The art project “A Room Between the Rooms” aims to highlight these lives and voices.  Through a series of creative workshops, we are forming mobile common spaces and looking at how these could impact people living in hiding in Norway. Could the shared creative work build a different bond between the participants? What are the participants understandings and reflections around community? Could our collaborative work reduce stigma and increase understanding? In the series of workshops, various drawing and writing techniques are explored.

The hand “tells” differently from the spoken word and can give us access to a wordless language. Doing something with our hands also does something to our minds, we talk differently, we listen better, and we get closer to each other.

To explore writing as expressions we invited the author Simon Stranger to host writing workshops for the group. Playful writing exercises brought personal experiences forward. We read the texts together and talked about how words can soothe, and discoveries of personal potentials can be released. How stories of struggles can be shared without victimizing the narrator, and instead highlight human strength. The quote starting our text comes from Simon Stranger’s book: “They that don’t exist”, The book tells the story of the refugee Samual. The story could just as well have been Nasim’s, Hiwot’s, Sarah’s, Nezeret’s and Koroush’s.