With the decolonization towards the end of the 20th century, newly independent countries were confronted with the challenges of swift economic, social and cultural transformation to be participatory in the emerging dominant world system which is to be known as global capitalism. There are those who made giant strides and succeeded in adapting into this new landscape while others continued to combat the “contradictions, half-finished processes, hybridity, and liminalities” effect of colonization. Said (1974). The latter’s participation in this new world system took shape in propagating transnational movement of bodies as capital goods (wage labor). These “transnational bodies that moved as capital goods (wage labor) whether it is permanent (where new citizenships are taken up) or temporary ( where the diaspora is based only on contractual work)” are now known as ‘Migrants.’ Bodie (2012) 

Gramsci introduced us to the notion of the “subaltern”; displaced specific people from the socio-economic institutions of society who are socially, politically and geographically excluded from the hegemonic structure of power. Jones (1967). Chakravorty Spivak (1999), following this line of thinking, asked us in her original essay, “Can the subaltern speak?,” which is still an ongoing intellectual and political debate to date. Using these as provocations, The Museum of Migration and Memory as a project argues that migrants are subaltern and attempts to respond to the question of Chakravorty Spivak because it understands that people we call voiceless are oftentimes not actually voiceless. They are in fact talking all the time if you only listen to them intently. 

The project contends that the question is not ``Can the subaltern speak?” but “Are you listening?” 

Bhaba in his book, “The Location of Culture,” introspected how the moment of the scattering of people in the nations of others is also a time of gathering. It is from this realization that The Museum of Migration and Memory's artistic vision is drawn from. It aims to serve as a conduit to this act of gathering of migrants and building of containers or platforms for listening. 

The project also heeds to the call of Said (1979) to not only recognize “the socio-political dislocations and configurations of our time but to situate identities in geography of higher identities, peoples, cultures and then to study how despite of their differences, they have always overlapped each other… which is the only way we could free ourselves from (post colonial) imperial attitude towards it.” It is the aim of this project to precisely do that: to raise critical consciousness; counter discourses to the single narrative of who is and what is a migrant by surfacing subjectivities of migrants, front and center, and situating them into a higher geography where they could overlap each other and create a new sense of belongingness. 

What ‘The Museum of Migration and Memory’ wants to create is, in essence, what Bhabha (1994) calls a “third space;” a space for listening and containing migrants’ articulations of their alienations, negotiations and gains; a space where the legacy and aftermath of their mobility is articulated and understood. It is a space that challenges the traditional notion of space and place and enables us to appreciate the “social nature of space as something created and reproduced through collective human agency. Rather than simply representing a physical entity, space is socially constructed through conceptual acts of re-imagination.” Parreñas (2001). 

To achieve these monumental tasks, the project employs the Kyoto School of Thought, a school of philosophy that looks at transforming the way we view ourselves, others, and the world; that looks at philosophy not as a cerebral exercise in logic or the analysis of words or propositions. The Kyoto School of Thought, as a philosophy, doubts “the adequacy of the intellect and its concept formation to deliver a true picture of the complexity of everyday human experience. It embraces “pure experience;” “that to experience means to know facts just as they are; to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one’s own fabrications; not adulterating experience with some sort of thought; to experience the state of experience just as it is without the least addition of deliberative discrimination.” Carter (2013). 

The Museum of Migration and Memory honors the notions of, "Knowledge given is sufficient'' and “Truth to materiality,” from this school of philosophy. The project has no intention to put meanings and judgments into the results of the project’s Phase 1/Year 1 (Ethnographic research, Community art workshops) and Phase 2/Year 2 (City-wide installations, Crowd-sourced narratives, Performance art piece). The project aims for authenticity and sincerity by ensuring every step of the way the migrant’s voices are heard as they are. The project’s processes in place serve merely as containers or platforms to contain what is already present and palpable. 

Nguyen (2018), in his book “The Displaced,” talked about the artist’s task. How “artists are supposed to go to where it hurts, to know what it feels like to be an other. They should be able to conjure up the lives of others, and only through such acts of memory, imagination, and empathy can they grow our capacity to feel for others. Artists, being people who do not always feel at home; who are out of place, who are emotionally or psychically or socially displaced to one degree or another, at one time or another, are in the best position to create works that reminds us that it is only through our ability to welcome others that we achieve the best of ourselves.” 

The artists-makers of The Memory of Migration and Memory are migrants themselves who understand space as a spatio-temporal construct; that space could be re/imagined and re/created. They’ve been doing these acts of re/imagination and re/creation constantly to relieve pressure from alienated times of being in diaspora and they are part of their continuing negotiations. They are in this project to ask difficult questions on migration and memory, to speak of our time and to break down silos that separate our humanities apart.