in a character’s life. I wanted this slice of their lives because it would be useful in the artistic process. In terms of making the monuments, I liked that turning points offered a kind of a before and after effect, something I could use as an anchor to be precise about how I wanted the monuments to transform or provoke the public. I wanted to explore how the monuments could be a portal that embodies this liminal space between the before and after so that the public could enter into one side of it and come out on the other end. Furthermore, there were also considerations of what turning points will offer me as a playwright/director to work within the theatre-making phase of the project. Given that turning points in drama are pivotal moments that significantly impact the development of plot, characters, and overall narrative arc, I thought it would be ideal to focus on them to give me a better sense of how to distil the different narrative accounts into a compelling, collective story. Since turning points offer critical moments in a character’s life, they can reveal their true nature, test their resolve, and force them to evolve. This would make for a good starting point for a devising process.
“Narrative interview is classified as a qualitative research method (Lamnek, 1989; Hatch and Wisniewski, 1995; Riessman, 1993; Flick, 1998), which is a form of unstructured, in-depth interview with specific features. "The narrative interview envisages a setting that encourages and stimulates an interviewee to tell a story about some significant event in their life and social context" (Jovchelovitch and Bauer, 2000, p. 3). This is so we can see and understand the world through the eyes of the narrator, reconstructing social events from the perspective of the narrator as subjectively and directly as possible (Schütze, 1977)” (as cited by Moleba, 2016, p. 32).
However, as a listener and a researcher in this process, my presence plays a part in how each narrator tells their story (Riessman, 2008). I am an active participant in their storytelling. As such, I become as much a listener as I am a co-collaborator or co-creator of the narratives being told in the process as meaning is jointly produced between the interviewer/artist and the interviewee/narrator (Gubrium and Holstein, 2002). Even though the interviews are about the narrators, my presence – as an audience and the questions I ask – shapes the kinds of stories told to me. The point is to recognise the impossibility of being neutral and to be aware that the story I will hear from a narrator, with my background and positionality, is very different from what another researcher would get. That is, the stories to be told are not impartial truths or final versions of their recounting. Thus, my ethical concern when I was designing how to conduct the interviews and write the stories was, how to develop an ethical framework that would limit, as best as possible, my influence on the narratives (being cognisant of factors at play I cannot control).
The second strategy I employed to limit my influence was adopted from a previous project. In 2016, I was involved in a project that would lay the foundation for my framework for how I would design the ethical framework for my Ph.D. research. I participated in a book project titled, I Want to Go Home Forever: Stories of Becoming and Belonging in South Africa's Great Metropolis (2018). I was one of the writers who was tasked with interviewing and collecting the oral history of one of the ‘narrators’.[7] This was done over several interview sessions, which were recorded and transcribed. As interviewers, we used the transcripts to create a narrative using the narrator's own words, based on the style of the Voice of Witness (VOW) series. After working with VOW's ethical guidelines during the book project, I was impressed with how much control they gave back to the narrators, who, rightly so, should be at the centre of the telling of their own lives and narratives. The process re-centred the narrators, allowing them to have a meaningful say in how their interviews were shaped into stories. For context, here is a summary list of the VOW principles (see their website):
- Invest in relationships to build trust, mutual respect, and collaboration.
- Prioritize ongoing informed consent and transparency throughout the process. Ensure narrators have ownership and control over their stories.
- Honour authenticity, complexity, and the whole person, rather than approaching with preconceived expectations or framing narrators as victims or heroes.
- Use a trauma-informed approach.
- Position narrators as the experts.
- Acknowledge and mitigate power dynamics and biases.
- Ensure stories are accessible to narrator communities.
