SAME/Difference: Exhibition Launch

SAME/Difference is a creative writing and photography project devised by Quotidian artists Maria McManus, Viviana Fiorentino, Nandi Jola and Bernarde Lynn. 

The exhibition is a series of photographs that share the participants’ of the project concepts of identity, belonging, home, diversity and peace-building, through creative writing and expressive abilities. It explores the lived experience of migration and home-making and includes people from minority ethnic groups whose first language is other than English. 

Quotidian's experienced team of artists supported the groups to make creative inquiry of both the challenges and enriching perspective of life in a ‘new ground’ and the lived experience of ‘home’.

Programmes were undertaken in Portadown (supported by Peace IV), Newtownards (supported by Good Relations/ TBUC Ards & North Down) and online across Northern Ireland (supported by CRCNI & NI Refugee Resettlement Programme). 

About the artists

Nandi Jola, originally from South Africa, now lives in Portadown. She has been published in Fortnight@50, Big Issue, Bangor Literary Journal, Affinity, The Incubator and Four X Four. She has also had work commissioned for Herstory: Parallel Peace Project, Transpoesie Poetry Festival; Ambiguities, Six Project, and Arrivals 2. She has been a guest on the BBC Art Show and Culture Café, and has read her work at the Human Rights Festival in Belfast, XBorders, Staccato, the Belfast Book Festival, and the Eastside Festival.

Viviana Fiorentino is Italian and lives in Belfast where she teaches Italian literature. Since January 2020, she facilitates creative writing workshops for cultural minorities. She is a recipient of two Support for the Individual Artist Programme (SIAP) grants (2019/20 and 2020/21) from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to write a collection of poems about migration and ‘prisons of life’. In 2019, her poems appeared in the anthology Writing Home (Dedalus Press). An award-winning poet in Italy, her poems, short stories and translations have appeared in international literature magazines including Nazione Indiana, FourXFour NI, Poethead, The Blue Nib, Honest Ulsterman and Days of Clear Light (Salmon Poetry). In Italy, she published a poetry collection, an anthology, and a novel. She co-founded two activist poetry initiatives and also Le Ortique.