A new exhibition has opened this month at the Museum of Cambridge exploring notions of belonging in the city. Named ‘Hiraeth’, an untranslatable Welsh word which conveys a sense of homesickness, the exhibition draws on the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers and documents their history in Cambridge over the past century.

The student-led initiative has produced an interactive audio-visual experience composed of drawings, photographs, objects and voice recordings which address the challenges of constructing a sense of home in the context of displacement.

The Hiraeth Project, supported by the Cambridge Hub, worked with a group of teenage refugees over the summer of 2019, running a series of creative workshops centred around the theme of home. These included poetry and music workshops, discussion sessions and recording a radio show, and the material produced in these has been used to curate the exhibit.

Among the items on display are a series of maps of Cambridge hand-drawn by participants, representing their differing personal geographies of the city, as well as photographs documenting various migrant groups which Cambridge has seen over the years, from Belgian refugees in 1914 to Syrian asylum seekers in 2011. The exhibit also includes recordings of participants sharing their varied experiences of a search for belonging in the city.

“This is not something that is normally seen in museums,″ Sarah Dore, who was involved in creating the exhibit, told Varsity. “We hope that those who visit the exhibition are interested in the young people’s stories and can learn about how they experience the city.”

Visitors are encouraged to contribute to the project by adding their memories on post-it notes to a map of Cambridge, in order to create an image of how the city is lived in and moved through by a multitude of different people.

The exhibition is on display until 16th December.