An Art Outlet for Refugees in Athens

Love Without Borders for Refugees in Need (LWB) is having a tangible impact on the lives of refugees in Greece and amplifying their art around the world. Art classes are offered in a small gallery in Kypseli in the middle of Athens.

Here, families sit down in front of blank canvases, most of them have never painted before. A woman hands them acrylics and says paint whatever you want. Her name is Kayra Martinez, and she is a flight attendant. She came to Greece in 2015, when the boats were arriving from Syria and Iraq, and started as a volunteer in a camp with no plan and no background in any of this. She brought in paper and crayons because she wanted the children to have one good day. Eleven years later, that is still more or less the method.

What she noticed in that camp is what everything since has been built on. The children were traumatised. And while they painted, they were happy. She supplies the tools, canvases, acrylics, and brushes. There is no subject, no suggestions and no corrections. She is firm about this, she does not want to influence what they paint. Which matters more than it sounds, for a child who has had every decision made for them since they left home.

Children paint, photo provided by Kayra Martinez

The paintings turned out to be sellable. She rented a flat near the camp and brought fifteen children over each day, and the parents cooked while the children painted. Then the adults started sending work of their own through Facebook. She would wake up to a phone full of paintings from strangers in the camp, most of them apologising for not being very good. Some of it arrived on paper plates, because that is what there was. She bought every piece, and went to meet every person who sent one.

The system that grew out of that is the interesting part. Each painting travels with a card which includes their name, their account and their words. The work tours and sells at pop-ups abroad, and the money goes to the person who made it. When a piece sells, someone photographs the buyer holding it and sends the picture back, so the painter sees who chose their work.

A Sudanese man in one of the camps, seriously ill, had never painted. He created a beautiful painting of pale blue, with yellow and white flowers. It sold at an event in San Francisco, the first to sell that day. She sent him the photograph to tell him, put the price up, and sent him the difference.

Funds for the project are running out. The funds were being raised exclusively through social media following and on donors she went out and met in person when her flight attendant job brought her to their town. She had dinner with a man in London who mentioned he sang opera; three months later he was in Athens running a music programme for the children. The project also recently received a small grant from Burners Without Borders, who first found her work in 2018.

But the housing sponsors fell away two years ago, nearly all of them. The house that held twenty-five people and the twelve apartments are gone. She thinks attention has moved, to Ukraine and to Palestine, and that people are less generous these days. Meanwhile the Sudanese are being granted asylum and pushed out of the camps into a city with nowhere to put them, and families are sleeping in the parks.

Painting of Afghan women, photo provided by Kayra Martinez

Providing a space for creativity and art hands some agency back to people whose lives have been uprooted. Kayra hopes to continue the work long term helping people deal with difficult life situations through art therapy.