Since 2015, we have spoken of a ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe. Because of the ongoing conflicts and decrease of safety and perspective in countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, people are leaving their homes. For many this is a journey of years of insecurity, risk taking, and a continuous violation of human rights.

During my Masters artisteducator I started working with children and teenagers in refugee centres in the Netherlands doing interdisciplinary arts workshops to enable creativity and fun. I was confronted with a peculiar mix of hope and despair and the traumatised behaviour of the children I worked with. I felt an urgency to take the next step in my practice by actually going to Camp Moria on Lesbos to join a small Dutch NGO doing socially engaged arts projects in the camps, called Changing Stories. Together we travel about 3 times a year to the Greek islands for a ten-days project of theatre and imagination with the children who we make co-creators of our costumes, the backdrops, the games, and the theatre performance which is a play with all sorts of possible endings but eventually based on a story about inequality and friendship.

Traumatised children have what, in psychology, has been called a small ‘window of tolerance’, meaning that when they experience stress they quickly switch to a flight/fight/freeze mode which could be harmful for their social-emotional development. According to studies, play and laughter do not only create a moment of fun, but actually contribute to an increase of the ‘window of tolerance’ in traumatised children. For me this underpins that the arts make an extremely powerful tool for expression, healing, education, and change. Despite this, I am continuously critically questioning what we do and how we do it ,which I believe to be one of the responsibilities of socially engaged artists; to continuously question the role of the artist and to be aware of the power structures you are working with.

As an artivist (artist/activist) I do believe that socially engaged arts projects make a valuable impact on the lives of many people and I think that speaking up against oppression and inequality through words or deeds contributes to a slow, collective changing of these systems. As Michelle Obama describes in her biography, sometimes when sowing the seeds of change, you may not be there to see its fruits, but that does not mean they will not grow.

Apart from our work on the Greek islands we are also active in developing projects in the Netherlands to raise awareness and to promote critical dialogues regarding the topic of forced migration. And while the public debate seems to become increasingly polarised, while news items about Covid-19 dominate our newspapers and thoughts, I try to use my voice as artisteducator to say that no one should ever forget that each refugee, each displaced person, is so much more than these labels. We are all human and for that reason alone we should collectively resist the very existence of the camps and we should fight for a sustainable solution for migration not only today, but for all the generations to come because everyone has the right to human rights, and everyone deserves a better future. 

Lotte Wandel