After working with VOW's ethical guidelines during the book project, I was impressed with how much control they gave back to the narrators, who, rightly so, should be at the centre of the telling of their own lives and narratives. The process re-centred the narrators, allowing them to have a meaningful say in how their interviews were shaped into stories. The idea of writing the stories only in the words of the narrators seemed like a good way to approach my ethical concern, to be forced to focus on what they have said to limit my creative interpretation and the natural bias of focusing on what I wanted to hear. I even went a step further to give the narrators the final approval of what would be the written text. This was the last piece that would crystalise what became the ethical framework for phase one of my research project: to use a narrative approach that allowed the narrators to recount specific past events that happened to them in relation to my provocation as a starting place, and then compliment that with the VOW ethical guidelines to ensure narrators maintain ownership and control over their stories. This is the approach I took to the research subjects, to gather source material from them – with their explicit consent.
On Procedural vs Relational Ethics
In hindsight, I discovered that what I also liked about working with VOW's ethical guidelines is that they embraced relational ethics, which felt more intuitive and organic to me, as it reminded me of our African philosophy of ubuntu. This philosophy is best expressed by the Zulu maxim, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, or its Sesotho variation, “motho ke motho ka batho”, literally translated to mean, "a person is a person through other persons" (Letseka 2013a: 339; Letseka 2013b: 352). It emphasizes the interconnectedness of all people and the importance of communal relationships which implies that ethical behaviour involves treating others with respect, compassion, and understanding. In the Glocal South, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, we are born and bathed in the Ubuntu ethics, which can be "…defined as a set of values central among which are reciprocity, common good, peaceful relations, emphasis on human dignity, and the value of human life as well as consensus, tolerance, and mutual respect" (Ujomudike, 2015). Evidently, the central tenets of Ubuntu appear more aligned with relational than procedural research ethics. Perhaps this explains why I had such a strong affinity to VOW's guidelines without knowing why.
In contrast, although writing in context of social work, Bilotta (2022) argues that procedural ethics prioritizes ethical principles, theories, and perspectives from the Global North. These are the mainstream, often Eurocentric methods, theories, and values that continue to dominate academic (and now artistic) research, something we see in the dominance of compulsory procedural ethics from the academic research, which are now being transferred into the emerging field of artistic research (e.g., informed consent, privacy and confidentiality, institutional ethical approval). This prioritization often comes at the expense of relational ethics (e.g., respect, reflexivity, researcher positionality, and reciprocity) (Bilotta, 2022). This could be for a variety of reasons. There is a misconception that research should be completely objective and detached from personal relationships or values. This can lead to the belief that relational ethics, which involve acknowledging the researcher's positionality and engaging with participants on a more personal level, compromise the objectivity of the research. Implementing relational ethics requires time, effort, and resources, such as building trust with research participants, engaging in reflexive practices, and promoting reciprocity. In resource-constrained environments, researchers may prioritize procedural ethics as a way to efficiently conduct research. Research institutions and funding agencies often emphasize procedural ethics because they are concerned with legal compliance, minimizing risks, and protecting the rights of research participants. As a result, researchers may feel pressured to prioritize procedural ethics to meet these requirements.
I know in my case, this last point was true as the schools follows the national and school ethical protocols, which I have had to comply with to carry out this research project. In retrospection, I realise that even though I have officially followed my school's procedural ethics of making the research subjects sign informed consent sheets and such, my attitude and communication in actual contact with them followed the philosophy of ubuntu, which is an embodied ethic I know.
Given that artistic research as a field is still young, this has made me wonder how working with ubuntu as an ethical framework – which is relational – would shift our understanding of notions like artistic license/freedom/control, etc. Furthermore, such an ethical perspective would have interesting implications for our mainstream, mythical idea of an artist as the sole 'Artistic Genius' that we still peddle, especially in the West. This is because relational ethics is an approach that emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of individuals, communities, and the environment. Therefore, it focuses on how these relationships shape our actions, values, and perspectives. When applied to the mainstream idea of the "Artistic Genius," relational ethics will de-centre the Individual, which would challenge the notion of the artist as a solitary genius by emphasizing the collaborative and communal nature of artistic creation. It will demand the "Artistic Genius" to disclose and highlight the influence of mentors, peers, cultural context, and collective experiences on an artist's work. It recognizes that creativity emerges from a web of relationships rather than solely from an individual's brilliance.
