Saturday, July 22, 2017

Learning from the Past: Refugees Give Museum Tours in Berlin

Austin Davis, News Deeply
July 11, 2017

"The Mshatta Facade is among myriad artifacts from the ancient Islamic world that draws more than 700,000 visitors to the Pergamon Museum in this German city every year.

Dating to the 8th century in what is now Jordan, the facade was an outer wall of the winter palace of the Umayyad caliph, whose empire stretched from Spain to India. The facade came to Germany in pieces in 1903 and, after surviving the destruction of two world wars, wasn’t fully reconstructed until the 1950s.

Today the traces of the restoration are only noticeable to trained eyes like Hussam Zahim Mohammed’s, an archaeologist who immigrated to Germany from Iraq in 2005. Mohammed views the artifact as a metaphor in cross-cultural understanding that applies to Germany’s modern challenge of integrating almost 1 million Syrians and other Middle Eastern refugees.

“There are old parts and there are new parts, and we can always learn something from the old parts,” he said.

Since April, Mohammed has been one of the project directors of Multaka, an integration initiative that places refugees and other immigrants from the Islamic world at the helm of guided tours in some of Berlin’s most popular museums.

What began in December 2015 as a small tour led once a week by a handful of rotating guides has grown into an expansive project with around 24 participants.

“It’s a form of integration because we bring people together to talk about their own culture displayed in the museum as well as European culture.”

These docents lead free, Arabic-language tours of four of the German capital’s most popular museums twice a week for refugees and other immigrants from the Arab world. Paid tours in German can also be arranged.

The project doesn’t end with the tours. It also runs 18 intercultural workshops at which native Germans and refugees meet to discuss and create art together during lessons in glassmaking, photography and carpet weaving.

“It’s a form of integration because we bring people together to talk about their own culture displayed in the museum as well as European culture,” said Mohammed."

More here

No comments: