​How can we creatively share knowledge and experiences to unleash a new common ground?

 

    Fragments of Impermanence showcases the results of the project WEBS that was developed during five months of intense collaboration between 14 artists and educators from diverse refugee and migrant backgrounds working together and having Berlin as their common ground.  The starting point of the collective experiment was the series of workshops titled Training of Trainers, where all participants were simultaneously learners and teachers of the knowledge they brought along to share.
 

    The group adopted a self-organised, non-hierarchic and non-linear approach, free enough to allow thinking and practising new ways of sharing experiences through artistic expressions and critical thinking. There were no fixed rules, no anticipated directions but the general intention of empowering co-creation and allowing all voices to be heard.
 

    Naturally and intuitively, ideas emerged and spread, connecting ones to the others, one workshop to the next, painting, drawing, writing, animation, sound, video, collage, photography, sculptures and performance, until they all felt they belonged together beyond and between places, languages, time.
 

WEBS challenged the colonising and oppressive system of hierarchical knowledge and given titles and provided a platform where the richness of diverse expertise, skills, life paths, languages and roots were concentrically connected. Like in a spider web, every crossing of two threads marks a point of creatively catching knowledge and passing it forward, constantly weaving new insights.

    So fragile and so extremely tensile are the connections, so are they – not meant to stay – but disintegrating again and yet leaving their trace. Gathered in Berlin, passing by, piercing through and ultimately creating a memory of togetherness imprinted in the city as fragments of their own impermanence.