Art has long been a platform for expression, innovation, and exploration, often pushing the boundaries of societal norms and challenging established paradigms. However, the relationship between ethics and art is complex, raising pertinent questions about how the artistic research field is going to deal with the ethical implications and consequences resulting from creative processes. To meet such a challenge, perhaps it is fruitless to pit procedural vs. relational ethics approaches against each other, but to prioritise what we can learn and take from them to build a middle ground as a possible way forward – as both approaches have their own merits. This may be a topic for further research.
Justification of ethical approach:
I have specifically chosen to design the ethical framework and approach in this way to balance the scales and give the narrators as much say and control as was possible. It was challenging to strip so much power/control from myself as a project leader, but it also allowed me as the playwright/director to explore different dimensions of my role and how it is to work in these two opposing artistic processes. I was hoping that the combination of give and take principle when applied to the creative control of the project was complimentary. Here is a breakdown of how it was divided and intended to be operationalised according to the various phases of the project:
Phase One
Before all the interviews were conducted, the narrators were given an information sheet which offered a project description, outlining what the project was interested in doing with the data collected from them throughout the three phases. It was crucial that everyone understands the undertaking they were asked to participate in. Furthermore, the narrators had to sign a consent form which set out their rights for participating in the project – obligation free.
The narrators were also told that – for ethical reasons – they have final creative control. All the edits I do is subject to their approval. In addition, they reserve the right to edit and shape their stories however they wish. And the final version of the stories can only be published after they have signed off on it.
This is to ensure that the narrative account collected is as reflective of their experience and the story they told me as much as possible. The ‘extra’ bonus for this requirement lies in potential nature of the targeted use of these narratives. Because they will be produced in a narrative form and then exhibited as ‘historical accounts’ during a tour or exhibition, I wanted them to be as autobiographic as possible (with as little creative tempering from me as possible). Therefore, my role as the playwright/director here is to stay as truthful as I can to the stories others share with me. And this requires less intervention, less manipulations, and less creative license to be taken. The idea is that the results must be produced as a kind of fair and ‘authentic’ account of how the narrators would like to tell them.
Phase Two
In this phase, I proposed that the narrators and I will share the creative control. During the interview (and going forward as well), they were all asked to contribute ideas for what they would like their monument to be. Some of the narrators will even create their own monuments. What is important is that they will be consulted on the ideas generated and are welcome to follow the development of the selected idea. It was imperative to me that we don’t create a monument that either them or I don’t like. We both must be happy with the final results, as it will matter for the longevity of the project and its intention.
Phase three
This is the play-making phase. In this phase, I have full creative control. Although the idea is not to misrepresent their stories, this artistic process is meant to lift all inhibitions previously placed on the playwright/director in the documentation phase of these narratives. Here the playwright/director can treat the material as a source of inspiration and to draw from them, but without the burden of having to necessarily reproduce them in any faithful way. In this sense, the playwright/director can re-imagine, re-edit, and repurpose them for the sake of other dramatic goal or premise as a basis to create something else.
Even though I have creative control, it is important to emphasise that the narrators are going to be invited into the creative process to see/comment/feedback on how I/we were using their stories. I don’t want them to meet the work on stage as a finished product, but to allow them a say when it is still possible for me/us to consider their insights. This is a vital step to correct my previous ‘wrongs’.
[1] I wrote my masters on the young people in this town, which you can read here: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/items/b81afef0-d8aa-4130-aac3-b6acfbe3271c
[2] Fanakalo is the lingua franca of the South African mining industry, spoken daily in the workplace (Bernardi Wessels, “FANAKALO: Lingua Franca of the mining community,” Mining Survey 1 (1986): 26).
[3] Fictionalising historical events is something I do often in my work, and it is one of the main reasons I sometimes call myself an unreliable narrator – since I like to project my imagination into them and find an angle or perspective that is relevant/interesting to me as the storyteller.
