CREATIVE REFUGE
Febrik project: Book, participatory workshops in Beirut Washington, DC: Tadween Publishing, 2014
Creative Refuge was the result of two projects informed by a series of three art-based workshops – latterly becoming a book – created by Febrik. The workshops were attended by children aged 8 to 10 years-old at Beit Atfal Assomoud, in Burj El Barajne Palestinian refugee camp, Beirut, Lebanon, and aimed to explore their dreams and play, and impact upon them within this environment.
The resulting publication showcases the social and spatial findings, but also provides a catalogue of children’s stories, dreams, play spaces, and related family histories. It has also been used as an educational manual for practitioners and educators working with children in participatory creative processes, who are in particular interested in working with contextual and situated learning and issues of displacement, rights and refuge. The first of the aforementioned projects was ‘Dream Project’ (2003–4), which explored children’s dreams in relation to the limitations of their legal and social status as residents in refuge. Divided into two workshops, the first was on a purely personal level; the children made ‘dream’ costumes that reflected their wishes for a future profession. The second involved speculation of the future on a bigger, collective scale, one that included others, in which the children up-scaled their dreams into programmatic spaces in the camp.
The second project was ‘Play Space’ (2005); divided into two distinct parts, the aim was to research existing play practices using a range of art and design processes such as memory maps, plans of play and collage, and an intervention into the physical environment of the camp through proposing new play spaces.