REFUGEES WELCOME

Interactive and participative performance with refugees and public

14/11/2014 @Kreuzberg Pavillion, Berlin

This project, which proposes to demand the performance made by LIUBA last year an will be included in the documentary of the American director Zachary Kerschberg, consists in two part: the collective performance itself, at the gallery, and the previous, long, site specific  work on meeting and knowing refugeees people and their problems, inviting them to come to the gallery and standing for their rights. The performance is only like the ‘iceberg point’ of a long and deep relational process.

The refugees have been invited to participate in the performance that consist of 12 symbolic minuts’ silence as a sign of their right and their acceptance.

Some of the ideas that led me to this action:

• I think that people and their problems are more important than art projects.
• I bring alive people into an art gallery because people, their lives and their problems are really what matters now.
• I put together different people in the same space, because everyone has the same right to stay in that one space.
• I let people stay still. People observe each other. Observing is the first step of accepting and respecting.
• I let people looking at each other to find the common basis of our existence: being alive now.
• I build my performances with the purpose of creating personal experiences for people, inner and outer.
• Art as a mean to give refugees people a way to be listened, to be visible, to be respected in their equal right.