WELCOME FESTIVAL 2016
& PAINT NOW! REFUGEE PROJECTS
In 2016 I got deeply involved in social projects for the refugees living in the Tempelhof Camp in Berlin.
I helped to organize the WELCOME FESTIVAL 2016 event being part of the Schön Dass Ihr Da Seid volunteer group. The event sponsored by AVAAZ had as objective the integration between the "newcomers" and the locals. With this event I led an art workshop during the festival as well as I designed the Poster and the Flyer, written in different languages, to promote the event.
I also redesign the logo taking inspiration from their previous one.
At the festival I also brought the PAINT NOW! (branch of GERMAN NOW!) Exhibition, another project I was involved in not only as organizer but also as Art Therapist. The project consisted in weekly visits to the Camp, offering materials and support, both emotional and creative, in order to allow the refugees to use their artistic talents to express what they still couldn't with words. Each one of them was asked then to express a concrete wish that locals could be interested to help fulfill, facilitating this way the communication and the contact between them.
After the workshops, besides being responsible of a poetry event with the refugees I also helped organizing the Exhibition of about 200 artworks from all the participants and I was asked to write a piece to describe the emocional involvement of us volunteers and introduce the project to the visitors of the UNDER THE MANGO TREE Gallery.
This under is the piece I wrote.
FOREVER LOST
Consciousness comes in pieces when a story is being told.
A mother paints two flowers, one next to the other. Fezi S., that’s her name, starts filling their outlines with colors, the image seems peaceful. No alarm, no surprises.
It’s when she calls over her 12 y.o. daughter to help her finishing a picture that she couldn’t on her own, in that moment the picture starts telling their story. A broken heart over the right flower, bloody tears over the left one and the flowers are not flowers anymore. The flowers are a husband and a daughter, killed in Afghanistan. The flowers are ghosts.
“Hopeless flowers” is the title she gives me for her work, with broken voice and watery eyes.
Bloody tears come often in their artworks, as if experiencing death every day for years has become part of their own body, penetrated their pores and skins, soaked their soul. “Wo sind Sie, Gott?” is the question of Sohrab A., who painted a giant eye and a bloody river of tears, the ashes and the fire, an enigmathic sun with spikes, black and red on the paper.
A piece of paper for a piece of pain.
Hagbakri H. paints a black stain, he knows what to do from the beginning. He starts from the black stain. Only later he’ll explain to me that it represents Germany, in a picture that looks more like a nuclear explosion than his way from Syria till here, the Tempelhof refugee camp, which he calls prison.
A piece of paper for a piece of truth.
He is not the only one depicting the treacherous journey, the despair, the sorrow. Ali P. also does this with stains of colors, he’s an artist, was an artist in his land, he says. He tells me how to read his work from up right, the red and black stains, the war, then down a thin green line walks along, a ”tiny hope” are his words, it leads him/us to the boat, and even there red and black stains cover the blue. The -partial- end is out of the paper. He tells me he feels happier here, safer. And yet the middle of his work carries a message too, written in Farsi. It says “I am a stranger with no land, I’m forever lost.”
Consciousness comes in pieces when a story is being told.
Sometimes even dreams don’t look the way we imagine. A young woman (she decided to stay anonymous) paints a vivid image, strong colors given with firm, nervous brush strokes. A black tree, no leaves, two houses pending like they are falling down, the agitated river comes out of their doors. She tells me it’s her dream place, a house next to a river.
I keep questioning myself why I dare to ask Fezi, Sohrab, Hagbakri, Ali and the other people living in Tempelhof Refugee Camp their own stories. I guess theirs are not only the story of a refugee, they are part of my story too, of OUR story, as humans.
It’s our collective consciousness that needs to know, our collective soul that needs to heal. Then again, consciousness comes in pieces when a story is being told.
We need their pieces, as they need ours.
