By Liz Hingley.
‘A person in any country begins their relationship, adventures and acquires an identity, whether temporary or long, when they put the SIM card of that country in their phone.’
Kacem, from Syria to the Bibby Stockholm Barge, 2020
The words of Kacem frame the door of an old Victorian shop on the Strand in London, which is currently displaying SIM-scale artworks created by hundreds of people as part of the Waymarkers exhibition commissioned by Kings Culture. Waymarkers is a landmark platform for The SIM Project, a programme I founded in 2017 that draws on the smartphone SIM card as an international symbol of connection – one that unlocks local and global networks to bring people with different experiences of mobility together. Combining analogue and digital photographic processes, the project gives material meaning to the ways people curate personal digital archives, and how they visualise and map their everyday lives using the common camera phone.
The SIM Project uses a sensory workshop methodology that has been co-designed over eight years (Hingley, 2022). Participants draw lines with wool to places they connect to on a borderless world map and then select one image to print from their smartphone that gives them a sense of belonging. Using a bespoke 3D printed camera and the chemical ‘magic’ of a miniature darkroom, participants optically transfer the image from their phone screen onto a SIM-scale glass piece. Gathered around a table, the group learns how to polish a metal frame and hand stamp a backplate with a meaningful number, to mirror the International Identification Number on the back of every SIM card. Each person makes one to keep and wear as a pendant, and they are invited to add another to the mobile collection.
The Strand exhibition showcases artworks made in eight countries – from Cyprus to Finland to the USA and the UK – by people with roots in more than 40 countries. Their SIM-scale windows are illuminated daily from 6am to midnight in multiple formats and scales. Mosaic sculptures feature over 1,000 chosen images and portraits of contributors. Through a peephole in the door passersby can view the SIM prints enlarged into a moving projection. In the adjacent window pendants are suspended from a glittering silver shawl inspired by the Portland Global Friendship Group and the international trade of Portland Stone.
In 2024, as part of the b-side arts festival on the Isle of Portland, Dorset, UK, I ran two SIM Project workshops to bring together five residents of this tidal island with five men living on the Bibby Stockholm barge, a container-like floating structure designated as temporary housing for men in the asylum system, moored at that time in Portland Harbour.
During this time, I stayed in the house of a co-founder of the Portland Global Friendship Group (PGFG), whose downstairs rooms were stuffed to the brim with donations of clothes and shoes. The PGFG emerged in response to fear and hostility surrounding the arrival of the Bibby Stockholm barge in August 2023. Originally built for 220 people, the barge’s capacity was expanded to accommodate 506 residents, along with up to 40 staff. The group’s mission was simple: to welcome these men to the island and uphold Portland’s spirit of kindness. When the local Dorset council prohibited members from distributing welcome packs to arriving men and banned them from inviting the men into their homes, the group, in their own words, ‘went maverick’. During the following 18 months, weekly activities evolved in response to the needs and interests of both the men and the local community. These ranged from clothes and SIM card distribution, arts activities and games clubs to grounding pursuits such as walks to explore the island’s distinctive geology and migratory bird life.
Words of the PGFG members inscribed on the Waymarkers exhibition walls highlight the creativity and impact of this grassroots network, which was designed to foster emotional resilience and resist hostile migration policies: ‘Out of adversity, a really beautiful thing has grown.’ The experience also strengthened local ties, bringing many islanders together for the first time. ‘We have become a tight community, a better community because of the men,’ another member reflected. In January 2025, the barge was towed away following the conclusion of the government contract and the ex-Bibby residents were rehoused across the country under the government’s dispersal policy.
In response, the network moved online, with many PGFG members continuing to provide legal, practical and emotional support, primarily through WhatsApp. Seeking to visualise and materialise this ephemeral yet intimate digital connection, I invited islanders and former Bibby Stockholm residents to share five mobile phone photographs that reflected their experience of Portland and the PGFG on their WhatsApp groups. This generated a collection of more than 200 images that captured activities, views, life on the barge, hugs and laughter, a selection of which were printed onto SIM-scale glass and framed in silver to weave into a jewellery piece.
The central core of the jewellery piece is formed by fragments of Portland limestone collected by PGFG members. Highly prized and extensively quarried Portland stone has been exported to construct some of the world’s most powerful landmarks, from the UN headquarters in New York to London’s St Paul’s Cathedral and Bush House, located just opposite the Waymarkers exhibition on The Strand. These ‘waste’ fragments chipped from the valuable stone allude to the lucrative trade of extraction and migration of materials; a wealth that has not profited the island. The monumental Bush House was originally conceived as a major new trade centre by American industrialist Irving T. Bush. Statues symbolising Anglo-American friendship flank the building, which was, until recently, home to the BBC World Service. The building bears the inscription ‘To the friendship of English-speaking peoples.’ In response, the facing Waymarkersexhibition wall is inscribed with the quote, ‘The Portland Global Friendship Group is the biggest family in the world.’
From the stone core of the jewellery piece, I knotted silver into a delicate, net-like structure, evoking the maritime setting and the island’s historic reliance on fishing for sustenance. The numerous photographs of hugs shared by PGFG informed a shape that echoes both the embrace of a shawl and the interwoven chains of protective battle armour. By challenging common sense conventions around the materials used to create necklaces and nets, the piece can be understood as a theoretical ‘body of thinking’ with tangible effects (Culler, 1997). The use of Portland stone fragments disrupts familiar associations between the stone and its histories of ecological extraction, imperial power and cultural influence.
On World Refugee Day, 20th June 2025, an event will reunite the PGFG at Waymarkers. Transport for some of the men to join from around the country is sponsored by Counterpoints Arts as part of Refugee Week. MMB friends are invited to join. Please contact Liz Hingley for details.