Project Spotlight: Healing Crossings in a Time of Deportation
By Axel Winget, PhD, MFA, RDT. Axel is a queer, transmasculine drama therapist, educator, and performance-maker based in Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi, and the founder of Queer Healing Space.
Crossing for Love + Learning Access
When I moved to Sweden, I did not yet know that some of the most important artistic and political work of my life would grow out of friendships I had not yet made.
Newcomers Performing Arts member Tonny at his first Pride in Stockholm, 2019.Photo courtesy of Axel Winget
I crossed an ocean not for refuge, but for love, lineage, and a longing for belonging. In the people I would later meet through RFSL Newcomers, I recognized a different but resonant longing: for a life where one could breathe more freely, love more truthfully, and be less alone. I arrived in Sweden already committed to performance as a site of healing, survival, and collective transformation. But Sweden changed the stakes of that commitment. In relationship with queer and trans asylum seekers and refugees, I came to understand more deeply how survival itself is structured by access: access to safety, care, movement, language, recognition, and rest.
One of the first things I learned in Stockholm was how much access was organized through small systems that most Swedes had the privilege to barely notice. To ride the metro, you needed an ACCESS card. To enter many buildings, you needed an electronic fob. To navigate public systems, apply for jobs, or open a bank account, you often needed a Swedish personal number. For those granted entry into the national imaginary, these systems were mundane conveniences. For asylum seekers, they could become daily reminders of exclusion and even threats to survival.
I kept thinking about that word: access.
Entering the Room Relationally
At the time, I was volunteering with RFSL Newcomers, a member group within Sweden’s national LGBTQI organization for asylum seekers, undocumented people, and newly arrived queer and trans people. Many participants were living with layered forms of precarity: displacement, anti-queer and anti-trans violence, racism, bureaucratic uncertainty, poverty, and profound isolation. Queer and trans refugees are often cut off from the family or community structures that other refugees might rely on, and they are at heightened risk of complex trauma while still struggling to find affirming support.
I did not enter that space as a detached researcher. I entered as a queer and trans artist, as a facilitator, as an outsider to Sweden myself, and eventually as mental health project manager, dramaturg, co-writer, and co-director. My role emerged relationally. Over time, the work became not only about supporting performance, but about helping to cultivate a safer creative container where people navigating extreme instability could gather, make meaning, and feel less alone.
That is what participants themselves have said the group became. Tonny, a musician and refugee from Uganda, described the arts group as something that “turned into a family” and said, “It was peaceful and helped me to heal.” Ronah, an activist, organizer, and mother, also from Uganda, reflected that the group helped her open up while she was still in the asylum process, and that after meetings she would go home feeling “that there was a big load off my head.” Adnan, a dancer and refugee from Bangladesh, said the group helped restore confidence he had lost and showed him, “we are worthy.”
Bella, Alex, and the Crossroads
One of the artists in that early community was Bella Demhat, a Kurdish trans woman whose performance “Fuck Borders” I have since shown to hundreds of students in Europe and North America. Her work moves people because it is fierce, vulnerable, and unsparing in its insistence that borders are not abstractions; they are lived in the body.
Bella Demhat performing “Fuck Borders” in Stockholm, 2021.
Photo courtesy of Axel Winget
Bella was part of the Newcomers performing arts project from the beginning. In our 2019 production of The Miraculous Journey of Breaking the Silence, she appeared as Goddexx Bella, a colorful figure of protection, storytelling, and crossing, while another founding member, “Alex” — a pseudonym I use here for safety — played Eshu, the Yoruba orisha of the crossroads, and also the Black & White Leader. The companion program described the project as opening “a safe space for healing and creativity for Newcomers to share their stories,” and as placing healing processes at the center of our work.
Alongside Bella and Alex, the work was shaped by a wider circle of artists and organizers: Ronah Ainembabazi of Uganda, my co-founder in Crossing Pride; Mirage Baker, a gender-expansive dancer from Palestine; Sumera Yasin, a lesbian academic from Pakistan; Suma Abdelsamie, a trans woman activist from Egypt; and Ines Anttila, a trans woman scholar and activist from Serbia who now studies law and works in harm reduction and sex workers’ rights.
Alex, who had worked as a social worker, has since been deported to Nigeria. I remain in frequent contact with him as he navigates life in hiding, constant fear, and recurring illness. Bella is now facing deportation from Sweden to Türkiye. She married a Swedish man more than six years ago and has spent nearly a decade building community in Stockholm as a beloved activist and artist. Public demonstrations and solidarity actions are trying to stop her deportation and make visible what is at stake. Bella’s and Alex’s situations bring painful clarity to a question that has shaped my work for years: what might performance offer queer and trans refugees when the same systems that demand their stories also refuse to protect their lives?
While I still believe in the power of storytelling to change lives, it may not always save them.
Empowering Methodologies
That question became central to the Newcomers Performing Arts Project and later to Crossing Pride. As the work developed, I came to describe the approach through the phrase I still use now: empowering methodologies.
By that, I mean participatory action research, decolonial methodologies, trauma-informed and consent-based facilitation, cultural humility, and embodied approaches to Theatre of the Oppressed and social change theatre. I mean collaborative rather than extractive process: co-creation, collective ritual, pacing, metaphor, and the refusal to force people into state-sanctioned performances of identity.
Crossing Pride logo designed by Token, a Newcomers Performing Arts Project Group choreographer and artist from Kazakhstan, 2022.
