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ABSTRACT
Refugee children and young people are living a life in transition: they have been forced to leave their countries due to war, poverty or political persecution in order to seek protection and new life options in Denmark. This article argues that museums have opportunities to help the process of integration that has been mostly overlooked. In the Travelling with Art program for young refugees at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, our goal is to create good experiences for refugee students by developing methods that invite them to express themselves through art as a way to share their thoughts and feelings. Bridgebuilding in the form of intercultural workshops between Danish and refugee youth is another recent, but important aspect that we believe can help the students to create networks, and thereby help their integration process. Of course, this raises questions – such as how to balance the expressive element in such a way that the children are invited to express themselves without risking getting close to feelings that are traumatic. Or whether it makes sense to build bridges between Danes and young refugees who will perhaps not even stay in Denmark.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
About the author
Line Ali Chayder has a Masters degree in art history and works as an art educator in Louisiana Learning. She initiated and is responsible for the Travelling with Art project, and has made numerous presentations of the ideas and methods developed for the program. As part of the museum's learning team since 2004, her focus has been continuously on inclusion and ways of working with art that invite visitors to meet around art and share their experiences.
Notes
1 Since 2005 the Danish Red Cross has been responsible for the schooling of asylum-seeking children and young people in Denmark. In the early days of the project, the students primarily came from the Red Cross school called The School on the Hill situated in the small town of Lynge, a 30-minute drive from the museum. Since then, we have been working with several Red Cross schools in the local area. The school in Dianalund situated one hour's drive from the museum, was the farthest away. As a way to expand the scope of the program, we also invited a Red Cross school from Jelling in Jutland to participate in the learning course. These pupils and their teachers spent four days at the museum as a part of a school camp.
2 For more detailed descriptions of the history and teaching methods of the project, see Chayder, “Art as a Space of Opportunity.”
3 The Ministry of Immigration and Integration and the Danish Immigration Service: https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/nye-tal-drastisk-stigning-i-boern-alene-paa-flugt-ind-i-danmark
4 The application process and subsequent development of the project was carried out in collaboration with Elisabeth Bodin, Head of Learning at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
5 Mila Mineva is quoted from an interview at Louisiana in 2016. See Chayder, “Student Perspective,” 62.
6 Heath and Wolf, Art is all About Looking: Drawing and Detail, 64–84.
7 Normally, we do not use translators. This is due to both practical and economical reasons; with up to five or sometimes even seven different languages in one group, it has not been possible to provide the amount of interpreters needed. Likewise, the fact that students are often moved on in the asylum system quite fast, and their place are taken over by newcomers, makes it difficult to foresee which interpreters that are needed. Sometimes we are lucky and some of the Red Cross teachers speak for example Arabic or Kurdish, or some of the students are fluent in English. So, just like in the daily teaching in the Red Cross we have to use body language, images, Google translate and a lot of humor and good will in order to understand each other.
8 The booklet Pencil in Pocket exists in two versions: one targets the schoolchildren; the other one their teachers, introducing the drawing exercises and the ideas behind them. The focus is on using drawing as a way to explore and combine the world in new ways, as when the students in the activity Walk the line are invited to draw together what they see in the sculpture park using just one long line – or draw the experiences of a day in the same way. The activities are simple and low-tech and can be carried out everywhere, also outside the institution. See quickpaper.rosendahls.dk/louisiana/en/Toolkit/#/1/ and quickpaper.rosendahls.dk/louisiana/en/ToolkitTeacher/#/4/
9 Winner and Hetland, “Art for our Sake, School art Classes Matter more than Ever – but not for the Reason you Think,” 6.
10 Montgomery and Linnet, Børn og unge med flygtningebaggrund, anbefalinger til professionelle. Montgomery emphasizes the potentially healing psychological aspects of being able to tell one’s own story, and the importance of helping the refugee children to be able to re-learn how to play – an ability, many of them have lost:
One of the good functions of play is that it creates order in the chaos that the child experiences and that is why free play in itself is not sufficient.(..) Organised play may help to control the unpredictable and chaotic in the child’s experience of the world, such that the child will perceive the world as more coherent and predictable, 83.