[4] ASSITEJ unites theatres, organisations and individuals throughout the world who make theatre for children and young people. (http://www.assitej-international.org/en/assitej-in-the-world/our-mission/)
[5] To be fair, I was always interested in doing this, and this just because a good opportunity to do so.
1.8 Exploratory Research Approach
Since I was curious about something of which there was limited knowledge, I decided the best course of action to take would be an exploratory research approach. This appealed to me as it is characterized by an openness to discovery, experimentation, and the generation of new ideas without predefined hypotheses or outcomes, especially since all I had at this point was my curiosity, so I thought it would give me the room I needed to explore and follow where that curiosity may take me.
As I didn’t know what stories I was going to meet, it was vital to undertake a process that would be flexible, enabling me to adapt the focus of the research as new insights and directions emerge. This adaptability is crucial in artistic research, where the creative process can lead to unexpected and significant discoveries.
As a playwright/director, who was already planning to be working across other disciplines, i.e. making monuments, an exploratory research approach made sense as it would essentially allow me to navigate cross-disciplinary boundaries, give me room to learn about and include methods, theories, and practices from various fields into my own practice, which would enrich this artistic research and me as an artist. But it was equally important to marry this approach with a strong reflective practice, to peel back the layers of my experiments and processes to understand how it was shaping up. Critical reflection is integral to assessing the work, methods, and decisions, allowing for a deeper understanding of the practice and its potential outcomes.
The reflections will happen both during and after research activities. Schön (1991) identified these as “reflection-in-action” (thinking ‘while doing’ or ‘in the moment’) and “Reflection on action” (thinking ‘after the event’). Although he is writing about teaching practice, I think these two ideas are also relevent and present in artistic process/research. I will exercise this reflective practice with the aim to understand and articulate the often-tacit knowledge embedded in my creative process and practice.
1.9 Timeline (of PhD research public events)
Even though this is not an exhaustive list, this timeline focuses on a chronological listing of activities undertaken that mostly involved public presentation of parts of my research, to give the reader a sense of what was covered during the PhD period.
2019
December
Joined a research cluster: MEMORY WORK.
It is a platform for sharing performative work about memory. It is an interdisciplinary artistic research project developed by artists with backgrounds in Choreography, Theatre, Performance Art and Art in Public Spaces.
Link: https://www.memorywork.no/research-1
2020
21. January
Workshop piloting our research cluster titled: Pilot: Preparing - engaging in memory research artistically, ethically and politically at the Research Week at Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
Link: https://khio.no/intranett/nyheter/artistic-research-week-2020
2021
25. January
Panellist in a discussion on ethics at the opening event of the Research Week at Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
Link: https://artisticresearchweek.khio.no/2021/01/22/opening-event-2/
25. January
Workshop presenting our pilot project, Memory Work, at the Research Week at Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
Go to link for more: https://artisticresearchweek.khio.no/2021/01/07/the-alternative-histories-project-eliot-moleba/
28. January
PANEL DISCUSSION “Memory Work”, at the Research Week at Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
Link: https://artisticresearchweek.khio.no/2021/01/22/memory-work-merete-rostad/
March
I presented at the Artistic Research Forum Spring from 15-17th March, where I repeated the same online workshop, which also proved to be quite effective.
24. March
Invited to speak about my project and participate in a panel discussion at a virtual conference organised by The Oslo Desk, which was titled: Future in Focus: Shifting Power & Diverse Narratives in Journalism - Telling Diverse and Inclusive Stories
Link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/shifting-power-diverse-narratives-in-journalism-tickets-142012117065#
8-14 August
Participated in the Summer Academy for Artistic Research organized by the University of the Arts Helsinki (Uniarts Helsinki). SAAR 2021 will bring together up to 18 artistic researchers and 10 supervisors for an intense and stimulating week in August. This year’s gathering under the topic Problems? Soak and Surrender focuses to share some of the acute knots, itches and questions that puzzle you right now in your research project.
