The piece that I chose to work with on this collaborative art project is Silver Specks. It depicts what appears to be a brightly colored road, dotted with silver, leading out of a brown, wasted, barren landscape. As I scrolled through the collection of art pieces made at the Kakuma Refugee Camp, I came across many that struck me. But this one spoke to me the most. After watching the “We Are Kakuma” video, I discovered a newfound perspective on the life of a refugee. Most people imagine it to be a toxic wasteland full of sadness and hunger and a weary thirst for escape, but this video showed that it can be a happy place, too. It showed people dancing, laughing, hugging, and going about their daily lives with smiles and laughter. But it also showed tears, darkness, and tightly knotted barbed wire fences. The fences especially resonated with me because of how they conveyed the feeling of limbo, of stuckness. I decided to use that in my piece. Silver Specks features what I’ve interpreted as a road that leads out of the camp, towards the hope of a new life. I’ve added a barbed wire fence in order to show a sense of the obstacles that stand in the way of that hope. I’ve also added people laughing, dancing, and singing. In doing so, I hoped to depict the zest of life in a refugee camp. Color, sound, music, and food reign supreme, but so does a heavy sense of longing. I wanted to show joy, bright and bold, but still trapped in the brown land, caught by the sharp threads of a barbed wire fence. The materials that I used were wire, felt tip pen, pencil, and natural materials. After watching multiple videos of refugee children and adults using natural and found objects to build homes, create artwork, and craft tools, I began to look at the world around me with a new, creative eye. I began examining every piece of nature I found with a “how can I make this work?” kind of attitude. I decided to incorporate the natural elements of life in a refugee camp into my piece by using sticks as posts for my fence, and bordering my piece in found natural objects. In essence, what I sought to respond to, in this collaborative piece, was the feeling that we all have something we are striving for, something that is blocked by some sort of figurative barrier. Even when we are happy, there is still a heaviness in the feeling that something is missing, incomplete. Just as refugees have the feeling of being caught in a place, stuck between past and future, we all have a feeling of being stuck somewhere or with something, unable to escape until we let hope shine through. Georgia Marshall United States
Silver Specks, original
Member of the My Start Art Collective Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya
Full Pink Sun Half a Yellow Sun, collaborative piece
I chose this piece of art, called “Full pink sun half a yellow sun,” to add to because from the moment I looked at it, I could already see the many similarities between the shapes and colors used in the artwork and videos of the Kakuma refugee camp that I watched. I interpreted the small orange rectangle as a representation of their homes, so I added the tiny brick details, as well as the door and windows. I pictured the long green rectangle under the orange rectangle as grass. So, I cut out really small green rectangles out of images of grass from magazines and scattered them all over the green area. The orange-brown area under that had a wave-like pattern on top, so I drew on some waves all throughout that space. I also added clouds, stars, and birds to the sky above. The big pink sun and half of the yellow sun definitely stand out, so I added some color around them and then basically connected the colors to act a metaphorical bridge between them to signify togetherness, family, and the strong community inside the refugee camp. And finally, I wrote “HOME” on a piece of paper, that I placed above the representation of their homes, to show that the Kakuma refugee camp is, and has been the home for most of all the Kakuma refugees’ lives. I tried to highlight and emphasize this image/concept without adding too much to the artwork and to honor the original artist’s intention and purpose of this piece of artwork. Anika Bhat United States
