This week the Swansea City of Sanctuary team took down our month-long exhibition, Home Away from Home, which has been displayed in The National Waterfront Museum since the middle of June.
Home Away from Home consists of 16 core panels, including information about Swansea as a City of Sanctuary, stories from local refugees who have come to live in Swansea, as well as information and definitions about the asylum seeking process. This exhibition is a celebration of all the people and organisations who have been involved in making Swansea a City of Sanctuary for over ten years. It allows an audience to discover the stories of those who have sought sanctuary in Swansea and how they have helped shape the city to become a more welcoming space.
Home Away from Home Exhibition Launch, 20th June 2022
Our panels were displayed among some incredible contributions from around Swansea. We showed Sanctuary, a short film made by The Fusion Project, who received an Anniversary Sanctuary Award just last year. University of Wales Trinity Saint David were also kind enough to let us display Nylah MAK’s birdhouses from the Art for the Park community project! We also displayed material from the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, another recent award winner: their beautiful Sanctuary Banners courtesy of Mary Hayman, Nylah MAK, and many participants from the local community. Local Schools of Sanctuary also allowed us to display their beautiful work, showing colourful t-shirts and their Schools of Sanctuary Logo project!
We are what our supporters do!
Staff from National Waterfront Museum and Sioned Williams MS in front of the Sanctuary Banners
We launched the display at the very start of Refugee Week 2022, and continued the celebrations at The Waterfront Museum with our Swansea Schools of Sanctuary Event, which highlighted all the incredible work done by local schools in our network. We gave out 6 awards to schools this year, who should all be so proud to be recognised as places of welcome and inclusion in Swansea. Attendees were invited to a tour around the exhibition after the event took place. During our exhibition time, we have also held an event on Empowering Refugee Voices with Swansea Asylum Seeker Support (SASS), encouraging discussions on how to support and empower refugee voices from our local community. This was once again held in the exhibition space itself, where we drew specific attention towards the stories within our core panels.
Schools of Sanctuary event, 21st June 2022
The Home Away from Home exhibition had plenty of feedback:
“Excellent and informative exhibition! Enjoyed very much – thank you!”
“Amazing to see this, in celebration of Refugee Week, in our City and Nation of Sanctuary”
“Keep up the good work – solidarity!”
“Looking forward to sharing my story with the world. Thank you UK. Thank you Swansea. Thank you City of Sanctuary. Thank you Swansea City of Sanctuary…for all your support”
“Lovely exhibition. Incredible videos. Thought provoking.”
We’d like to thank all of the contributors to this exhibition, the schools, the artists, those who have shared their stories, the PERCEPTIONS Project and Swansea Museum. We’d also like to give a special thank you to The National Waterfront Museum (who are notably the first Museum of Sanctuary in the UK!) for hosting the exhibition and supporting us with all of our events.
This display was hopefully the first of many, as the Home Away from Home panels are designed to travel across Swansea, Wales or even the rest of the UK. If your organisation has an event coming up and you would like to loan the exhibition for a certain amount of time, please do get in touch. We are so excited to see where Home Away from Home will travel to next!