Last week two new students joined the project group, we started by meeting them last week to replay with them our first sessions together back in the Spring, we asked them the question we began with ‘what do we really want in life…what are our goals? and importantly what are the values that guide us? We take the text and combine and project them, placing them one on top of the other. As we had all done together earlier in the year. Repeating – this helped us start to reflect on the process …
Today, we all gather again plus two, and we focus on the question of our last session together how to communicate and share what we are doing and why? How do other people understand? What do they see?
We have made start, and produced a poster we look at this together then realise no its not right it doesn’t say what we are doing. So we stop and reorganise ourselves – lets lay out our sketches, graphics, objects that we have been working on to date
We spend a little time to lay it all out and we start to see how things fit together, or not – what is also missing ?
We discuss how are we going to find the narrative that lies beneath the different steps we have been taking, and to make them feel real for others – our work is intentionally simple to sit within a complex context. How do we reveal this in a meaningful and easy to access way?
Now we shall simply get on with working on this, as we want to share our experimentation with others!
Drawing Centre 
Today I went back to the beginning and read all the posts about your sessions together which become an unfolding story. I see that you are thinking now about what and how and why you try to communicate with others about what you are doing. Two people have asked to join you so I wonder what you have communicated to them without even realising it, maybe. And I am another person who has been learning about this through the posts and the photos and through a few conversations with Joe. So the communication is through others who are working with you but not as one of the refugee participants, so it is not direct. I have left replies on the website twice but this is a very faltering conversation so far. Then Joe and I realised it would be interesting to take this encounter further, make it more direct, maybe eventually even in person. He wrote and said that you will send something to me through the post…so I am sitting in a village in southern france, feeling anticipation, curiosity stirring…a colleague of mine, a writer called John Shotter, says that everything of importance to human beings happens in their meetings with one another and it is almost always the unexpected happennings that turn out to matter most…best wishes, Patricia
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Hello Patricia, we read your comments with pleasure and are glad we could catch (surely with the help of Joe) your interest. As you may have had experienced it yourself, we lack of some active communication, due to making very new experiences and going through new challenges. We promise improving on that! We had a talk with Joe and he introduced you to us. There was no doubt of us wanting to meet you, for exchanging our experiences and more important to get some Feedback from you. As I write now, we meet and discuss about, the package we want to send you. The idea is that you get some physical material of our process, in hope you could dive in our development as easy as possible.
If you have further question feel free to ask, we will pay this website a visit more often from now on.
best wishes,
Refugee Project Team
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Hello Arwin and fellow group members – what a welcome surprise to see your reply. This thread that goes out from your group towards me seeking connections can start a weaving. I have been speaking of you with Maria LLanos in Spain. She and her partner Ruth Cross, are moving into a house in a village south of Granada in order to be part of a project they initiated themselves. They are working with refugees coming off the boats from Syria. They have worked hard to interest local villagers, local government and refugees to find out how they can find new lives and livlihoods by becoming involveded in regenerating this part of Spain, which suffers from people leaving the land for the cities. When I speak with her she tells me about the challenges faced by everyone (those already living in this part of Spain and those arriving having lost so much) in communicating together about who they are, what kind of lives they hope to live and what all this raw newness makes possible. They too are exploring graphic and performative ways to communicate to generate not just understanding but new openings across so many differences.
I look at the photos on this site with some frustration I glimpse but cannot really see what you are doing together. I am looking forward to receiving a mystery package – to learn what that shows me and what further questions it generates and maybe later it might be possible to connect in this way also with the project in Spain if you are interested.
If I think of what questions I would love to ask some of you it would be to know what have been the moments, the incidents, the scenes, when you have felt most alienated (estranged) from what was happenning around you in everyday circumstances in Germany and also when you have felt most connected and drawn towards what was happenning around you? As I ask this I think of myself living 3 months of the year in Florida, not at all as a refugee – I chose to go with my hisband – but still I experience there these sensations of estarngement which leave a hollow under my diaphragm and moments when I am at ease. I will try and answer my own question.
All good wishes
Patricia
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