From left to right: Seven-year-old girl from the destroyed city of Aleppo, seven-year-old soccer player, seven-year-old refugee girl from Kabul. Ten year old girl from Afghanistan, ten year old boy from Ethiopia. Double: Fifteen year old girl from Damascus. She had a place at school, what other children were waiting for, her parents forbade it, they would not be able to write and read either. Besides, she would soon be married. Works by a three-year-old Kurdish girl,
and by a ten-year-old girl born and raised seven years in Persia, who conjured up adorably airy dandelions with Tipp-Ex
we build our city.
Being private the greatest wish of all, it cannot exist in a refugee home. Idea of this project, realised with the help of the Hüppi Meisterschüler Bernd Kastner and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf: they draw a house in which they want to live and build it in clay. Their town is then created from all the houses. Excursions to beautiful residential areas, social hotspots, villages and small towns showed how people live in Germany. Their houses have little in common with what they have seen. Does it correspond to their homesickness? It may or may not be. A seven-year-old Mongolian girl, who has been on the run for many years builds a round house. Or the six-year-old from Baghdad, since two years here, designing a house on stilts? Important, the prison for the bad guys, a public bath, a grocery a skating rink. What else we did:
They were wonderful, completely unproblematic, simply children who enjoyed playing with each other. The trouble, the violence came later, from the adults.
