Dispatches in Exile, the one-of-a-kind project led by VII Academy curator Ziyah Gafić in partnership with the International Organization for Migration, Bosnia and Herzegovina, has launched its online media portal, dispatchesinexile.com.
The website gives participants, who are people on the move through Bosnia and Herzegovina, a place to publish reports and stories that give insight into their difficult and fragmented lives. This unique project provides about 60 migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middles East with basic media training. Trainers teach them the basic principles of journalism and media production including photography, time-based media, ethics and narrative storytelling.
With a few notable exceptions, the stories of people on the move are usually told through dispatches from reporters who drop in periodically to cover the “migrant and refugee crisis”. The VII Academy has partnered with the IOM to mitigate this fragmented and distorted narrative. Everything we know about the people on the move and their precarious journey is told from the perspective of outsiders, whether humanitarian aid agencies, activists, NGO’s or by professional journalists who are frequently limited by cultural differences, language barriers, and attention span.
