Image Credit: ‘Queer Migrations’ by Bold Mellon.

‘you are all who came before, you are all who will come after’: queer & migrant artists on belonging, hope & desire

What does it mean to move – across borders, between languages, through histories, and towards imagined futures? What do we carry with us, and what do we choose to reinvent along the way?

you are all who came before, you are all who will come after is an art book emerging from Bold Mellon Collective’s Queer Migrations project, sharing its title with a collaborative live art performance.

Bringing together work selected through a nationwide open call, the art book features contributions from more than 20 LGBTQIA+, migrant, diasporic and refugee artists. Photography, visual art, prose and poetry sit alongside documentation of Queer Migrations 2026 – the live performance, a collage workshop, short film and community discussion.

Together, these works celebrate the movement, lives and imaginations of LGBTQIA+ migrant, refugee and diasporic communities- those living between places, languages, cultures and histories. Woven across time and place, the book becomes a space for connection, reflection and collective imagining – a way of thinking about what it means to move, and to be moved, as queer people in a world shaped by borders.

Ahead of the book’s launch and Bold Mud V event at Poplar Union on September 26, Emilia Nurmukhamet of Bold Mellon Collective spoke with ten contributors about belonging, hope and desire.

How do queer communities create belonging across borders, languages, and different lived experiences?

Benjamin Cyril Arthur: I think belonging is built the way you’d build a house in a country with no fixed ground, you learn to make the foundation portable. I left Ghana because I was gay but what I didn’t expect was that belonging, once I got to the UK, wouldn’t arrive as relief. It arrived as translation work. I was still explaining myself, just in a different register. I was no longer hiding from family, but now I had to teach near-strangers the shape of what I’d survived.

What I’ve noticed is that queer diaspora belonging isn’t built on shared identity so much as shared fluency in translation itself. A Ugandan friend, a Filipino friend, a Brazilian friend, we don’t share a coming-out story or a religion or a first language, but we share the specific exhaustion of having built two selves and having to decide, every day, which one gets to walk into which room. That fluency becomes its own kind of kinship. We recognise each other by the seams, not the fabric.

Lechen Zheng: Through love, and through finding forms of recognition that were not allowed or available to us in our original cultures.

Through love, we fall in love with people in new places, and from there, our lives begin to branch out and take root. Through people from different cultural backgrounds, entirely new worlds open up to us: we taste new food, learn new languages, and discover histories we did not know before. Love creates a kind of butterfly effect. To me, it is also one of the gentlest and most natural ways of developing a sense of belonging within a local culture.

Beyond love, finding an identity and a sense of recognition that may have been absent from our original culture can also allow us to stay, settle, and put down roots in a foreign place. There is an old Chinese line, “此心安处是吾乡”, which roughly means, “Wherever my heart finds peace is my home.” I think it speaks to exactly this feeling.

Minh Nguyen: I think personal archives are an important part of how queer communities create belonging. For communities whose histories have often been forgotten, overlooked, or left undocumented. The act of preserving memories through photographs, food, journals, music, and oral histories can become a way of remembering and honouring those identities as we form new ones.

Our stories and traumas may be completely different, especially across cultures and generations. But there’s something powerful about creating spaces where we can recognise parts of ourselves in one another. A personal archive can become collective through sharing. For example, one person’s memory can resonate with someone else’s experience, even when the circumstances are very different.

I think this is really important across borders and languages because we don’t need a shared history to understand feelings like longing or isolation. Queer communities can create belonging by preserving these fragments and giving each other somewhere to be seen.

Raneece Buddan: For me, I have found a sense of belonging by bonding with people over shared mainstream queer media/culture. Attending live music events or dance parties for us/by us has been a great way to connect, as well as participating in the ballroom scene. Ballroom is a space rooted in acceptance, where everyone is allowed to express themselves creatively. It’s multigenerational and multiethnic, filled with people from all walks of life with different experiences. It’s where you can find your chosen family.

Image Credit: The artists from the project, “you are all who came before, you are all who will come after” by Bold Mellon.

What gives you hope right now, and what forms of resistance, resilience, or collective action inspire you?

