refugee spaces is a web-based project that focuses on the everyday lives of refugees and asylum seekers.
Through the spaces and places where they develop activities and experiences, the refugees show (and share) a portrait of their current life conditions, feelings, but also projects and challenges. They render visible the culture that they create during their “in between life”.

refugee spaces joins other efforts to generate social visibility in a communal sense. It is a participatory channel that invites refugees and asylum seekers to document and show how they cope with their changed situation.

The project was started by distributing disposable cameras to refugees and asylum seekers in Berlin. Through these people we gained access to the city’s refugee social networks and were able to get a more complex view of their realities. The photographs taken by them were uploaded to the website.

As the project is a work in progress, we expect to contact refugees from other cities, to increase networks and to develop a more complex view of current life processes.

refugee spaces works in the way to connect with some basic questions:

how to develop visibility in a participatory way?

how to start building collective dignity in a “timeless condition”?

how to manage the flow of reliable data in constantly changing sociocultural environments?

how to preserve these life experiences and developed knowledges?