Olive Branch Arts work creatively with displaced communities here in the UK and abroad, we are committed to building relationships across communities to promote love, dignity, and care for all people who seek refuge. We are committed to sharing our participant’s stories around the world to enable them to be seen and heard by a new audience. To this end we will be launching the resulting exhibition of the participants work from Armenia on International Women’s Day 2020 in London before it tours several cities worldwide.

By offering participants a safe place to come together and learn new skills we aim to develop bonds and confidence across this community of women and their supporters, enabling them to visually document their own stories. By focusing on the moments of freedom they cherish the ultimate idea of this work is to reduce the isolation of this community through the sharing of photography.

The Freedom Photography Project came about due to a question from Tumana, one of the participants during our Photography training on the Sahrawi Refugee Camps in 2017, she asked “How do you photograph Freedom?” The impact of that question and our exploration of it the following year on the camps gave birth to an idea that has since found us working with the charity Play for Progress and their unaccompanied young refugees in London and now with the WSC, a domestic violence charity in Armenia.