About / Press
Making Waves is an interdisciplinary project in Berlin that invites refugees to build an industry standard motor yacht! The workshop offers experience in carpentry, boat building and more. Participants engage in all stages of construction from design to completion.
Building a boat is an ambitious activity, which provides a meaningful context for participants to share their stories, and discuss the challenges of migration, assimilation and cultural difference. We envision the vessel as an exploratory vehicle for local and cultural engagement.
Model making workshops in 2017
It all began when…
The project grew out of model making workshops hosted by artist Daniel Seiple in 2017. A year later with Hassan Aji, Hanna Aljarada and Nawras Alwali, the group began construction on a full-size yacht. Later, the team was joined by Walid Bara, Mumtaz Dimashqi, Nafee Kurdy and other volunteers. The group offers an array of expertise and various professions including a plumber, pharmacist, dental technician and decorative painter. Participants have come from four continents, and speak an array of languages and varying degrees of German.
Why a motor yacht?
By designing a workshop in which refugees craft their own luxurious ride, we create a more ambiguous cultural image than the ones presented by the media, politics or aid organizations. It is not an attempt to counter this image. It is our intent to complicate the image, to create a new narrative, so that one might take notice, rather than passively dismissing it as known.
More than a workshop
Making Waves is interested in creating forms of representation for refugees beyond the static and traditional symbols of victimization, passivity and poverty. The workshop format provides a model to reconcile knowledge and sentience through action. Far from utopian, the workshop aims to confront cultural and social conflict, and the challenges of assimilation through artistic, discursive and personal means.
