Shared Horizons
Integration Through Art
Stuttgart, Germany · 2025
Type: Community arts and social integration programme
Created and facilitated by: Arturo Laime
Location: Refugee accommodation centres, Stuttgart, Germany
Period: May — July 2025
Partners: Refugee accommodation organisations and cultural institutions in Stuttgart
Participants: Approximately 60–80 participants from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries
Format: Three-day workshop modules, morning and afternoon sessions of 4–5 hours
PROJECT STATEMENT
Shared Horizons is an arts integration programme created by Arturo Laime, designed for people in the process of building a new life in a new country. First delivered in refugee accommodation centres in Stuttgart in 2025, the programme uses art-making as a structured space for reflection, expression and cultural dialogue — addressing themes of origin, displacement, arrival and belonging through direct creative practice.
The programme operates from a conviction that integration is not only a legal or administrative process but a deeply human one — and that art can create conditions for that process to unfold with dignity, agency and joy. For many participants, the works produced during the workshops are the first pieces of art they have ever made, and the first they will hang in their new home.
PROGRAMME
Sessions are delivered across multiple groups simultaneously — morning and afternoon — accommodating participants from diverse national and linguistic backgrounds. Techniques are chosen for their accessibility and expressive potential: photocopy transfer onto canvas, mixed media painting, and pictorial composition. No prior artistic experience is required or assumed.
Workshop themes move through three areas of reflection. Participants first explore their place of origin — landscapes, colours, motifs and memories that carry personal and cultural meaning. They then turn to their life in their new country, documenting their current experience and surroundings. Finally, they reinterpret their new city through their own visual language — its streets, parks and architecture filtered through the aesthetic sensibilities, colour palettes and symbolic vocabularies they have brought with them.
Conversations about the integration process, hopes and aspirations are woven naturally into the creative sessions, without becoming the explicit subject of instruction. Art provides the distance that makes honest expression possible.
OUTCOMES TO DATE
Each workshop cycle concludes with an exhibition of participants’ work held within the accommodation centre — making the creative process visible to the broader community of residents, staff and partner organisations. Works are taken home by participants at the close of each programme. For the majority, these pieces represent their first owned works of art — objects made by their own hand, carrying their own story, in a country still becoming familiar.
Documentation of the programme — photographs, works and participant testimonies — is held in the artist’s archive and continues to grow with each new edition.
Shared Horizons is available as a programme for cultural institutions, NGOs and organisations working with refugee and migrant communities. Learn more about this workshop:
