ICYMI: ‘We did not come to be a burden.’ Belgian artists mail letters from migrants to an uncertain public | Toronto Star

Amid the increasingly xenophobic political rhetoric in Europe, a pair of Belgian artists is sending letters written by recently arrived migrants to local residents.

“Moving Stories” is a public art project that seeks to break down the invisible barriers between the migrants and those who have, somewhat reluctantly, welcomed them into safety.

“We wanted to invite people to get in touch with each other and talk to each other instead of about each other,” said the artists’ agent, Anouk Focquier. “That’s what’s missing in this entire debate.”

Dirk Schellekens and Bart Peleman got 13 migrants living in a Red Cross shelter in Antwerp to pen letters explaining why they left their homes in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and how they arrived in Belgium. The letters were then translated from the migrants’ mother tongues into Flemish and copied 166 times — one for each of the nationalities present in the city.

On Friday, the missives and their translations were put into envelopes and posted to random addresses across the Antwerp, along with return postcards inviting the recipients to send back a response.

The messages, written in Arabic, Kurdish, French, Russian and English, describe persecution at the hands of Al Shebab in Somalia, domestic abuse in northern Mali and forced conscription in Syria — not to mention hardships endured on the journey to Europe.

Focquier said the artists asked the migrants to use pen and paper in order to undermine the knee-jerk opinion forming that takes place on social media.

“When you write a letter, you sit down and think. And we wanted to slow down the process of forming opinions because that’s going really fast right now.”

Schellekens & Peleman, as the artists are collectively known, have focused their recent work on the European refugee crisis, floating a six-metre inflatable sculpture of a migrant on a small boat through Venice, Italy in November.

The “Inflatable Refugee” sculpture is made from the same materials as the boats that transport migrants across the Mediterranean Sea — “too fragile to withstand the waves,” the artists write.

Source: ‘We did not come to be a burden.’ Belgian artists mail letters from migrants to an uncertain public | Toronto Star