Leaving Home

An evening centered around the stories of precarity and resistance from women migrant workers.

The way we discuss migration in the Netherlands is dehumanising. We talk about ‘it’ as if migration exists separately from an actual human being, one who through unknown conditions has left their home. This is no different for labour migrants, who are mostly spoken of in terms of disturbance or judged based on their economic value. The questions that predominate public discussions about labour migration are: how are ‘they’ of use to ‘us’ and how much of a problem do migrants pose to ‘our’ society. Much less is the discussion about the living and working conditions that labour migrants find themselves in in the Netherlands and the positive effects of migration on a society. And above all, systemic questions are completely disregarded. What conditions cause people to leave their home? What is the role of state policy in the web of global migration? How do capitalism and imperialism foster these dynamics, and how are these systems gendered? And most importantly: what forms of resistance arise in these systems of oppression?

To answer these questions, Leaving Home takes a closer look at the intersection of gender, labour, and migration. Through a close reading of personal essays written by female labour migrant workers from the Philippines and Indonesia – supported by a conversation between community organisers and migrants, and a solidarity letter writing session – the program examines the systemic conditions that underlie labour migration and emphasises the human-side of this discussion.

In this programme Dewi Sofia Cultural worker, curator and research assistant at Framer Framed. Mark Pascual Executive director of Stichting Center for Philippine Concerns and campaigns lead at Migrante Netherlands.

About the speakers

Mark Pascual is a political refugee and activist from the Philippines. He is executive director of Stichting Center for Philippine Concerns and campaigns lead at Migrante Netherlands.

Dewi Sofia is a cultural worker. She holds an MA in Arts and Culture at Leiden University and primarily works as an exhibitions and research assistant at Framer Framed. Her interests are mostly found in the intersections of contemporary culture and politics, working within themes of gender, queerness, and anti-imperialist resistance. As a cultural worker, her experience is in curating, writing, and research, integrating collective processes and social-justice driven perspectives in her practice. She is also involved in community-based projects which seek to (re)connect members of the diaspora to the history and political realities of Indonesia and the Philippines. Her projects are often centred on the imaginative possibility of reclaiming space and forming South-South solidarities to shake the matrices of coloniality.

Rizqita Naherta (They/Them) is a cultural worker, organiser, and archivist-researcher working collaboratively to nurture archival knowledge of Indonesian queer-marginalized communities and women’s resistance movements that are prone to be forgotten, misapprehended, and lost. Their practice manifests in the assemblage of various living archives built from old scattered media and the stories told in the everyday. Giving homage to their elders that came before them, and recirculating their spirit in the contemporary to counter historical amnesia. They often produce installation, pedagogical activation, relational performances, and community-based events.

Read more The particularities to women's struggles in migrant organising

Article with a brief recap from a webinar by the International Migrants Alliance