Stories of Change
May 23, 2019
Visit from ACM – Portuguese High Commissioner for Migrations
May 23, 2019Saturdays in Construction
In April, the Wemin Project Work Package 5 activities started in Lisbon. The main goal of this group of activities is bring in contact migrant and refugee women, newly arrived in Portugal and women from the host community, who are from Lisbon or have lived in this city for a long time.
The creative process that will culminate with an exhibition in November began with meetings of migrant women, promoted by the young artist and cultural producer, Mafalda Teles, in which the challenge was to discover the participants' arts and crafs talents and their cultural inspirations: Popular parties, traditional weddings, gastronomy, typical costumes. From here we depart for community workshops that took place on Saturdays of April and May, all day, in the space of the Renovar a Mouraria ecological store, with the purpose of involving the entire local community and the visitors of the neighborhood in this dynamic.
In these workshops were created several pieces / artistic installations, authored by migrant women, from the reuse of materials and which served to decorate the space of the popular June party that our association holds annually in a neighborhood square - O Arraial de Santo António. In 2019 the theme of this popular party was Sustainability and zero waist, so it was called “Arraial Composto”.
Every Saturday, the authors of the pieces taught to those who joined the workshop the technique used to replicate the elements and massify them in order to embody the installation designed for the decoration of the Arraial.
About 65 women were engaged, 25 of them third-country nationals and the remaining portuguese and other european nationalities. In the end we have, together up over 10 different nationalities, from Brazil to Nepal, from India to Germany, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Romania, Poland, among others.
Strong mutually supportive bonds have been established and lasting intergenerational and intergenerational friendships have been created!