11 Structure, predictability and safety are also key elements in the daily teaching in the Red Cross Schools. Based on the so-called STROF model, developed by the Swedish pediatrician Lars Gustafsson, the pedagogy aims at creating structure, talking/time/trust, rituals, organized play and family collaboration as important factors when working with traumatized children. The STROF model is described at The Red Cross homepage as the basis of the organization's pedagogy when working with refugee children in kindergartens and schools. See https://www.rodekors.dk/det-goer-vi/roede-kors-asyl/hverdagen-paa-et-asylcenter/vi-giver-boernene-pejlemaerker.
12 Poul Karoff, principal at the Red Cross Schools, underlined the pupils’ curiosity and abilities to make contact as an example of the positive advantages of teaching this particular group of children as opposed to “ordinary” Danish kids. A curiosity, that in his opinion, could help bridge the language challenges.
13 Likewise, some of the teachers also saw the strengthened concentration among the younger students at the museum as an indicator of them being mature enough to start in an ordinary Danish primary school. Other times the increased focus of the students led their teachers to see new possibilities in terms of activities. For example that the boys did not always have to play football or do sport, but could also benefit from creative activities like painting and drawing. And at one of the teachers initiative a special girls group was formed, in order to explore whether meeting around art at the museum could help the girls to “talk about things they otherwise did not talk about.”
14 Whyte, “They will think, I have gone to the moon! Art as a contact zone in a project for asylum-seeking minors in Denmark.” “Sociality thus both shapes the ways in which the students talk to one another, and is made material in the artwork they produce, which often expresses not only a purely individual identity, but also a social identity,” 35–6. In one of the activities for example, the students had to work together two and two and create photographic portrait collages inspired by David Hockneýs so-called Joiners, by mixing pictorial DNA from both of them to one image.
15 Whyte, “They Will Think I Have Gone to the Moon!” 63.
16 Heath and Roach, “Imaginative Actuality, Learning in the arts during Nonschool Hours,” 23.
17 At the intercultural workshop in 2016 for example, the pupils built Future Palaces together, carried them outside the institution and asked the passersby to participate in the themes of the Palaces in different ways. In 2017 the pupils made a silent dance performance in the Louisiana Galleries as a workshop finale, inspired by Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s videowork Crazyhouse (2014). In both cases, these activities brought great enjoyment both to the students, but also to the museum’s guests and to people outside the institution, who began to wonder who these young art experts were. See Christiansen, “Palaces for the Future,” for an in depth description of the bridge-building workshops between Danish and refugee students and with Tate Modern’s associated artist Albert Potrony as workshop leader.
18 All though the evaluations of these workshops are extremely positive, and the majority of the young people talk about how much they have learned about each other, we realize that two days are not enough to form friendship among the participants – even though they might exchange Facebook addresses. A longer time perspective is needed, if we want our workshops to form the basis of more lasting relations. Due to logistics, this is hard to realize. The Red Cross schools and the Danish schools are often far apart, and the students have to be brought by busses to the museum. This makes it difficult for the students to hang out together and to integrate the workshop experiences into their everyday life.
19 According to the Foreign- and Integration Ministry, 2017 brought the lowest number of asylum seekers in 7 years. Where the amount of asylum seekers peaked in 2015, with 21.316 coming to Denmark, only 3200 people applied for asylum in 2017. This development reflects not only a tougher border control in many of the European countries, including Hungary in 2015, and Denmark and Sweden in 2016, but also stricter regulations in Denmark introduced by the leftwing government aiming at reducing the amount of refugees and asylum seekers. http://uim.dk/nyheder/2018-01/danmark-fik-i-2017-det-laveste-antal-asylansogere-i-ni-ar.
20 Since 2015, the Danish right wing government has implemented 73 tightenings of the foreign policy and asylum rules as stated on the Ministry of Immigration and Integration’s homepage http://uim.dk/gennemforte-stramninger-pa-udlaendingeomradet. At the same time, the Danish Red Cross reports that there is an overwhelming interest among civilians to volunteer in integration.