What struck me early on was how often the surrounding systems demanded a narrow and recognizable story. Migration regimes frequently reward coherence. They often expect asylum seekers to narrate sexuality, gender, family violence, shame, or “coming out” in ways that fit Western assumptions about identity. In other words, survival can depend on performing credibility for the state. Our work did not ignore that reality; we addressed it directly. We created a healing-centered, creative, community-based space where queer and trans refugees could explore and share their stories on their own terms, through metaphor, embodiment, ritual, and collective witnessing.
At the same time, we were practical and forthcoming about what migration authorities would demand. We taught: you have ownership over your story, and the state will still ask for a particular version of it. Here is a place to reflect, rehearse, and reconnect with your own meaning; and here, too, are tools for shaping testimony in ways migration authorities may recognize as legible and credible. The tension was never resolved, but it was held with honesty. The work asked us to hold paradox: healing and pragmatism, story ownership and state legibility, decolonial methodologies practiced within institutions still shaped by colonial power, grief and possibility, all at once.
What the Work Looked Like
The room itself mattered.
We met in familiar spaces. We began with fika — communal time with coffee, snacks, cookies, and sandwiches. We moved tables and chairs and circled up. We warmed up less to achieve performance polish than to arrive in our bodies and become aware of one another. Trust-building mattered as much as artistry. In a group carrying so much uncertainty, “safe space” could never be a static promise. What we could build instead was a safer, more responsive container grounded in community agreements, acceptance, and choice.
Sometimes I would guide participants to close their eyes, feel their feet on the floor, and imagine a place where they felt safe enough to be fully seen. From there, I might invite them to choose an object in the room that seemed to belong there with them. Then they could speak as the object: What is your name? What do you protect? How do you help this person feel safe? That object work later became a vital Crossing Pride practice because it created a way into story through metaphor rather than forced disclosure.
Because many participants were already living with ongoing instability, and because I was not there to do direct trauma treatment, I worked carefully to avoid replicating the extractive logic of asylum interviews or sensationalized public storytelling. We worked largely in metaphor, myth, embodiment, and creative distancing techniques, precisely because of the amount of ongoing trauma participants were carrying.
The Volcano, the Goddexxes, and What Could Be Said Safely
One of the clearest examples of this came in The Miraculous Journey of Breaking the Silence.
In one sequence, hatred became a volcano god whose fumes infected people with homophobia and transphobia. In another, Eshu opened a portal through which only some prisoners could escape. In another, Goddexx Bella led those marked as too colorful, too queer, too different out of the black-and-white world and toward another possibility. The Goddexx figures tell the audience they crossed “oceans, skies, universes, nations, genders, boundaries of time and space,” and later insist that the story is also “the story of those who never will.”
Those were not decorative images. They were ways of saying what could not always be said directly. They were aesthetic strategies for holding emotional and political truth in forms that participants could survive.
Over time, the group’s creative process became something larger than rehearsal. Participants described it as therapeutic. People who had entered as strangers began referring to one another as family. Public performances at Stockholm Pride, Uppsala Pride, Gothenburg, and later the development of the documentary theatre piece Home/Less were not simply artistic milestones. For some participants, performing publicly in queer spaces became part of healing itself: a way to feel belonging, confidence, and solidarity in a country where they otherwise remained precarious.
Members of Crossing Pride during a performance of Home/Less at Strindberg’s Teater Intima in Stockholm, in collaboration with the National Black Theatre of Sweden, 2022. (from left: Sumera Yasin, Samson Kirksylvan, Ronah Ainembabazi, and Tonny Mighty) Photo by Mette Akerholm
What Performance Could Hold
Performance matters here not because art stops political violence, but because it interrupts the reduction of people to case files, pathologies, or objects of pity. It creates conditions where relation does not depend on extraction. It allows witnessing without requiring full disclosure.
That matters all the more now, when Bella’s case has become visible precisely because people are making noise. But for every case that draws visibility, there are many others that remain quiet: silent deportations, silent disappearances, silent terror. Some queer refugees I worked with, like Alex, were deported back to places such as Nigeria with almost no public outcry, despite having already risked everything by living openly. Their lives did not become less precarious because they had been witnessed onstage.
Queer Healing Space Across Borders
This is one reason Queer Healing Space matters so much to me now. The work did not end when I left Sweden. It changed form.
Through Queer Healing Space, I continue building trans-led, trauma-informed creative spaces rooted in metaphor, somatic care, consent, and collective imagination. That practice now connects people across borders virtually through workshops, support groups, artistic rituals, and sustained relationships. The values are the same: trust, creativity, care, and healing. The forms evolve. Friendship remains central. Love remains the guiding principle. What began in Sweden as local creative healing communities now continues transnationally through art, care, and connection.
Refusing Disappearance
This is why I have come to see queer refugee performance not as separate from peacebuilding, but as one way of practicing it.
Peacebuilding is not only about resolving conflict after the fact. It is also about creating relational, aesthetic, and political conditions in which people can breathe, imagine, and belong otherwise. In work with queer and trans refugees, that has meant treating healing not as a private clinical endpoint, but as a collective and decolonial practice.
If peacebuilding means anything in this context, it must include refusing the quiet normalization of deportation, disbelief, and disappearance.
Art alone cannot stop a deportation order. But it can help build the relationships, courage, memory, and public witness that make disappearance harder. In a time when queer and trans migrants are still being asked to prove their humanity to the state, that feels to me like no small thing.