The Project "Where is Zuhause?" funded by Berliner Projektfonds Kulturelle Bildung, it started with the artist Helena Mancelos together with the filmmaker & art director Carlos Vin Lopes creating a series of workshops with 12 refugee children living in Berlin.
The objective of the workshops is to offer a platform for expression and connection for refugee children, and collect the material produced by them in response to a series of visual and narrative stimuli.

This was a way to let the children manifest their emotions, exploring visual paths ranging from figurative representation to more abstract drawings. Subsequently, visual artists  connect each one of these visual expressions with a feeling, by writing down notes, some in the form of small paragraphs, others as single words.

In a secondary phase, the art directors Carlos Vin Lopes together with Valerio Nicoletti reconverted these notes into visual compositions. Most of these pages are the result of a handmade process, using natural elements such as leaves, seeds, fruit and vegetables, wood, cotton, soil and mixing them with other “domestic” tools, such as fabrics, paper and cardboard scraps, shoelaces, cotton swabs, playdough, chalks.

The visual content of this project is organized into four sections, representing our attempt to connect with the children’s experience: the departure from their countries (journey), the welcome in Germany (arrival), the integration into this new reality (adaption) and the next steps (future).

We hope that this small project can help us navigate this process together and cast a colourful light on our common tomorrow, by continuing to look into each other’s shoes.

This is the webpage: www.whereiszuhause.com

And the Instagram page: www.instagram.com/where_is_zuhause/