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Tilal

Welcome to Tilal Stories!

Tilal is the Arabic word for hills or mounds. The name Tilal brings sites of the Antonine Wall into the present. In place of a wall what we can experience today are strangely shaped curves in the earth, ‘tilal’, or ‘hadhaba’ in Arabic, ‘kurba’ in Tigrinya or ‘koh’ in Urdu – places to be opened up, re-considered and shared by people from all sides of today’s state borders.

From November 2021 to October 2022 this project strand has been a space for people to come together to transform the Antonine Wall, the former frontier of an Empire, into a community resource, and place of shared belonging. Through it, the Tilal team have co-developed creative programmes and events in collaboration with five communities with lived experience of navigating the UK immigration system. We have worked together to form an exchange – connecting often-overlooked histories, that frequently but not exclusively related to migration, with present-day community interests and forms of expression.

Photo by Paria Goodarzi at the Refugee Festival Scotland 2022, Callendar Park