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Image Credit: © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

Join National Maritime Museum with The Road to Nowhere as they present an interactive programme decolonising our relationship to water and lookin gat how our identities are as fluid as the sea.

Founder Dalia Al-Dujaili invites guest speakers and curates a workshop exploring South and South West Asian migration paths across bodies of water, asking how waterways have been exploited in the same ways as indigenous lands. In this session, you will also look at mass migrations across oceans, waterways as facilitators of cultural exchange, as both dangerous and fortuitous for migrants, and what the sea connotes for the diasporic identity.

Programme: 
Talk: Hope in Crossing Seas (Friday 6th October) - Learn more and book
Time: 6:30pm-7:30pm 
Join artist Tamara Al-Mashouk and Babylon Migrants Project founder Ali Ghaderi as they speak through what seas and oceans mean to them amidst waves of avoidable tragedies in the seas, and the hostile environment around us.

Hosted by Dalia Al-Dujaili, the panel will explore how we can begin to reimagine seas as sites of healing rather than tragedy. We will also explore how oceans have historically acted as both facilitators and inhibitors of movement, and what this means for the people that cross them, and we will look at privilege and seafaring spaces accessibility.

Workshop: Every Journey Leaves Traces (Saturday 21st October) - Learn more and book 
Time: 2:00-4:00pm
Artist Amanni Hassan Hollands leads a craft workshop exploring various prompts on land-dwelling and seafaring communities from the United Arab Emirates. Through the act of palm leaf weaving, participants will begin to uncover aspects of cultural exchange along the ancient sea-trading routes. From India to Venice, the journey involves silks, spices and pearls; songs, stories and poetry.

Talk: What and who are Bodies of Water? (Friday 3rd November) - Learn more and book
Time: 6:30pm-7:30pm
Join Dalia Al-Dujaili in conversation with authors Sabrina Mahfouz and Nina Manandhar, as they explore what it feels like growing up between two cultures, and examine what it means to belong.

About the curator and host: Dalia Al-Dujaili
Dalia is an Iraqi-British freelance writer, editor, and producer based in London. She tells stories on emerging creativity from the SWANA region and diaspora, on migrant narratives, and reports on community-led stories from the margins with bylines in The Guardian, WePresent, Huck, The New Arab and more.

Collaborations include Nike, Converse, TATE Galleries, BFI, the Barbican, and she has recently co-written a book with The Middle East Archive. She is the founder of The Road to Nowhere magazine – as seen in Dazed, GQ Middle East, Port and It’s Nice That – which showcases new creative and cultural writing, art, and photography about second-generation immigrants, diaspora, and migration narratives.

Dalia is also the Producer of Refugee Week 2023 and has worked with migrant charities such as Paper Airplanes, Restless Beings, Counterpoints, Gaza Library, the IRC and The Migrant Rights Network.