Art Refuge: Thriving through the pandemic
BY EMILY WIGHAM
The coronavirus pandemic has caused nothing if not a complete derailment of everybody’s plans. While some individuals and organisations have been left floundering in the peri-COVID world, others have used the time and resources that quarantine gave us to their advantage. Art Refuge, one of the charities FUZE is so proudly supporting this year, falls into the latter category, and has thrived throughout this unprecedented time.
It is important to understand the work Art Refuge undertook before travel bans and social distancing measures were put in place. In an interview with Art Therapist/artist/CEO Bobby Lloyd and Art Therapist/Bristol Lead Sarah Robinson the two laid out what a regular working week looked like for the people at Art Refuge.
To start with, Bobby explained how the team in London travelled to Calais in Northern France on a fortnightly basis to offer crisis support to refugees trying to get across to the UK. The team provided art making and art therapy through activities that used maps, typewriters and building blocks in various locations, and worked alongside a mobile medical clinic run by Médecins du Monde, offering arts-based crisis support alongside the emergency medical service for the refugees in Calais.
The Bristol branch on the other hand, is in an ongoing collaboration with Creative Youth Network, who hosted them in their central space and specialist drop-in called Welcome Wednesdays for young refugees and asylum seekers in Bristol. Over the last four years, Art Refuge has contributed to Creative Youth Network by bringing art, art therapy and photography into those sessions, reaching across our city and beyond to young people who have been displaced by war, poverty and trafficking. Art Refuge also created a more traditional, in-depth art therapy session for a group of 8 young people.
While much of the work taking place in Bristol differed to that offered in Calais, Sarah spoke about echoes that reverberated between the two spaces, using activities employing the building block as an example: “the difference which I think illustrated the disparity between people who are displaced and people who are settling is that the people in [the Bristol] group that were using these bricks were using really strong super glue to keep these building together. It was much, much more important for them to be able to build something that would last; but what we would see in Calais was people making these buildings and being completely accepting of the fact that at the end of the session they would be dismantled”.
However, Bobby explains that the use of building blocks in Calais offered more than simple construction of temporary structures: “it’s about helping people to breath…breathing brings back a sense of equilibrium; of feeling grounded, safe and contained”.
The art and art therapy support that people like Bobby and Sarah can provide, give people who are displaced, a sense of belonging at a time when they may feel at their most isolated. Accepting this reality at a time where the whole world is quarantined away from one another is far more challenging. However, those at Art Refuge have not been discouraged.
Bobby explained a couple of projects she had been working on, such as a round table art-making space with people on the ground in Paris, along with others from all of the world through Zoom called “The Community Table: Online and on the Ground”.
Art Refuge also launched the virtual Coronaquilt back in March, on the theme of daily rituals that are helping people cope with the Covid-19 pandemic. Receiving to date over 1000 images from 25 countries, a number of refugees from within the charity’s projects and many other settings have been taking part – a project that is ongoing (www.coronaquilt.org).
However, both are also excited about a project headed by Sarah happening right here in Bristol. ROUTES/HERE is essentially a project that works to support those working and caring for displaced youth in Bristol and the surrounding counties. A lot of young people prefer to access services in person such as those offered by Art Refuge and Creative Youth Network. But since quarantine, the logical step forward is to ensure those around them are as equipped as possible to help out. Sarah comments, that “as their engagement in online platforms waxes and wanes we know the sustainable thing is to work with the network that supports those young people; where changes happen, where there is flux, we are still able to reach that network”.
A six-week pilot programme set up by art therapist, Sarah Robinson and Alison Clarkson Webb, a foster carer for young asylum seekers, ROUTES/HERE set out to connect foster carers, key workers for displaced people, supported lodgings hosts and advocates in the National Youth Advocacy Service.
Thirty people made use of the pilot during the initial six weeks, and there was much interest from people from outside of those particular professions such as lawyers, social workers and psychologists, who they are thinking of integrating into the project further down the line. This project, which launched this Autumn has funding to continue into early 2021 as it is an important aspect of Art Refuge’s work as a whole, which we at FUZE are so excited to support.
Where many were discouraged through lockdown and the consistently dizzying effect of yoyo safety measures, those at Art Refuge have seen a significant gap in the care and support of displaced young people and have endeavoured to fill it.
This year’s FUZE is in aid of two charities: ArtRefuge and Black South West Network.
