Stella Skiadopoulou’s participatory action research project Nostos, combines participatory filmmaking with affect film theory, aiming at proposing the use of participatory nostalgia re-enactments as methodological tool for social integration of migrants and refugees in Northern Ireland (NI), as well as wider social and political change.
The word nostos, meaning the return home (Bonifazi, 2009: 481), is a word used in Homer’s Odyssey, to describe Ulysses’ epic journey from Troy to Ithaca. Nostalgia, a 17th century word (Sedikides et al., 2008: 304), is derived by the words nostos and algos (meaning pain in Greek), therefore the pain caused by the return home.
Nostos is about the shared human experience of feeling nostalgic for past experiences and memories from childhood. Working together with participants who have migrated to NI, Tatiana Novokhatnia, an actress and playwright from Ukraine, Mahsa Jahangirpour, a painter from Iran, and Erick Robson Souza, a photographer from Brazil, participants and researcher produced, wrote and directed together, a short poetic documentary that embraces the illusive nature of memory and nostalgia, composing memory re-enactments that blend space and time and, personal and collective nostalgias.
