Essential information
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Events and festivals
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|---|---|
| Location | |
| Date and times | Saturday 3 October 2026 | 11am-4pm |
| Free entry for members. Not a Member? Join now |
Discover stories linked to migration in this creative festival, produced in collaboration with Royal Museums Greenwich, Community Curators and the Migration Museum.
TIDES: (Intertidal) – Migration Festival is an ode to the ebb and flow of people who have moved around the globe for thousands of years. Through workshops, performances and screenings, the event acknowledges deeply layered stories of migration and forced displacement, while highlighting the political and personal undercurrents and counter currents.
This festival takes inspiration from the 'Crossings' display in the Queen's House, which centres migrant voices.
We invite people of all ages and backgrounds to participate in TIDES. Together we can learn from each other’s experiences and create a better understanding of how migration intersects with our personal histories and collective humanity.
Event programme
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Workshops
Zine Making Towards Solidarity
11am-12.30pm | Undercroft, Queen's House
Join illustrator Javie Huxley for an interactive zine-making workshop exploring solidarity, connection and community. Create your own zine to take home!
Empowered Reading Time and Workshop with The Black Curriculum
11am-1pm | Governor's Parlour, Queen's House
Join The Black Curriculum for a children's reading workshop, focused on Black British migration.
This event has a capcity of 30. Children will need to be supervised during workshops.
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Displays
11am-4pm | Throughout the Queen's House
Explore a series of displays showcasing archival projects, which are centred on specific communities and narratives. These have been developed through grassroots methods and practices.
Discover more about the themes and contributors below.
Performances
Formula by Diasporas Now
12pm-1pm | Great Hall, located on the first floor of the Queen's House
Join artists from Diasporas Now for a practice-led live art ritual led by RIEKO and Lulu Wang of Diasporas Now – with improvised collective movement and orchestral guitar soundscape, sonically and somatically exploring waves and cycles, ebbs and flows.
Diasporas Now is an art community, cultural agency and collective that champions Global Majority artists. The group is currently Collective-in-Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), organising live performances, talks and alternative arts education.
Be Right Back: Paper Houses
1.30pm-3pm | Governor's Parlour, located on the ground floor of the Queen's House
Where is home? What makes a place a home? How can we build a community together and share our common experience of being an immigrant in Europe?
Be Right Back is a workshop theatre performance about migration and diaspora. Through interactive storytelling and crafts-making in multi-sensory settings, the space is opened up for all participants to share their more-than-ordinary stories of home and migration, and find a new means of expression through building papaper houses and crafting a community.
The performance will feature: Jacob Wu, lead artist and ideation, Boing Yuen, deviser, Pat To Yan, dramaturg, Wai-yi Wong, sound design and presented by Amy Sze Production.
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Film screenings
Curated film programme by MOSTOVI Collective
1pm-2pm | Lecture Theatre, National Maritime Museum
A selection of films curated by the MOSTOVI Film Collective, exploring themes of displacement, migration, memory and identity across Balkan regions and diasporic communities.
MOSTOVI is a women-led film collective, dedicated to platforming film and audiovisual material from the Balkans, to the UK. They say: "Formed out of our shared diaspora experience as ex-Yugoslavians living in the UK, we recognised the absence of such spaces within London’s film landscape. Yet, Mostovi is not just about screenings. It is a space for connection, created to unite our diaspora through films, discussions, and Q&As."
Curated film programme by Ching Wong (Archipelago Collective x Hong Kong Film Festival UK) and Audrey Chan
3pm-4pm | Location TBC
Three short films address movement, memories – and lived experiences carried across seas and waterways – in this screening compiled by film and art curator Ching Wong and filmmaker and artist Audrey Chan.
The films include What Sound Does the Black Atlantic Make by Alberta Whittle, In 1875 We Met at the Docks of Liverpool by Yarli Allison and Anak Where Did We Stay? by Sadia Pineda Hameed, and span the Philippines, Barbados, Hong Kong, China and the UK.
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Talks
Artist Talk: 1834 Collective
1pm-1.40pm | The Queen’s Privy Chamber, first floor of the Queen's House
Join members of the 1834 Arts Collective for a talk exploring their work, its purpose and its importance within the British cultural landscape.
