The African Centre for Migration and Society wanted to have an exhibition accompany two majour public events in its calendar: a Public Symposium On Migration And Health In Southern Africa And The South African Launch Of The UCL-Lancet Commission On Migration And Health.
Because of the MoVE projects focus on migration questions in general these projects were a good fit for an accompanying exhibition. Jo Vearey approached me with the brief. The ACMS wanted an exhibition that could accompany the symposium and the launch of the report. This exhibition It was a good opportunity for the MoVE project to feature some of its past projects and workshop process photographs. The MoVE Project has projects bundled into it that goes back to 2010. You can see much of this history on the MoVE Issuu page. Many of the projects include long term participants and collaborators. What a journey it has been! This exhibition had to relay some of this journey. We had, however, both a time and cost challenge to deal with. Given the status of the event, however, quality could not be compromised on. Furthermore, it was clear that this exhibition had to create a space that clearly demarcated the territory of the symposium and the report launch in an otherwise public area. This is where where spatial design meets communication design through exhibition.
By relying on the good practice of past design approaches we were able to create a good exhibition that engaged a range of researchers, politicians, members of civil society and members of the general public. What enabled this exhibition was the underlying modular design approach that informs much of the supporting content of MoVE exhibitions. This structure works well to give contextualising information around the rather organic creative output coming from participants. This means that previous MoVE exhibition content was designed so that the information bearing elements can be repurposed and reconfigured into new exhibitions, and that exhibitions could scale up or down depending on available budgets and timelines. This design approach has proved effective, and has allowed exhibitions to be feasible even when budgets are low. We chose project feature posters that gives broad project interests, and project workshop posters that give access into the project activities. We also displayed project portfolios, and past publications. And because this is MoVE, we couldn’t resist showcasing some of the newer project artifacts: we had space for one of the quilts from Mwangaza Mama, and the newly created stickers from Bua Modiri. Were it not for the modular resources that could be reconfigured to show the journey of the MoVE project, this story would not have been able to be told at this important symposium and report launch.
