WORKSHOP LIGHTS WAY FOR REFUGEES
Raghad, an 18-year-old from Syria, smiles shyly as she hands me a tangled roll of white twine and an instruction sheet.
She speaks Arabic. I speak English.
The instructions — for cutting and knotting the twine, then slipping the ends into the corners of a balsa-wood-framed lamp — appear in meters, not inches.
Raghad lays an end of the twine along a ruler and shows me the numbers to use.
In the sunlit lobby of Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, more than a dozen other people also are participating in Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s “Green Light — An artistic workshop,” creating polygon-like lights that can be combined to form squares, spheres and other shapes. All of the parts are recycled; the twine, for example, was made from plastic bags in Mexico.
The construction is harder than it initially looks. There are tables for painting the insides of the wood strips, tables
for piecing the lamps together with corner joints that have been created on a 3-D printer. The corners must be attached securely to specific points of each, purposely asymmetrical lamp.
“Not just a craft project you can do in 15 minutes,” the Moody’s director Alison Weaver, suggested.
At the stringing table, most of the women wear hijabs. Natives of Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, they have been in the U.S. less than two years, arriving in Houston through Interfaith Ministries of Greater Houston’s refugee services program.
They speak Arabic, Farsi, Pashto or Dari. Which is to say, they sometimes speak with each other only slightly better than they can talk with me.
Raghad, looking frustrated or bored — it’s hard to tell which — taps a music app on her smartphone, which has Arabic text display, and suddenly all the women grin, nod their heads and sway gently. It’s the sexy, rhythmic song “Chantaje,” by Shakira, sung in Spanish. We all “speak” Shakira. Since March, workshop participants have built more than 150 lamps, each with a colored LED bulb that represents a green light for immigration. The lamps sell for $350, with proceeds donated to Interfaith.
More than just a chance to participate in a worldrenowned artist’s project or raise funds for charity, Eliasson’s workshop aims to create a sense of community among those working and demonstrate that refugees are more than casualties of global turmoil or political divides.
Former refugees are successfully integrating themselves into societies, Eliasson says.
“I am fundamentally, totally convinced that they want to be seen as people who give, not as people who take, from society.”
Eliasson’s studio in Europe creates scientifically sophisticated sculptural objects that sell for thousands of dollars. But social activism drives much of his work, especially interactive “installations” such as this. Last year the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston staged his “Collectivity Project,” which invites visitors to build tabletop cityscapes from a mound of white Lego blocks.
Eliasson also strives to disrupt ideas about what can take place inside cultural institutions such as museums. He wants viewers to take responsibility for what they are experiencing and to understand that art has a higher purpose than consumption.
“We mistakenly think that the cultural sector is only the art market,” he says. “That is a big mistake. Culture has great social potential.”
Eliasson launched “Green Light” in Vienna in 2016. The Moody is the project’s first stop in the U.S.
Meeting three days a week at Rice, the former refugees there also share lunch and take Englishlanguage classes. They’ve had lessons on how to create résumés and ask questions of a doctor. To learn more about American culture, they’ve played baseball with a Rice athlete and watched a DJ spin records.
This component of the project, the organizers say, is as important as the lamp-making.
Throughout the complex resettlement process, the participants had to tell and retell old traumas, reviving painful memories, on official documents. Now, the English that comes easiest to them invariably involves praise for their new country.
“In America, everything is good,” says Mohammed Hamid Sheikh Horo, proudly showing his Texas driver’s license. “No difference — Arabic, Kurdish. Civilized people here, not racist.”
Barzar Khalid, Horo’s Interfaith case manager, says Horo is the kind of guy who helps everybody, a man who stops to aid strangers on the street and drives newcomers around town, showing them the ropes of life in Houston.
Now 41, Horo left Aleppo, Syria, with his wife, Suriya, and their five children about five years ago because they are Kurdish, targets of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Their neighborhood was bombed; the apartment they lived in is gone.
Push him a little, and he’ll tell you he misses his family’s country acreage, which had olive trees. They traveled first to Turkey, where Horo worked as a supervisor in a clothing factory for four years, but life was challenging for Kurds there, too.
At their apartment complex on Houston’s southwest side, neighbors greet each other with smiles and waves, Horo says. He has landed a few gigs as a musician, singing and playing traditional Kurdish songs on the lutelike buzuk; and also runs a small tailoring business.
Horo recently lost his best-paying job, as a housekeeping supervisor for a Galleria hotel. Living with the stress of overdrawn balance notices from the bank, he’s anxious to find work again to support his family. He used his incometax refund to pay rent in advance, so they will have shelter for a while.
According to Interfaith and UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency, there are 21.3 million refugees in the world, most of whom are women and children. Interfaith assists hundreds of families from across the globe each year. More than 90 percent of the adults find employment within three months after they arrive.
About 20 people participated in the “Green Light” project during its first week, in late February, but that number dwindled as some found jobs. A handful of volunteers also have been pitching in, serving as drivers and language assistants, eager to interact and explore the more personal dimension of social issues that loom so large in the news.
Aletha Evert, who signed up to help at Interfaith last fall, will miss the camaraderie when the project ends in early May.
“It’s important for us to be welcoming,” Evert says. “My great-grandfather came from Ireland right before the Civil War, and my grandmother came from Scotland.”
Eliasson visited for a few days, to speak with and meet the participants.
“It leaves you with a bit of finding out for yourself. … Suddenly you have a situation where it’s not so patriarchic,” he says. “I’m interested in, can we all be subjects together without marginalizing others?”
Hayfaa Al Gbori, one of the liveliest participants in “Green Light,” asks Eliasson to explain who owns the project. He tells her nobody, other than the participants, together.
“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an author. But the author is not the same as an owner,” he says. “The project is not about me.”
“So it’s about ‘we,’ ” Gbori says. This makes him happy. Workshop participants have gravitated to tasks that suit them best. Dayami Rodgriguez-Lopez, a 34-year-old cultural historian from Cuba, has worked them all. She became so efficient, she’s now the quality-control manager. Each lamp must be solidly built, and she’s not shy about pulling them apart and starting over.
Eliasson knows the lamps are difficult to construct.
“It’s good fun,” he says. “It’s not so easy, but it’s not supposed to be easy. Art is hard — which you can also pronounce ‘heart’ — but the rest is easy.”