I recently had the following article published on Contributoria. Here it is again, with more photos!
Ola is strong-willed and smart. She’s usually the first of her friendship group to dive into the painting tent and organise all the others: mixing paint to perfect colours and bossing everybody around. To her teacher Lucy she’s a sweet, talented all-rounder who’s always at the heart of the action. But today she’s just not herself. She stays apart from the others, head drooping and little interest in the painting. Lucy is worried and elicits Lilian’s help in finding out what is wrong. Lilian comes back some time later and says that Ola is sad because she’s remembering her two brothers who died recently in a terrible accident.
Lucy Tyndall is the project manager of the pioneering Castle Art project at the Rise Foundation, a small NGO based in the Kurdish region of Iraq, Lilian is one of her local volunteer helpers and Ola is a young Syrian refugee. Every Friday morning, Tyndall and a handful of local and international volunteers pile into an old transit van at Rise Foundation’s base in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region, and drive two hours through picturesque but barren plains and mountains to reach the small town of Akre.
Changing brutality to beauty
An otherwise unremarkable settlement, Akre became synonymous with terror when former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein ordered the building of an imposing prison in the design of a castle, set prominently on a hill in the centre of the town. Built in the heartland of a region fighting against the dictator’s rule, the prison was designed for the detention and torture of political prisoners: a warning to all rebellious Kurds nearby.
When refugees from the Syrian civil war began to flow into the Kurdish region in greater numbers, Akre prison was turned into a refugee camp. It now houses around 1,400 people in its former cells, administered by the Kurdistan Regional Government and fed by the World Food Programme.
When Tom Robinson, director and co-founder of Rise Foundation, visited Akre with his team in early 2014 to help set up and stock a library at the camp, he found the atmosphere “so grim — it was not a nice place to be living in, with all the memories of a former totalitarian regime.” He and team member Nils Henrik came up with the idea of brightening the prison with the help of the camp’s younger refugees by painting murals on the walls. In October 2014 they brought in a new project manager, Tyndall, a former policy advisor to the New Zealand government with a passion for art that she has nurtured since her own school days.
Translating trauma into hope
“We are not professional art therapists,” says Robinson, “so we couldn’t delve into their trauma in this way.”Neither were they suitable for murals whose purpose was to brighten up the camp.
Now, Tyndall works with the children to translate their pictures into something that retains their power and meaning, but gives hope and brightness to the community. “One day Hindreen came to me with a drawing of a bird crying in a cage,” says Tyndall. “We worked on it together and the final painting on the wall was of a cage with the door open and a bird flying out.”
In this way, Tyndall allows the children and the camp community to drive the direction of the project. “It’s important to give them a sense of ownership and control,” she says. “That gives them hope for the future and takes away some of their powerlessness.”
I ask Tyndall how she deals with it if children bring up traumatic experiences from the war. “I give them a hug and put a paintbrush in their hand. All I can do is to give them the means to process it themselves.”
One day Najar, one of Castle Art’s most promising students, came to Tyndall with a drawing depicting an explosion of music. “She told me that it was a heart exploding with all the things that can’t be expressed. She said that when she puts the paintbrush to the wall, she can say the things that she can’t say out loud.”
From art project to art programme
Bringing in Banksy… fun, spray paint and irreverence
Recently, Tyndall has begun to focus more on street art with the girls, and has introduced spray painting and stencilling. Apart from having so much fun with the spray paint that only some of it ends up on the walls, Tyndall wants the children to connect with the wider background of the genre, rooted in irreverence, regeneration, beautification and rebellion.
Akre prison is a symbol of historical repression and torture: a prison now filled with victims, who are trapped there simply because they can’t go home. “It reminds me of the Berlin Wall,” says Tyndall. “I want to give the children ways of punching through the walls of their prison and retaking some control over their lives.”
It is also a huge canvas with plenty of potential to create for dramatic images. With its cracked, decaying walls and dark history, Tyndall believes that Akre prison is perfect for street art, both politically and aesthetically. “I believe that this is one of the most special art spaces in the world,” she says.
The endless battle for funding
I ask Tyndall what she would do if somebody gave her $10,000 to spend on the project. After a bit of incredulous laughter she begins to fire off her wish list.
“I could buy paint for a year. No, wait, three years… I could buy them so much paint. I want to give them a huge paint reserve, so that they can carry on if we have to leave.”
Then I asked what she would do with $500,000. This time she hit her stride. “I want to bring artists from the region and the world to work with the kids and employ more local artists to help them regularly. I want to spread the project to other camps. I want the children’s work and story to be featured in a gallery exhibition in the West. Hell, I want to take the children to be at their exhibition!”
Tyndall explains that the children very rarely leave the prison and that when they take them on occasional picnics in the surrounding area “they’re beside themselves, running around, jumping across streams and just playing like normal kids do. Can you imagine if I could take them to London? To see their own work on the wall and all these people looking at their work?”
Connecting the children with the world through art
“These children are a wasted generation if their talents and humanity aren’t nurtured. They have the passion and drive to fix their own country. They never talk about fighting; they want to be pharmacists, artists, lawyers, doctors, engineers. All they want to do is go home.”
When Tyndall asked Newruz what she would do to rebuild Syria, she replied that she would paint all the walls of Damascus.
This strategy of engagement has had some success. One student, Diana, drew a picture of a heart with a flame shooting out of it. It was so like the work of Spanish artist Ricardo Cavolo that Tyndall gave her more of his work to explore. Then she tweeted the results directly to Cavolo, who responded enthusiastically.
Tyndall’s hope is that she can persuade more artists around the world to engage with the children and perhaps even to visit and work with them in Akre. She also hopes that their art work will give them a voice in a world that otherwise ignores them.
For three hours a week Ola’s passion and talent soar, and through her art she speaks to her community and to the world. Perhaps it’s only through her painting that the world can start to see her not as a feral human, or vermin, but as a child.
Find out more about the Castle Art Project by visiting their blog or emailing info@rise-foundation.