Color My Home

Narrating The Story Of Our Lost Homes Through Architectural-Making And Poetry

Architecture and Education - Dec 2019 to present

In collaboration with Rania Qawasma

Color My Home is a community-based educational architectural design program which takes participants on a journey to trace, dream, and imagine their personal concepts of home.

Displacement in the form of diaspora, causes the loss of one’s most intimate and safe space, the house, and this loss leads to individual and collective identity crisis. In the current political, economic and environmental climate, the number of forced global immigration and local displacement due to poverty is growing immensely. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) right now “an unprecedented 68.5 million people around the world have been forced from home”. In addition, the harsh backlashes against these vulnerable individuals and communities not only prevent them for creating their new home, it feeds into the divisiveness between people. It’s on us all to look into innovative ways for inclusion of the underrepresented.

Color My Home workshops guide recently immigrated children to re-imagine the architecture they have inhabited and left behind, and to build architectural collages of what they recall. Participants also write poems about their homes and transform their memories of home into tangible artwork by building their first ever architectural collage. The visuals and poetry help share experiences that might otherwise be difficult for children to express between languages.