MY HOME, YOUR HOME – REFUGEE HOME 2024
A COMMUNITY ART PROJECT BY CUP OF COLOR in Frauenfeld, Switzerland
“WHAT IS HOME FOR YOU?”
How would you answer this question? Through asking this question, we spent 10 days working with the refugees home in Thurgau part of Switzerland, to develop the mural concept and to involve their ideas into the wall painting.
1. WE CREATE
together we discuss, imagine and visualise their understanding of HOME.
So grateful for every conversation and story with the people here from South Sudan, Turkey, Cameron, Afghanistan, Liberia, Syria, Brazil, Burundi... your story inspires and encourages us to believe in the strength of life, so we let each of them to sketch down their meaning of homes, so we can co-create a common home with wide spectrum of traditional cultures.
2. WE PAINT TOGETHER
During the community mural project, we see how active and sportive the people are, they’re always ready to help, we love the way how they take part in the process, assisting us to set up, to paint and tidy up
It’s important to let them be involved from the start, we have to firstly sand off the wood surface of the house, filling up the color shapes with rollers, then our team will facilitate them so they can paint their individual ideas with brushes on the colorful area. At the end we cover the mural with a coating for protection as well.
3. WE CELEBRATE
Hope is an action! That’s why we always make a party at the end of our community art project.
We print out photos of people as a pop up exhibition and give them in hands for memory, to remember how precious it is to have their anticipation through the painting process, to ask everyone of them to bring and cook their favourite food, let people be the main part of the event, let them be proud and have the ownership of the place they live, we share time for conversation, jumping and even the super fun volleyball match in the late evening.
Details
Community art
Mural
REFUGEE
FAMILIES
HOME
SWISS
*a home for asylum seekers, responsible for the integration and care of recognized and temporarily admitted refugees.
BEFORE
AFTER
“Thanks so much, the wall is really good, it becomes so beautiful and amazing, a big change from before, so refresh to look at it!”
WINDOWS
We all love the memory of mothers from the window, calling their kids to come home to eat. Sometimes windows symbolise our heart and soul… We close it for safety, when there’s storm and rain outside; We open it for sunlight and fresh air, when we search for human connection! Windows shall be taken good care of, so in the beginning we already think about how to integrate the mural design with these lovely windows, we washed them carefully and people helped us to color them, it's such a comfort when we put them up back in the position.
We together paint the images that express our homes
it can be a physical building, a geographical location, moreover, a memory from childhood, faces of family, traditional culture, favourite meal. Over generations we long to move away from parents and home town, to move to modern city for job and life, we only start to cherish things from our home when we lost the chance to return home, please never forget, how much our backgrounds enriched our lives.
Community Art Project with 40+ kids and adults, we’re trying to form a big house, we have to laugh so much that it doesn’t work perfectly :)
“We have a great team to work together, a very supportive and trustful community.”
Project team: Anna, Maria, Lia-Merle, Damon
(Little helpers Monia + Malena)