Refugee Week is a UK-wide festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. Refugee Week is a platform for people who have sought safety in the UK to share their experiences, perspectives and creative work on their own terms.
The theme this year is ‘Healing’. We have so much to learn from refugees about holding onto hope when going on seems impossible. Art, creativity and community can all help us heal.
At Groundwork, for Refugee Week, we explored the theme of healing through creativity and conversations, celebrating community, mutual care and the ability to start again. We asked participants from our IMPACT and Together South programmes to explore the theme of healing and what it means to each of us, articulating that response onto a leaf. As a collective the leaves will show the breadth of experience, cultures and feelings towards healing, and what it means specifically to communities that have migrated
Our Healing Leaves:
How can we heal together?:
Our exhibit at the Horniman museum:
To mark the end of Refugee Week, our colleague Mo has been working on a creative art piece with our participants to exhibit as part of this year’s Refugee Week curation at the Horniman Museum on Saturday 25th June 2022.
This piece was titled: ‘Healing Together’.
“A collaborative artwork inspired by the paintings of Abel Rodríguez, who uses art as a medium to preserve his knowledge of the Nonuya rainforest after the Colombian armed conflict and exploitation of natural resources forced Rodríguez and his family from native land to Bogota. Each tile is painted by the Together South community, and stitched together with the Sashiko mending stitch, a Japanese technique which ‘heals’ the artwork together”.
