Es Devlin: ‘As an artist, I want to bear witness. Art should be active’

Congregation by Es Devlin—the main display at St Mary le Strand Church

Es Devlin is a ­theatre designer and artist who has worked with ­performers including Stormzy, Adele, Beyonce and the rapper, Dave, on huge installations that have filled stadiums and been beamed around the world.

Her new work focuses on encounters with displaced people who have arrived in London. Es worked with Leonie Ansems de Vries, from King’s College London, to stage this new installation.

Congregation presents Es’s monumental portraits of 50 Londoners who have experienced forced displacement. Through the art, audiences encounter those people and the gifts they bring to London, accompanied by music and a choral performance.

You are famous for huge installations. But this project seems very personal and intimate. How did it work?

Es: Fifty strangers came to sit for me, and we listened to the classical composer Vivaldi’s most famous work, Ode to Spring, while I drew. Then they told me their stories while we listened to music they chose, including Albanian folk music and Eritrean and Chilean protest songs. The portraits are not just documenting people, they are face to face encounters with others. Meeting people face to face changes how we see each other.

There are 50 different people with 50 different stories.

Ayman is a cinematographer because he wants to tell more stories like his. He was arrested twice during the Arab Spring of 2011. He crossed seven countries and even locked himself in a suitcase to get here to reach relatives in Manchester.

Maya arrived from Damascus, in Syria, aged 16, with nothing. She is now an airplane pilot. Everyone I spoke to was seeking refuge from something.

I drew each displaced person with a gift they had brought with them. I asked them each what gift they would bring to their new community.

Some talked about their spirit, and many used the metaphor of seeds and planting, of growing vegetables and producing food. They are all contributing to London’s diverse community.

My practice is all about intimacy, but at scale. I began with one voice reaching an audience of 75, then 1,000, then 100,000 in a stadium. But every installation was about a moment of encounter, an encounter with the life of another person.

Leonie: I love the idea of the gift. It reverses the narrative that people are coming to take our jobs.

But it also prompts us to ask why some people need to contribute to society and others can just arrive without proving anything.

The variety of different experiences here encourages us to think about what is home? What is belonging? What is a nation?

Leonie, you have researched the impact of violence and exhaustion. How do they affect refugees in places such as the Jungle, in Calais?

Leonie: Migration flows of particular groups of people are managed with violence, whether that is bureaucratic violence of documentation and regulation, or the physical violence from the police or border guards.

People have to struggle so hard to find a place of refuge and belonging.

I wanted to challenge the narrative that refugees are just passive victims of violence. Refugees have political agency, and they create their own informal spaces of community and belonging.

I talk about exhaustion because around 2016 I noticed that people in Calais, in northern France, were talking more about their feelings of exhaustion, of being completely run down, of losing energy and giving up hope.

This was because of both overt violence from the police and the constant uncertainty about when a raid might occur, and the long-term effects of things like untreated health conditions and trauma.

It was a political strategy to make life as difficult as possible.

“The politics of exhaustion” was a deliberate strategy and a lived experience. But people can also become energised by fighting this together. We have entangled pasts and an entangled present.

In Britain, I met a refugee who was a template success story. He had got here, completed a degree, done everything right.

Yet, he told me that he missed the Jungle in Calais, despite the violence, because there was a community there.

He found a sense of belonging in a place of violence, and no place of belonging in a place that was supposed to be safe. Journeys do not stop when people arrive.

Was the contrast between the way Ukrainian refugees were welcomed, and other refugees demonised, part of the inspiration for this project?

Es: In 2022, I was drawing some of the 243 animal species that share London with us. The city felt porous. Then the Ukrainian refugees came and the city was opened up to them and the media welcomed them.

But in October, then home secretary Suella Braverman talked about an “invasion” of people. Just months before, 10,000 children were welcomed, now a similar number was an invasion.

I wanted to understand what was happening so I talked to Leonie, to the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and to the campaigning charity, Choose Love.

I began to think about what we want to change. And why we need safe routes for people in need to reach a place of safety and sanctuary.

Leonie: The movement of people is never a problem. It happens all the time if you have the right passport. It’s the movement of particular people, which is seen as the problem.

We rearrange the borders to make it easier for some to come and go, while making it harder for others.

We need to create safe pathways and enable people to cross borders when they need to.

Most refugees seek sanctuary in their own countries, they are internally displaced, or they go to neighbouring countries. The authorities erect huge barriers to people seeking asylum.

You have to visit a consulate, get a visa, but if your life is under threat, you can’t do that.

Britain has externalised its borders to other countries. It has privatised its borders to the airline and ferry companies that will be fined or lose their licences if they bring in people without the right documentation.

That means the government is outsourcing border control to private companies.

Britain takes less than 1 percent of those seeking sanctuary. But Ukraine shows what can be done, how quickly schemes can be put in place for particular groups of people.

We can open up the same safe routes for people coming from Afghanistan, Syria and South Sudan. If you want to break the model of the people smugglers, you have to create safe routes.

Did creating this work change you?

Es: This project was life-changing for me. Having these sustained encounters with strangers for 45 minutes meant I had to challenge the layers of static interference of my own bias.

The context for these encounters became the general election and then the horror of the attacks on refugee centres—and then the reassurance of the country coming out in Brighton and Hackney and Walthamstow, in London, with people saying “Refugees Welcome Here”.

It was such a massive relief.

I listened to around 200 hours of podcasts to understand the history of conflicts that had created refugees, the maps and the rulers that were in the hands of British men.

Amir Nizar Zuabi is the theatre director who created the giant puppet, Little Amal. He is Palestinian but has been living in London for two years. He told me how Palestine is a land of many stories because it is a corridor between the land and the sea.

Everyone who travels through Palestine leaves something.

Destruction, love, a word, a curse, an etching, a version of God. He said he loves London, but he can’t forget that the colonial system that created this magnificent city is also responsible for creating the conflict and the pain in his homeland.

As an artist, I want to bear witness with grace. I want to make art in which people experience encounters with their own biases and with other peoples’ stories.

We need an informed understanding of safe routes. The UNHCR says the 73 percent of the world’s refugees come from five countries—Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine and South Sudan.

Leonie: It is important to understand that colonial journeys are connected to today.

We forcibly moved people, we went to other countries. This shaped the world. There are huge structural inequalities. English is now spoken everywhere. Most people trying to get to Britain come because they have family here or because they know the language.

What impact would you like Congregation to have?

Es: I want these encounters to be truthful. People came here to seek refuge and sanctuary, they made decisions and took action.

Encountering them in this way is enlightening, deeply moving and encouraging. Art should be active. The performance, the encounters between people, is a rehearsal for how things could be.