Excerpt from The Art Newspaper editor, Javier Pez's article on Green Light
Called Green light, the project was launched by Studio Olafur Eliasson and partners in Vienna last year. Venice is the art workshop’s most high-profile venue so far.

For some the context is very wrong. “I felt sickened by this human zoo,” wrote Jackie Wullschläger, the art critic of the Financial Times. Cristina Ruiz, a former editor of The Art Newspaper and another Venice Biennale veteran, was also unimpressed: “Let people interested in the project seek it out. Let the others gawp at something else. This is not art in service of migrants but migrants in service of a curatorial vision.”
. . .
But Green light feels different. It would have been diminished if it was a sideshow at the Biennale: art and activism as an add-on. It feels like a project designed and evolving to meet migrants’ real needs and encourage conversations. You need only speak to the migrants themselves to hear their thoughts and life stories (and critics of the project have so far failed to include the participant’s voices in their critiques).

One participant, Tahajud Alghrabi, a teacher from Baghdad who joined the project in Vienna, is now helping other refugees in Venice. During the preview week one young man from Nigeria, Jerry Angel, said frankly that if he wasn’t taking part in Green light he would probably be hanging out at a railway station drinking or possibly selling drugs.

Read full article on The Art Newspaper

#WithRefugees

The Green light project began at a specific moment in time, in 2015, when refugees were arriving in Europe by the hundreds of thousands, fleeing hardship, political and economic instability, and war in their home countries. Although these problems had begun years before, many – myself included – often felt emotionally disconnected from the reality of what we read or saw on the news. Art and culture, I believe, can have a pertinent role to play in responding to such events: as a start, it can reverse our emotional disconnect and, whether directly or indirectly, inspire us to take action.

But how does one proceed from the assembly of a light module to social change? The journey might seem long and convoluted, yet a simple but crucial first step is to trust the potential in the non-spectacular situation of sitting down together and doing something basic with our hands – in this case, working on a lamp that is more easily assembled by two pairs of hands than one. Add to that a multifaceted program of shared learning, with practical workshops, counseling, language classes, cooking, sports and cultural events, and knowledge exchange. What emerges during these activities is a shared social space. And once the initial nervousness has evaporated, moments of relaxed enjoyment unfold, pieces of personal history are exchanged. This elicits a feeling of interconnectedness that is incredibly strong.

I believe that allowing ourselves to be open to this feeling is key to intensifying our engagement in society and to participating actively in coming up with solutions in times where forced migration affects us all.

I undertook the Green light project with TBA21 with the hope of developing a scalable model that would work in an art context, but could reach beyond it and also be implemented in a school, a public library, or a political institute. . . . While the Green light community expands, I hope that cities, national governments, and policy-makers also begin to see the potential of creative approaches to welcoming refugees, addressing concerns among their populations, and devising collective solutions. Populations around the world will become increasingly multi-ethnic and multicultural and it is clear that the near and distant future will continue to be shaped by migration. We therefore need solutions, now and into the future, at all levels of society.

Excerpts from ‘Assembling a Light, Assembling Communities’, Green Light – An Artistic Workshop, published by TBA21 and Sternberg Press

Welcome! Arriving at an open house is usually an informal affair. The hosts might come to the door to greet you – or they might not. Clusters of guests form spontaneously, grow, dissipate. People wander about, check out books, or pick up an object lying around. You can hang out for hours or merely put in an appearance. There’s no schedule and, potentially, a good amount of unruly, social interaction.

And there’s a setting, a space that has been awaiting your arrival, awaiting you and imagining your presence, a space tuned to the act of welcoming – like this one here, in your hands. This book invites you into my studio in Berlin. For this book-as-openhouse, my studio team and I have left some of our favourite items lying about – experimental setups, sketches, models, some artworks. You will find fragments of conversations, stray quotes for inspiration, and ideas floating about, which give a glimpse into the daily concerns and exchanges among team members and with visitors.

Open house presents an opportunity to meet some of the approximately ninety people working at the studio. They come from diverse backgrounds and are engaged in a range of activities: some in woodworking and metalwork or on the glass team; some in charge of Exhibitions and Production or Design and Development;
others work on Research and Policy or with Media and Transmissions, while still others are involved in planning, logistics, or accounting. Finally, of course there is the kitchen team, which provides warm lunches four days a week for the entire studio. Olafur Eliasson, excerpt from foreword to Open House

Like the horizon, rainbows are perspectival and therefore exist in no particular location. A rainbow forms when the organic and the in-organic, eye and sunlight, matter and energy are brought into a sudden relation that changes the quality of light itself. The rainbow exist as an object, but an interstitial one, at a meeting place of relations and materiality. A rainbow is an alliance: solar gleam, errant cloud, water drops in motion, captivated eye, changed world” J.J. Cohen in Prismatic Ecology, 2013

"I’ve always been interested in how we co-produce reality. When I make an exhibition I think of it as a reality-producing machine. Virtual reality has the potential to become a platform for new ways of experiencing if we include the body in our virtual work – I don’t believe in leaving the body behind. For this reason, I’ve been particularly interested in developing Rainbow so that it hosts many people at the same time. To me, this social aspect is crucial; it emerges through recognising the presence of others, by experiencing others’ impact on a space. To enter Rainbow is not to exit the world and leave the body behind. It draws on our deep motor-sensory knowledge and sense of space to bring people together across geographical boundaries." - Olafur Eliasson

Presenting Green light – An artistic workshop in the Exhibition Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale together with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary has provoked many reactions. Some have been positive, others sceptical, and some clearly negative. There have been a lot of questions in the workshop space itself and beyond it, many of which are addressed and considered in depth in a series of essays in the Green light book recently published by TBA21 and Sternberg. Are people who came as refugees from very different countries being objectified when they take part in a transnational workshop at the heart of the biennale? Can the visitors participate actively, rather than remain outside, gazing at the participants from a distance? What is clear to me is that the reactions to Green light inevitably become a part of the project’s social fabric.

The project explicitly invites the general public to join the participating asylum seekers in the workshop, in building lamps and in taking part in the shared learning project – it trusts the point of contact, encourages interaction and collaborative work. Being in the Green light space and actively negotiating one’s role as a spectator or participant is a part of the project, whether one comes from a refugee background or not. I think, however, that not everyone saw that invitation, especially during the opening days of the exhibition.
Bringing Green light to the biennale means working within an exhibition platform that offers great visibility. It has been important to me throughout to actively use this visibility to bring the issues of migration and forced migration not just to those who are already interested in them (preaching to the choir, so to speak), but to everyone passing through the Exhibition Pavilion, since these are topics in the current political landscape that should not be ignored. It is also a means of giving the Green light participants a platform from which they can speak about their concerns.

Above and beyond what Green light communicates to the outside is the role it has in producing an engaged community. Integral to this is the Shared learning platform, an alternative educational programme organised by TBA21, which offers language classes, job training, psychological counselling and legal advice, as well as workshops, interventions, and seminars.
Green light – An artistic workshop presents no solution. It offers no easy ‘fix it all’ strategy. It is a modest attempt at addressing the issues surrounding forced migration and displacement through collaboration, community building, and individual engagement.