Happy Eid! I hope you’ve had a great Friday with your loved ones (or alone), whether you celebrated it or not.
The way we express love and gratitude towards each other has transformed. We do everything now from a distance and with masks on. This fueled our creativity to reconnect and build communities through entirely unconventional ways. And we’re all on this journey on figuring out how to navigate that.
We conducted our first virtual workshop this month. It was a collaboration between Ward and BreatheByArt. I was incredibly excited, yet terribly stressed. I found that my anxiety with new crowds stills stand even on screen with people thousands of miles away from me.
The workshop was titled Your Journey Home, and it was led by Amaal Alhifzi. I saw how Amaal led an art healing session in our first collaboration in 2018, and I witnessed how crucial it was to build trust and safety among the participants to allow them to share their ideas and stories comfortably. It was our biggest concern to achieve this on Zoom, with most of the participants’ videos turned off. Yet with everyone’s enthusiasm and commitment to create a safe space for all, we managed to defy this. Our planned one-hour-and-thirty-minutes session magically turned into an over-two-hours session. In our first check-in, everyone said that they were stressed. But that slowly faded as everyone started to explain their drawings as part of the activities Amaal has planned.
It was incredibly reassuring to see warmth radiate from everyone’s faces and words. My favorite part of running Ward is when these one-on-one interactions with people happen; Ward is no longer a group of artwork on a random website. It is rather a community of artists and stories of incredibly rich histories and backgrounds aiming to provide space for each other to grow and learn.
I hope and pray Ward becomes that space for you, a space where your voice is heard and respected and appreciated, whatever medium you use to convey it. I hope and pray it becomes a space where you can come with your creativity as it is, without censorship or fear of judgement.
I’m looking forward to the spaces I’ll get to share with each and every one of you, whether on Zoom or elsewhere, and the community we get to cultivate.
