mixrice. Migrating Flavours

About

mixrice is an art collective led by Seoul based artists Cho Ji Eun (b.1975) and Yang Chul Mo (b.1977). Their work encompasses photography, video, animation, wall painting and festival organization, and is often produced in collaboration with migrant communities. mixrice focus on the traces and process of migration, what they describe as ‘skin sense’ – embodied, felt memories, tastes and sensations of place, which displaced individuals carry with them.

Since 2006, mixrice have been working in collaboration with a collective of illegal migrant workers based in the Maseok Factory Complex outside Seoul. The artists will bring traces of their experiences in Seoul to Eastside Projects as video works and wall paintings, whilst also building connections with refugee and asylum seeker communities in Birmingham. In doing so they look for the common ground between these contexts – two different ideas of what freedom might look like.

Whilst in residence in Birmingham, mixrice will produce the second iteration of their project mixfruit. Working migrant and refugee groups including the Birch Network meet and greet and Kushinga Garden, a project that brings together migrants, refugees and community gardeners in Bournville, mix rice will lead a series of workshops which will ask participants to share memories of the sight, smell, taste of fruits from home, and to recreate these using coloured clay, drawing, writing, and the flesh of other fruits. The outcomes of these workshops, and others held across Birmingham, will form part of the exhibition at Eastside Projects.