studio chahar
Community Teaching: Color My Home
Architectural education for immigrant youth
Community, diaspora and home. 2018 to 2022. Organized by Yasaman Esmaili and Rania Qawasma, a collaboration between Studio Chahar and Architecture for Refugees, USA.
Displacement in the form of diaspora causes the loss of one’s safe and most intimate 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), “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 hinder them from creating their new home, they feed into the divisiveness between people. It is on us all to look into innovative ways for inclusion of the under-represented.
Color My Home is a community-based educational workshop which takes participants on a journey to trace, dream, and imagine what home is. The workshop guides children to re-imagine the architecture they have inhabited and left behind and walks them through how to build their first ever architectural collages. The participants create their designs based on what they remember of their past homes and how they envision their future homes, and write about their creations in their own words. Space is a perception; architecture encompasses imaginary and physical boundaries that are interchangeable, based on one’s specific memories and cultural background.
“This is Lima’s future home. Lima is a seven year old girl from Kabul who recently immigrated to Seattle, USA with her family to escape the war. She is going to build this house one day. She imagines it will float between flowers, like her old house in Jalalabad, in which flowers bloomed throughout the year. She covers the walls with Afghan carpets and will plant colorful flowers which will reflect the patterns of the carpets. Lima will make her house where two different worlds meet, the river and the garden, or the forest and the mountain, or the desert and the ocean.” Lima Nawab Khan, 7 years old, from Jalalabad and Seattle.