Initiated by artist Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna, Green light – An artistic workshop has been conceived as a field of multiple impulses of production and mutual learning, exchanges and encounters around the fabrication of an unlimited edition of stackable geometric modules equipped with a metaphorical green welcoming light. While its first iteration took place in Vienna (Austria) in 2016, this multifaceted programme of fabrication and learning has in the meantime migrated to Houston (Texas) and to the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale.
Faced with growing desires to prevent migratory movements and increasingly restrictive legal and social obstacles for refugees and asylum seekers to access education, as well as the labour market and therefore social life in their new environments, Green light expresses itself as a commentary and an active response. This social and artistic experiment aims to explore the possibilities and capacity for action of artistic and cultural institutions in the face of the challenges and possibilities posed by migration. The publication also aims to test the questions of what comes after arrival as what Giorgio Agamben designates as the coming community that has not yet been. How to think about and enact shared spaces and collectively produced learning processes towards a pluralistic society to come?
Throughout the book, testimonies, stories, memories, shared by the participants of Green light – asylum seekers and migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Eritrea, Somalia, Tajikistan and Nigeria – are intertwined and overlapped: sharing the meaning of what participation in the artistic workshop represents for each one individually, unfolding the worlds created throughout and around Green light while unravelling an encounter of the everyday, the political, the personal, the artistic, the past, the future in newly fabricated relationships.
