"No Filter": What Happens When Lived Experience Leads
On art, immigration detention, and the courage to draw with no filter
David Moyo's art and the question of who gets to define our values
In 2025, we worked with artist and advocate David Moyo to create a series of drawings for our Members Charter — the set of values that holds our network together: Community, Solidarity, Lived-Experience Led, Dignity, Anti-racism and Anti-Oppression, Independence, Care and Accountability.
We gave him one condition: draw with your heart. No filter.
Working with David was, in many ways, an expression of these values.
"Each of David's illustrations accompanying our Members Charter values speaks the language of lived experience – raw, uncompromising, and undeniably human." Gee Manoharan, Co-Director at AVID.
The Collaboration
Whilst David is an experienced artist, this was his first time working to a brief as a professional illustrator and designer. Therefore, we partnered with Migrants in Culture, a migrant led design and art studio, to provide mentoring, training and oversight for the project, including advising on a usage agreement for the artwork.
"'No filter' wasn't just a brief I gave David. It came from the same place his drawings come from. As someone with lived experience of what these systems do to people, I know what it takes to stop translating yourself for an audience that holds the power — I've sat in rooms where my truth was welcome only in palatable doses. Getting the scaffolding right — the mentoring with Migrants in Culture, the usage agreement, David's creative ownership protected from the start — meant that 'no filter' could actually be true." Gee Manoharan, Co-Director at Association of Visitors To Immigration Detainees
The result is powerful.
The Drawings
David's art doesn't explain detention. It makes you feel it.
Community — different shoes, tied together by a common thread of love, despite a system designed to isolate and divide.
Solidarity — two birds, slowly and deliberately pecking at the electronic tag on a migrant's leg. Not speaking for. Standing alongside. Taking the time it takes.
Lived-Experience Led — a flock of free birds landing on top of a detention centre, as faces look through the walls below.
The contrast is the point.
"To be understood, I invite nature — birds, butterflies and so on. In doing so, people will understand me. Because nature, as I see it, is a source of connection and comfort." — David Moyo, the illustrator
But David doesn't let comfort become complacency. His anger is present too:
"I am being denied justice by the very justice that I should feel secure to run to, to find comfort and peace of mind. Expressing my anger and feeling I don't exist — hence the bird that has broken the chain."
And on looking back at his own self-portrait:
"We often confuse symptoms — for example of depression — with the illness, when it can be the result of many factors, such as grief. As I look back and remember vividly the journey of my life, I have travelled a rough road… I find myself connecting to nature again, and the two birds on my head represent calmness."
David’s insights are testament to the fact that art itself is a form of care – both for the artist and the community engaging with the work.
Creative expression can be healing, empowering, and transformative for creators with lived experience of trauma and injustice.
We trusted David to show us our own values through his truth — to reveal what dignity looks like when you've been systematically dehumanised, what independence means when you've been controlled, what care feels like when the systems meant to protect you have abandoned you instead.
David’s drawings invite reflection and questions – questions that we have been grappling with as an organisation and network:
- How might we be legitimising the very detention system we're trying to dismantle?
- How do we maintain independence from those who run and benefit from detention?
- How can we ensure we are accountable to one another and to those with lived experience of detention?
"David's drawing for independence — of the people in the bottle — makes me feel like I am suffocating, I can feel the constriction. It makes me wonder if the hand is screwing the bottle top tighter or unscrewing it. I don't think a drawing like this could come from someone without firsthand experience of how detention feels, although it definitely brings the viewer closer." — Miranda Reilly, Co-Director at AVID
Why We Need More Artists Like David
By ensuring that an artist with lived experience shapes the visual narrative for our members charter, we challenge the traditional power structures that typically determine whose voices are heard and whose experiences are validated.
The disability rights movement's demand — "Nothing about us, without us" — applies here with full force. When we say we are lived-experience led, David's art is what that actually looks like. Leadership in the fullest sense: shaping how we see ourselves, how we communicate what we stand for, and what we dare to imagine.
"David's drawings, designs and illustrations give us powerful new visual representations of the government's hostile environment, which is designed to dehumanise and divide us. When I look at David's drawings I see all the difficulties he's been through, but also a liberatory joy — to resist and imagine abolitionist futures. His drawing of birds picking away at an ankle tag is a visual that will stay with me forever.
I'm also grateful to AVID for holding this project and relationship with so much care and curiosity. It was a dream collaboration. David has been such a joy to be around — and we couldn't imagine not working with him anymore, so he's now our illustration trainee. We know he'll go on to change how we see immigration detention and incarceration." — Rosalie, co-founding director and designer at Migrants In Culture
What We're Asking Of You
David's illustrations are a call to action — but art alone doesn't end detention. Here's how you can move with this:
- See the work. Visit our [About page] to find David's illustrations alongside each value in our Members Charter. Sit with them. Let David’s artwork challenge and deepen your understanding of what these principles mean in practice.
- Share it. David's visual language reaches people that policy arguments don't. Help it travel.
- Follow David's work and commission him: Follow David's Instagram page to see his portfolio here.
- Support Migrants in Culture: Our partners in this project are doing vital work — resourcing artists and organisers to build creative, powerful social movements. Find out more and support them at migrantsinculture.com.
Art as Resistance. Care as Strategy
David's artwork is now woven into the fabric of how we articulate who we are as a network. That's not a small thing.
Ultimately, David's artwork isn't just about our charter or even detention – it's about the society we want to create. It's about organisations where everyone belongs, where lived experience shapes every principle, where dignity is non-negotiable, and where no one faces injustice alone.
David has given our values a new visual life.
Now it's time for all of us to pick up the brush and paint the future we want to see.
Remember - No Filters.
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