Internship abroad in Granada, Spain at the Fundacion Escuela de Solidaridad

I am Emily and I am in the 11th grade at the FOS Landsberg in the branch design. As you know, the first year at this school is characterized by an alternation of weeks between school and internship. During my search for an internship, I came across Wolfgang Hauck and his association, dieKunstBauStelle, and was impressed by the diversity of the work they do there.

so I introduced myself there and luckily I was able to start an internship there. My work is very diverse, I was very well received and asked to participate in many projects, including the Erasmus project in Granada. So I had the chance to travel to Spain with Wolfgang Hauck and some girls of the Stelzer from Landsberg am Lech and to participate in the project “Festival Krearte”.

We stayed at the Fundacion Escuela de Solidaridad, an organization that takes in children, young people, and families from poor backgrounds and offers them a place to stay, something to eat and much more. The founder of this organization is Ignacio Pereda Perez and he has been running the organization for a long time together with his wife Dora Fanelli.

Respect for everyone you meet is a priority there and it is a safe space for everyone, no matter where you come from or what you look like. We arrived there, were very, very warmly welcomed, quickly made new acquaintances and made new friends. Our plan was to create “something out of nothing” with the people there and above all to work together as a team. The goal of the festival is to bring together different people and different cultures.

At the end of this week, so on Sunday 29.05.2022, the festival started and we moved with a colorful procession through Granada. But now back to the beginning. We flew on Monday the 23.05.2022 from the airport in Memmingen and went to Spain to work on some things and to provide as much support as possible. Also from Thursday to Saturday there were several workshops to prepare some things and also the people for the parade on Sunday.

I prepared with Laura, a Dutch artist who also came with us to Spain, the workshop “Making costumes out of paper”. This was from Thursday to Saturday a good three hours each at what felt like 38″ in the shade.

As it says from the name of this course, we made the costumes out of paper.  We made skirts out of old newspapers or turned wallpaper into hats.

Our motto was “Making something out of nothing”. In the workshop, we shared our methods and experiences of artistic work with refugees and migrant women with the Fundacion Escuela de Solidaridad.

They took place on the premises of the FES and a school near Granada. Here, too, we attached great importance to a practical and action-oriented approach with enough space for reflection and exchange. We had the support of volunteers from all over the world which helped us a lot to finish all pending tasks in time.

The focus of my work was mainly on gender-sensitive intercultural work. This means that during this week we intensively dealt with how we can specifically work with women with a migration background. Here, our stay in the community gave us the opportunity to enter into a direct exchange with the target group and to get to know the perspective of the migrant women living there.

We focused a lot on the basics of gender-sensitive work, creating easier access to projects and programs for migrant women, and empowering of migrant women through artistic inventions. Through solid cooperation with a wide variety of people, we were able to solve all tasks almost without any problems and were able to put together a beautiful procession.

All participants enjoyed the project very much and everyone was very happy, new friendships were made and we got to know each other better day by day.

All in all, I am very, very grateful that I was able to have this experience and would do it again at any time.