Link: https://artisticresearch.fi/saar/activities/saar-finland-8-1482021/
16. August
Presented at the 13th Drama for Life Conference and Festival, in partnership with NTNU: Performing Democracy; the fight, the fire, the fiction?
16 October
Presented at the Deichman Holmlia. Black History Month.
«Black History Month: Samtale med Eliot Moleba»
Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/252871390096590/
26 October to 12 November
Running a workshop with scenography students at NTA.
Students created monuments in public spaces. This concluded with an walkabout/tour of the monuments with the class.
Link: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17910115520301507/ (see what the students created)
8. December
Presented my project to the MA students in the performance line at NTA.
This was an introductory session to my project to see if some of the students would like to collaborate in the near future.
2022
4. January
Presented an update of my research project to the theatre department.
27. May
Performance
NBX performed a work-in-progress we have been developing over the spring at the Nordic Black Theatre.
4. June
I was invited to give a Performance Lecture (titled, The Labour of Memory) at the Bergen Kunsthall as part of the extended programme of the exhibition of Lene Berg
Festival Exhibition 2022: From Father
May 26.—21 August 2022
(This performance Lecture format was conceptualized and delivered alongside Prof. Merete Røstad).
Link: https://www.kunsthall.no/en/events/2524-2022-06-04/
7-13 August
Participated in the Summer Academy for Artistic Research organized by the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. SAAR 2022 will bring together up to 18 artistic researchers and 10 supervisors for an intense and stimulating week in August. This year’s gathering under the topic Relationships with the extant knowledges and practices.
Link: https://artisticresearch.fi/saar/activities/saar-7-1382022-sweden/
26. August
“Dissident Publics” at ROM
The Labour of Memory – a site-specific workshop/guided tour and performance lecture.
Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1457492084763345 and https://r-o-m.no/Dissident-Publics-2022-2023
17. September
MEMORYWORK: who tells your story, LAB 2
13–15 September 2022 Fieldwork
16–17 September 2022 Symposium
On-site Berlin, Germany
Due to visa problems, I was not able to travel to Berlin, but still managed to present an update of my project and current questions/preoccupations via zoom.
20. October
NordART Research Dialogues vol. 1 at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo
Session: other stories alternative views on western music performance and art practices
I presented my project alongside Sanae Yoshida, who is a research fellow at NHM, whom I also interviewed. We spoke about the intersections between our work, and she spoke about how my project influenced her work.
10. December
The Things We Left Behind at Grenselandet 2022.
I presented my first LARP performance/event at the festival in Oslo.
Link: http://www.grenselandet.net/2022/12/the-things-we-left-behind.html
28. December
Larp Café | Romjulslaivcafe at Pigalle
A talk about my experience of making my first larp for Grenselandet festival.
Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/416718433914724
2023
20. May
The Things We Left Behind at Knudepunkt 2023, A LARP conference held in Vejen, Denmark.
Link: https://knudepunkt.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Knudepunkt-2023-Catalogue.pdf
31.05-02.06 May
The Things We Left Behind at KHiO.
Link: https://khio.no/events/1728
02. June
Midterm presentation at KHiO.
Link: https://khio.no/events/1727
15-17 June
Narrative Matters 2023 at the Tampere University, Finland.
I attended and presented my work as part of the MemoryWork research cluster.
Link: https://events.tuni.fi/narrativematters2023/programme/
07. August
Drama Boreale, Nordic drama education conference at OsloMet, Oslo.
I was invited to present the latest updates of my research in a Pecha kutcha format at the opening of the conference (with other speakers).
Link: https://www.oslomet.no/en/about/events/drama-boreale-2023
2024
24. January
Artistic Research Week at KHiO.
23. March
DRAMA / THEATER in EDUCATION – Regional Conference 2024 at Althof Retz, Retz, Lower Austria.
I went to present the larp, The Things Left Behind, as a resource tool that educators can use in a classroom context when dealing with themes related to conflict, refugees, and forced migration.
Link: https://blog.idea-austria.org/neue-aktivitaeten/447/