Migration Memories set out to exhibit migration history in a way in which audiences would see themselves as well as others. Above all, it was interested in engagement across difference as a basis for informing understandings about ‘us’ in whatever configuration. To this end, the research exhibitions worked with the idea that embodying and grounding diversity in personal and local perspectives, and in the context of migration history, could create distinct and tangible contact points.

In discussing the Migration Memories research, I have argued for an approach to exhibiting migration that is not wedded to the passive spectacle of diversity or, as a reaction to the potential divisiveness of this, a catalogue of personal experience. The practical strategies adopted by the Migration Memories exhibitions suggest the possibility of dissolving the bond between migration and cultural diversity in favour of treating migration as a historical event and experience, within which cultural position is a factor. They also suggest the possibility of viewing difference through the lens of social-historical experience, position and discourse, rather than through the essentialist markers of difference attached to ‘culture’. This more fluid approach opens the way to undoing the use of diversity as a collective noun. As a noun, diversity, like community, has come to operate as a perfect managerial term in that it objectifies and makes passive. In Migration Memories, diversity was in many ways recast as a verb. The project approached exhibiting diversity as the action of making contact and interacting across difference. In this sense, the intention was to extend ‘sitting well with each other’ (the phrase Ruth Phillips draws on to describe collaborative exhibits)^[62] into exchange between subjects.^[63]

The metaphor I have used for diversity in action is ‘folding’—a connection between surfaces that produces complex and layered configurations.^[64] Migration Memories was interested in creating a ‘folding’ exhibition in practice. The idea of the dialogic exhibition suggested a form for encouraging conversation between the different experiences within the exhibition and between these and the experience that audiences would bring to their viewing of it. An important part of the research concerned how this form might be realised through the practical dimensions of graphics and fabric, of scale and composition, through the use of image, text, colour, material, shape and sound. My discussion of the theory and practice of Migration Memories speaks for the value of attention to this level of practice in relation to wider issues about the role of interpretative cultural institutions as collectors and creators of culture.^[65] It is founded on an interest in what we ‘make’ of each other and in how interventions in dominant understandings of ‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘us’ can be made through cultural—and in this case, exhibition-making—practice. I have argued that an understanding of the practical dimensions of ‘folding’ and ‘conversation’ is required for their realisation.