Néa Ishana Ranganathan: Building spaces for collective art making and real political resistance, which is made with and by the working people. Spending every day in and amongst the community at all capacities. Body doubling, silent zine making sessions, to late-night baking sessions, to sober raves. Reading, consuming media, and engaging with Guerrilla resistance movements, feminist militant strategy, Black and brown revolutionary theorists, and anti-imperialist/international student actions. Learning and rehearsing freedom every day and always trusting my ancestral gut. Remembering all of this and continuing to document and archive so I don’t forget, and our future comrades don’t forget.

Àmộké: My dreams give me hope to keep staying alive. I dream of a life of softness, to breathe lighter, to feel fulfilled in my life in a world that is actively burning. I know this is the dream of many queer individuals. I continue to create from my lived experiences as a part of the collective queer archive. My entire creative practice is an act of resilience and rebellion, and we persist by imagining and creating the lives we deserve.

Roya Ghassemi: I find hope in the fact that people keep making things even when circumstances tell them to disappear or make themselves smaller. Making can itself be resistant. As a ceramic artist, I think a lot about clay. It can be broken, crushed, dissolved, and formed again, but transformation doesn’t mean returning to what it was before. It carries evidence of every process it’s passed through. I recognise something of migration and queer resilience in that.

What inspires me most isn’t always spectacular resistance. It’s people building small infrastructures of care: sharing knowledge, opening doors, translating for one another, making spaces safer, preserving stories, simply letting someone be seen. Hope, for me, isn’t believing everything will become easy. It’s watching people keep creating possibilities for one another when the structures around them have failed to.

Image Credit: The event, ‘Bold Mud’ by Bold Mellon.

What stories about queer migration are still missing from public conversations?

Maggie Kuzan: Every migrant experience is different; but I want to speak from a place of pleasure and celebration. I believe that too often, the dominant public conversation around queer migration is steeped in loss and grief. Of course, I acknowledge the space for this but I also believe in the transformative, almost sacred potential of joy and pleasure, as championed by activists and writers such as Adrienne Maree Brown. Desire, intimacy (platonic or romantic) and connection hold equal weight and can be life-changing mechanisms for freeing ourselves from the structures of oppression, steering us towards happier, more fulfilling lives.

Why.Not.Me: What is profoundly missing from public discourse is the recognition that queer migrants are not a monolithic trope driven solely by the pursuit of western identity-liberation. Displacement is brutal, complex, and deeply universal. Often, individuals are forced to abandon their lives not through a curated quest for personal expression, but due to sheer, unavoidable circumstance, conflict, and structural collapse—just like anyone else.

When media narratives reduce queer migration exclusively to ideological slogans, they erase the quiet, harrowing reality of universal grief: the sudden loss of home, the sensory shock of starting over from scratch, and the raw exhaustion of survival. Being queer does not isolate you from the universal trauma of forced displacement; it simply adds another vulnerable layer to an already fragile existence. We urgently need narratives that honor this unglamorized human truth—moving beyond sensationalized headlines to acknowledge the raw, shared weight of rebuilding safety in an unfamiliar world.

Xiao Yang: One perspective I would like to see more of in conversations around queer migration is that of disabled queer people. I previously worked as an illustration teacher in a specialist education college, where I saw students use drawing and art to communicate their identities, emotions, and inner worlds in incredibly individual ways. At the same time, I became more aware of how easily their queer identities and experiences could be overlooked or not taken seriously.

Conversations about queer migration often assume that everyone has the same ability to leave, move, find community, and explore who they are. But for disabled queer people, questions of identity and belonging may also intersect with accessibility, care, dependence, communication, and autonomy. I think we need more space to listen to these experiences seriously — not simply seeing disabled queer people as people who need care, but as people with their own desires, relationships, identities, and right to self-discovery.

Find Bold Mellon at boldmelloncollective.com

See them IRL →

Join Bold Mellon Collective for an unforgettable evening of live music featuring Edith, Kühlname, Niloufar Shahbazi and Crossfade CIC, readings from the art book, art stalls, and more. Pick up your own free copy of the art book and celebrate the creativity, stories and experiences of queer migrant and diasporic communities.

‘you are all who came before, you are all who will come after’
Art Book Launch & Bold Mud V
Saturday, 26 September, 19:00
Poplar Union, E14
Pay What You Can tickets → outsavvy.com