ATELIER TREFF
Art & Wellbeing Programme
Frankfurt am Main · 2017–2020
FACTS
Type: Community arts and wellbeing programme
Role: Lead artist and facilitator
Venue: August Stunz Zentrum, AWO Frankfurt am Main
Period: 2017–2020
Participants: Approximately 12 per session, adults and elderly residents with diverse physical and cognitive needs
Sessions: One to two per week throughout the programme
Medium: Tempera, drawing, charcoal, collage, crayon
Exhibition: Collective exhibition at August Stunz Zentrum, Frankfurt
OVERVIEW
Between 2017 and 2020, Arturo Laime developed and facilitated a sustained arts programme at August Stunz Zentrum — a residential care facility managed by AWO in Frankfurt am Main — working with adults and elderly residents across a wide range of physical and cognitive conditions. The programme ran weekly for nearly three years, until its interruption by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The work was grounded in a straightforward conviction: that the capacity for creative expression does not diminish with age or physical limitation, and that art — when facilitated with sensitivity and skill — can restore a sense of individual agency, achievement and pleasure to people whose daily lives offer little of either. Sessions were designed around what participants could do, not what they could not. Techniques were chosen for accessibility without sacrificing artistic integrity — tempera, charcoal, collage and drawing offered a range of tactile and visual experiences adaptable to each participant’s abilities.
PROGRAMME
Each session combined practical art-making with guided thematic exploration. Topics were drawn from the participants’ own lives and memories — the trades and professions they had practised, landscapes they had known, personal histories encoded in objects and images. This approach served two purposes simultaneously: it gave each session an emotional anchor that motivated creative engagement, and it allowed participants to draw on a lifetime of accumulated experience as the raw material for their work.
Laime brought his full range of artistic knowledge to the sessions — compositional structure, colour relationships, mark-making — adapted to the specific needs and possibilities of each participant. The role was not therapeutic in a clinical sense but artistic: the goal was creative achievement, not treatment. Several participants with significant physical limitations produced work of genuine visual quality, finding in the sessions a form of expression unavailable to them elsewhere.
The programme also extended beyond the studio. Participants made visits to museums and cultural institutions in Frankfurt, experiencing art in its public context and broadening their engagement with the city’s cultural life. For many residents, these outings represented a rare opportunity for cultural participation outside the centre — an experience of the city as a place that also belonged to them.
Sessions were supported by care staff from the centre, who assisted with physical needs and continuity between weeks.
EXHIBITION
The programme culminated in a collective exhibition of participants’ work held at August Stunz Zentrum — a public presentation of the creative output of residents who are rarely visible as cultural producers. The exhibition was open to the wider community of the centre, families and invited guests, and served as a formal acknowledgement of what the participants had made together over nearly three years.
IMPACT
Over approximately 150 sessions across three years, the programme demonstrated that sustained, skilled arts facilitation — as distinct from recreational activity — produces measurable creative development even in participants with significant physical and cognitive constraints. The programme ended with Covid but its model — weekly, thematically structured, exhibition-oriented — is directly transferable to other residential care and community wellbeing contexts.
This programme is available for residential care facilities, cultural organisations and wellbeing initiatives in Berlin and beyond.