At ArtEZ University of the Arts, students participate in an interdisciplinary project each year. In my third year in the DBKV program, I took part in the project LAB3, together with students from the Artist Educator Dance and Artist Educator Theatre programs at ArtEZ.

During this project, I had the opportunity to do an internship at A Beautiful Mess, an initiative of the Refugee Company that runs a community café in Arnhem. The café is a meeting place where newcomers and local residents come together, work, and participate in language classes.

Together with my group members, we focused on transforming the space of the café. In collaboration with the newcomers who visit, work, and study there, we created a mural. Through conversations with them about the cultures and environments they come from, we searched for meaningful symbols and stories.

These symbols were then translated into stencils. Together with the newcomers, we used these stencils to paint the mural on the walls of the café.