During this workshop we were encouraged to look at the theme of home from a whole different perspective: being homeless. Specifically looking at refugee camps and stories of refugees. A student who had experienced being a refugee from first hand, shared with us his story which was a very powerful and enriching personal experience. We had a very long debate in class were everyone stated their point of view and discussed how to support or protest this issue in order to be morally sensitive. After all the imputes, everyone was given a piece of black cardboard, black tape and white chalk and was asked to create something related to personal research to one of the refugee camps of the list that we were given.
I personally decided to research about refugee camps in Syria and after looking at the information that I could find in the internet decided to start writing numbers down as the only information that I was given online was objective and quantitative, just being explained that reality in numbers of refugees, deaths, percentages,… Which seemed to me to be a way of presenting information that dehumanized the conflict. Thats why I decided to create a drawing of the siluette of a person out of all the numbers that I was being exposed.
Afterwards I decided to use the blurred nature of chalk to blur the drawing with my hands and feet to create the sense of journey and transit, of those people who are on their journey to finding a safe place to call home.
Finally I decided to mold the cardboard so it had 3D and became even more human and taped it to the wall as a work of art.
We all ended up marching through the school of art with or without our works.
