What was it?
Fame Asylum was a collaboration between the artist Richard Dedomenici, Refugee Week, and the Live Art Development Agency that aimed to create a participatory performance project with asylum seekers for Refugee Week 2006.
With the advice and support of the Refugee Week UK team, Refugee Council and a number of other organisations working with asylum seekers and refugee groups such as Refugee and the Arts Initiative, Richard Dedomenici undertook an audition process in London in May and June 2006 with the aim of inviting four young male asylum seekers to form a vocal harmony boyband, Status, that was launched as part of Refugee Week 2006.
Following the audition process and confirmation of the band’s line-up, Status was launched at a special appearance/press conference in London on June 14th. They undertook an intensive rehearsal process in which they received vocal training, choreography lessons, stylist makeovers, and record a demo of their debut single. They also performed during Refugee Weeks Celebrating Sanctuary festival.
The whole process was filmed for a Channel 4 documentary Fame Asylum, which can be viewed on Channel Four’s online on-demand service 4OD.
Such an innovative and provocative experiment that addressed issues of immigration, human rights and the nature of fame inevitably received media coverage, and it was intended that such exposure would contribute to interest in this project and possibly cultivate record company interest, and therefore a sustainable future for Status. However the project’s main aim was concerned with shifting perceptions and understandings of the experiences of asylum seekers and has no intention of guaranteeing its participant’s fame, sustainable employment or chart success.
Hear Status performing live at Celebrating Sanctuary 2006
Why the project happened
Fame Asylum was designed to alter attitudes towards immigration issues among the difficult to-reach opinion-influencing female adolescent demographic, harnessing pester-power and the trickle-up theory‚ to change minds, alter behaviour, shift paradigms, and transform societies.
Fame Asylum was developed by the Live Art Development Agency and the Refugee Week UK Team in response to the identified needs of artists working in Live Art and related practices who wish to engage with new creative strategies to raise popular awareness around complex socio-political issues, and in response to the needs of refugee artists and asylum seekers who wish to make visible the contribution of refugees to the UK, promote understandings of why people seek sanctuary and counter negative perceptions of refugees and asylum seekers in Britain.
Who organised the project?
Richard Dedomenici
Richard Dedomenici is a one-man subversive think-tank primarily dedicated to the development and implementation of innovative strategies designed to undermine accepted belief systems and topple existing power structures. By approaching the limits of conventionally acceptable behaviour, Richard Dedomenici's poetic acts of low-grade civil disobedience forcibly ask pertinent questions of society, while his subtle anarcho-surrealist interventions create the kind of uncertainty that leads to possibility.
Live Art Development Agency
The Live Art Development Agency is the leading development organisation for Live Art and new performance based practices in the UK. The Agency offers extensive open access opportunities for research, training, dialogue and debate; provides practical information and advice; works in partnership with artists and organisations on curatorial initiatives; and develops new ways of increasing popular and critical awareness of Live Art. Issues of cultural difference and diversity are a priority for the Agency and inform many of its schemes and initiatives.
Media Coverage
Here are some examples of the positive, negative and speculative reactions to the Fame Asylum project:
The Guardian
The Observer
