Project:
AMSTERDAM
Lessons From Departure: After Arrival
Developed in partnership with the Foundation Academy of Amsterdam.
Lessons From Departure: After Arrival is a new chapter within our ongoing arts project Lessons From Departure, a body of work exploring migration, displacement, belonging, and the emotional realities of rebuilding a life.
Developed in partnership with the Foundation Academy of Amsterdam, this chapter focuses on people pursuing education while living through the ongoing realities of migration, uncertainty, and starting again. Through portraiture, conversation, and collaborative storytelling, the project asks what it means not simply to arrive, but to continue: to study, to hope, to rebuild, and to imagine a future under conditions that can remain unstable, unresolved, or unseen.
Rather than reducing migration to crisis, policy, or abstraction, After Arrival centres lived experience, dignity, and self-representation. It creates space for stories shaped by courage, memory, endurance, and the search for a place in which life can begin to take form again.
The Project
This chapter was developed through a series of extended conversations and portrait sessions with participants connected to the School of Integrated Human Rights at the Foundation Academy of Amsterdam.
As with the wider Lessons From Departure project, the work was made slowly and collaboratively. Conversations unfolded across time, allowing space for trust, openness, and mutual understanding. The resulting works bring together painted portraiture, personal testimony, and a commitment to participant-led storytelling.
Together, these stories and images reflect on what it means to keep building a life after displacement. They speak to the emotional realities that continue long after movement across borders: uncertainty, resilience, study, memory, self-definition, and hope.
At the heart of ‘After Arrival’ is a simple but urgent question:
What does it mean to keep moving forward after arrival?
For many people, migration does not end at the moment of crossing, legal recognition, or physical safety. Life continues through education, work, care, bureaucracy, isolation, determination, and the ongoing effort to belong. This project makes space for those continuing realities, and for lives that are too often flattened by public narratives.
UNEDITED:
Migration Stories (In Their Own Their Words)
Their Story Our Community
Foundation Academy of Amsterdam
The Foundation Academy of Amsterdam is committed to widening access to education for migrants, refugees, stateless people, and others who may be excluded from conventional academic routes. Its work in human rights education creates space for learning, critical reflection, and collective empowerment.
This partnership grew from a shared belief that education and storytelling are both deeply connected to visibility, dignity, and social responsibility. The Academy’s commitment to accessible education made it a meaningful context in which these stories could be encountered, developed, and shared.
Samuel Lee and the wider Foundation Academy community have created an important platform for students whose experiences, insight, and leadership deserve to be seen and heard.
The Process:
Portraiture and Storytelling
The portraits in After Arrival are not intended simply as fixed likenesses. As in the wider Lessons From Departure project, portraiture becomes a way of holding complexity.
Layering, fragmentation, and painterly reconstruction allow each work to suggest that a person cannot be defined by a single image, category, or story. Where needed, this visual language can also offer distance and protection, while still making space for presence, individuality, and recognition.
The project invites viewers to pause, look beyond first impressions, and reflect on the person beyond labels, systems, and simplified accounts of migration.
September 8, 2026
Lessons From Departure: After Arrival will be presented in the context of the Graduation Ceremony & Academic Year Opening 2026-2027 on September 8, 2026.
This presentation places the work within a wider conversation about education, memory, responsibility, and justice. The event’s keynote theme, “From Memory to Responsibility: The Role of Education in Building a More Just Society,” closely resonates with many of the questions at the centre of this project.
Why This Work Matters
Lessons From Departure began as an evolving archive of stories shaped through close listening, trust, and collaboration. The wider project remains ongoing and continues to grow through new conversations, portraits, exhibitions, and public engagement.
After Arrival forms one chapter within that wider vision. It reflects a commitment not only to showing completed work, but to building the conditions for more stories to be shared with care.
So far, a growing number of stories have been told, but many more remain unheard. The longer-term ambition is to continue expanding the project, deepen its reach, and create space for many more individuals and communities to be seen beyond labels, borders, and bureaucracy.
Get In Touch
To learn more about Lessons From Departure: After Arrival, support the wider project, discuss future collaborations, or help bring more stories into public view, please get in touch: hello@nathansamuel.co.uk