Unmasking the Past: Artists in Conversation

Nelly Ating

Nelly Ating is a photojournalist who focuses on questions of identity, education, extremism, and migration. As a photojournalist, her work has been published in local dailies in Nigeria and legacy media such as the BBC and CNN. Her photographic work documenting the rise of Boko Haram terrorism between 2014 and 2020 in Northeast Nigeria shone a light on the aftermath of violent extremism. Ating has exhibited at galleries and photographic festivals in Africa, Europe and the US, as well as judged and reviewed photography competitions such as African Women in Media (AWiM) and Ugandan Press Photo Awards. She is a member of Women Photograph, Black Women Photographers, African Women in Photography, the Journal Collective, and African Database for Photojournalists run by the World Press Photo. She is currently a PhD candidate at Cardiff University researching the discourse of human rights through photography.

Audrey Albert

Audrey Albert is a Mauritian-Chagossian, visual artist and creative facilitator. Based in Manchester, Audrey’s research-led practice enables her to consider and investigate themes of mixed identity, collective memory and displacement.

Selected for the Future Fires 2020 programme at Contact and the 2021 Creative Fellowship for Manchester International Festival, Audrey is currently working on Chagossians of Manchester (CoM) and Ble Kouler Lakaz (Blue is the colour of Home), both socially-engaged art project about Chagossian culture and heritage.

Audrey’s work highlights stories of empowerment that celebrate Chagossian culture and heritage. Through these works, she pay homage to Chagossian ancestors, including her own, whose descendants are still affected by forceful displacement.

Ffion Denman

Ffion Denman is a photographer and educator currently living in Cardiff.

My body of work opens up complex conversations on cultural displacement and the values of Welsh identity in Patagonia. The work in progress, goes beyond a romanticised notion of my Patagonia from my childhood imagination and invites onlookers to consider a more nuanced and intricate story; which includes the question of what happens when a dominant culture overshadows a minor, and more vulnerable one.

Patricia Hayes

Patricia Hayes is National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She currently holds a FIAS (French Institutes for Advanced Study) fellowship at IEA-Nantes (2023-24) where she is developing a project on colonial photographic archives. She is co-editor of several recent volumes, including Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History (2019), a special issue of the journal Kronos 46 (2020) on ‘Other Lives of the Image,’ and also Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa (2021).

Thierry Mandarin

Thierry Mandarin is an MSc post-graduate in Social Research Methods at the University of Sussex, with a BSc in Social Anthropology and Sociology from the University of Roehampton, London. He completed his MSc dissertation on the “intergenerational challenges, cultural identity and future prospects of the Chagossian community in Manchester” – focusing the subsequent generations of Chagossians; migration stories; impact and legacy of parents and grandparents and the future for the community after the Nationality Borders Bill 2022. He is of Chagossian heritage and identifies as Black.

Geraldine Lublin

Geraldine Lublin is an Associate Professor at Swansea University’s Department of Literature, Media, and Language. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she has lived in Wales since 2002. It was at Cardiff University’s School of Welsh that she completed her PhD, which focused on the special standing of the Welsh community in Chubut in relation to the region and the rest of Argentina. This led her to develop an interest in the wider dynamics of the region, including nation-building in Argentina, indigenous populations and settler colonial theory. She is the author of Memoir and Identity in Welsh Patagonia: Voices from a settler community in Argentina (University of Wales Press, 2017), which critically explores autobiographical materials written by Welsh descendants towards the end of the twentieth century. More recently, she has been inspired by Pedagogy of Degrowth approaches to undertake projects which contribute to highlight how the climate crisis, global inequalities and the dominant growth-oriented economic culture are closely interrelated.