Tejiendo Vidas

Country: Spain / Colombia

Participants: Exiled victims of the Colombian conflict

‘Flowering’
One of those grey days I went for a walk, a day when you feel sad and melancholic, when you remember all your loved ones. Walking along a deserted street, I came across a flower… at first, I thought that someone had placed it there, because it was all alone in the middle of nowhere, then, as I got closer, I could see that surprisingly its branch had managed to cross a fence passing through a narrow hole, making its way and blossoming on the other side…

At that moment, that beautiful flower gave me a great lesson of life, to see how despite its difficulty, she was able to make its way, against all odds with tenacity, going through different obstacles, fighting with perseverance, patience, strength and resilience, until it reached its goal.

That day that flower taught me that we can stay locked up and trapped by our fears, difficulties and problems, or we can be a bit like her, fight our way out and show the world our best colours, transmitting a bit of joy and hope.
© Claudia

Approximately 5 million people have left Colombia over the past five decades. In addition to dealing with the emotional impacts of the conflict, these Colombians must cope with the challenges of migration. The Colombian consulate in Barcelona provided psycho-social support workshops for Colombians, both recently arrived and those who have been in Spain long-term, under the auspices of the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Unit for the Attention and Integral Reparation of Victims, established as part of a package of peacebuilding measures designed to support reparations for victims of the Colombian conflict. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, there were concerns that the confinement would increase the isolation of these Colombian asylum seekers, leaving them emotionally vulnerable, at greater risk of exclusion and of developing mental health issues.

Tejiendo Vidas was created to address this isolation. Working online and mixing participatory photography workshops with meditation, breathing and body movement exercises, the project developed a form of remote therapeutic photography to support 15 Colombian diaspora participants over the course of five months.

I am a visual artist and also a victim of the armed conflict in Colombia. My father died in Pablo Escobar’s assassination attempt in 1989, when I was 11 years old. My siblings were small and that marked my life. It has given me the strength to go on, my mother was left alone with four children and her strength gave us the strength to go on. As a child, you didn’t understand why it happened but over the years, you understand the complexities of the violent event. I understand that my father had died because of the armed conflict but I was not close to the conflict because in Bogotá, which is like a bubble, in the cities, we are not touched by the conflict. But it did affect me. Then I understood the conflict. My mother’s role, that resilience changed my life and that of my siblings, and it is something I share in stories of survival.
© Juan Francisco Vargas Gómez

Tejiendo Vidas was inspired by Colombian led Mujer Diaspora’s feminist methodology that create a safe and welcoming collective space to promote active listening of individual testimonies, which are then transformed into art to encourage symbolic reparation. Co-designed and facilitated by Ingrid Guyon, photography and facilitator of Fotosynthesis, and Isabella Marín, a Colombian Barcelona-based psychologist, the workshops sought to create a space for emotional-relational nourishment, to foster creativity and self-esteem and provide strategies for managing emotions in moments of crisis. The workshops promoted active listening as participants worked collectively to build personal photo projects and sharing them with each other within the online workshops, via emails and using Whatsapp. 

‘Theatre play’, evaluation at the beginning of the project about how the participant felt.
At the beginning of the project, I felt like I was going to enter the auditorium (the workshop space) to see what was going to happen, to see what the play was about. I had little confidence and no trust but I was surprised because the Colombian government works differently inside and outside of Colombia. I thought the workshops would be cold, distant, controlled but I was surprised by the human warmth and relaxed energy of the group.
© Bajo la Piel (acronym to keep anonymity)

Working online was initially a challenge for both participants and facilitators but they developed various strategies to build trust and solidarity and the workshops regularly ran overtime as conversations flowed and deep friendships developed. The focus was on building resilience to heal and participants combined using their old family photos from Colombia with the creation of new images of their lives in Spain to share painful experiences and to build a sense of a more hopeful future. Each participant established what they wanted to show and tell. They were given customised support to realise their stories in the format they wanted (as well as photo stories, one made a video and another a poem). A personalised, informed consent process catered for individual needs for anonymity. The project culminated in the launch of an online exhibition and website which features the photo stories and testimonies of all the participants.

Evaluation hands
At the end of the project, we used visualization, meditation and drawing to reflect on the project. These hands represent the end of the project. They took pictures of those words to explain their emotions. Words include: trust, happiness, positivism, calm, family, connection, love, empathy, gratitude, unity.