Tea and sympathy for refugees in a time of turbulence
ALKETA XHAFA Mripa isn’t the superstitious sort, but when a couple of teacups smashed on the eve of her latest show she admits she was a little unnerved. The Kosovan-born artist has been living in England since 1997 and her latest work began life in a van outside the British Museum shortly after the EU Referendum.
“The idea for Refugees Welcome had begun a couple of years earlier when I was travelling across France. I saw refugees on the side of the road desperately trying to get onto the back of a truck. For them, that truck represented freedom and Britain seemed like a land of opportunity.
“I wanted to capture what I was seeing and so I hired a van, turned the inside into a 1970s British living room and invited people to come and have a cup of tea with me. Then just before we opened the teacups smashed. It felt very symbolic. Tea is so quintessentially part of the British welcome and there it was in pieces. I think that’s how a lot of people felt after the referendum.”
While the work, which comes to York as part of the city’s Festival of Ideas, might have taken shape after what Alketa witnessed in France, it has its roots in her own experiences of growing up and then leaving Kosovo as it was gripped by bloody civil war.
“From being very young I knew that things weren’t right in my country,” she says. “There was an expectation that the younger generations would leave because in Kosovo there was no hope for the future. I came to London in 1997 to study art at St Martin’s College and even then I remember thinking, ‘Why can’t the rest of the world see what’s happening over there? Why is no one doing anything’.”
The following year, tensions which had been bubbling just below the surface spilled over. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbia responded to separatist pressure from Kosovo by launching a brutal crackdown on the territory’s Albanian population.
Between January 1998 and December 2000, 13,517 people were killed or went missing and, for three weeks, Alketa was unable to make contact with any of her family who had remained in Kosovo.
“I remember calling home and the voice on the other end was Serbian,” she says. “That was it. I thought they were all dead. Eventually they made contact with me from one of the refugee camps. They were alive, but far from safe.”
Unable to return home, Alketa’s temporary home in Britain became a permanent one and, when she looks back at those years, all she remembers is how welcome she was made to feel.
“I always felt that Britain was a place that I could put down new roots,” she says. “People cared and it did feel like a refuge from all the horrors which were happening back home.”
However, over the last few years Alketa says she has seen the atmosphere in Britain change and while last week’s General Election result has made her more optimistic for a softer, more sympathetic Brexit, it has also made Refugees Welcome all the more relevant.
“It’s hard to believe what has happened in the last 12 months,” she says. “We have had the vote to leave the EU, we have seen Donald Trump voted in as President of the United States and nothing seems certain anymore. Now I see the same thing I went through happening around me.
“There are people in desperate situations and I feel I need to be the voice for the voiceless. This isn’t just about me telling my story. I want people to sit down, have a cup of tea an tell me theirs. We need to talk and we need to be open with each other. I’m just doing my part as a human being, as well as an artist.”
Refugees Welcome, York Festival of Ideas, York Minster, June 17. www. yorkfestivalofideas.com.