Spotlight Panel: Intersecting Tides of Change: Building Solidarity Through Arts, Culture, Heritage and Research
2pm-3.30pm | Great Hall, first floor of the Queen's House
“Without community, there is certainly no liberation.” – Audre Lorde
Guided by the words of activists, scholars and thinkers across time and space, this conversation brings together practitioners to explore how we can build, sustain and amplify multiple, interconnected forms of solidarity across the culture, arts and heritage sectors.
This conversation asks how we might move beyond divisions. How can artists, cultural workers, researchers and heritage practitioners, with direct connections to experiences of migration or displacement, use their individual and collective practices to create spaces for connection, exchange and mutual support? How can we recognise the different histories and experiences of communities while identifying the shared struggles that might bring us together?
The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Daria Valova-Lynch from the Migration Museum. Speakers include Êvar Huseynî (The West Asian and North African Women's Art Library), Dr. Shelley Angelie Saggar & Toan Khanh Vu (An Việt Archives) & Güler Ates (artist featured in the Crossings display in the Queen's House).
About the organisers
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Community Curators
TIDES is curated by the Community Curators, consisting of Amalia Syeda-Aguirre, Arbër Qerka-Gashi and Ching Wong.
The Community Curators is a collective of creative first and second-generation migrants and refugees.
They say: “Our curatorial practice seeks to uncover and amplify the lesser-told perspectives, emphasising stories of solidarity and collectivity. We celebrate the experiences, which we are told should bring shame, and strive to showcase the full spectrum of what is possible when we shift; both physically and spiritually.”
Amalia Syeda-Aguirre (b. 1986, London) is a writer, curator and community organiser of Chilean and Bangladeshi heritage. Amalia’s writing focuses on world-building for young children; understanding our collective past and imagining better futures for people and the planet.
Arbër Qerka-Gashi (b. 1997, London) is a writer, curator, archivist and community organiser of Kosovar heritage. He is the founder of the research platform and publication, Balkanism as well as co-founder of the Balkan London Collective.
Ching Wong is a London-based curator, writer and programmer. She co-founded Hong Kong Film Festival UK and the transnational cultural collective Archipelago. Her curatorial practice explores how cross-disciplinary artistic experimentation can reshape the ways we gather, (un)learn and imagine.
The Migration Museum
The Migration Museum explores how the movement of people to and from the UK across the ages has shaped who we are – as individuals, as communities, and as nations. As an emerging museum project, we spent five years in a temporary space in Lewisham, South East London (2020-2025) and are now establishing a new permanent museum in the City of London, launching in 2028.
As we work towards the next chapter for the Migration Museum, we have been partnering with Royal Museums Greenwich – an old neighbour and long-term friend – on a range of events, including the upcoming Migration Festival. As part of this event, we are also particularly excited to be working alongside the Community Curators again, a collective initiated by the Migration Museum in 2024.
We look forward to celebrating and commemorating the stories and histories that speak to the themes of migration, journeys, identity and belonging.
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Background to the event
The event organisers share their aims and ambitions for the event.
Migration stories are too often absent from, or misrepresented within, public narratives. These are shaped by increasingly politicised debates that continue to dehumanise communities that migrate and/or are forcibly displaced.
In response to this context, this year's Tides: (Intertidal) Migration Festival, produced in collaboration with Royal Museums Greenwich, the Community Curators and the Migration Museum, places the voices and lived experiences of people connected to migration and displacement at the heart of its programme.
Drawing on the metaphor of the tides, and the waters that have long carried people across borders, continents and generations, the festival explores the ebb and flow of human movement over thousands of years.
Inspired by the 'Crossings' display at the Queen's House, the event brings together creative responses that foreground lived experience, offering perspectives that have too often been overlooked or underrepresented within institutional spaces.
The name of the event 'Intertidal', refers to a shoreline that is constantly submerged and then exposed. It is dynamic, often hidden and then visible, much like the inner and external multi-layered experience of migration. The marine communities that live in these intertidal areas are hardy, adaptable and experience extreme conditions.
What’s on
Banner image: Detail from Crossing Border by Shorsh Saleh, on display in 'Crossings'