TESTIMONIALS

A tool for research and for sharing :

“These workshops travelled between France and South Africa since 2009, followed by exhibitions where the Body Maps are associated with the diversity of the audiences they reach, create a dialog : with each crossing, the harvest becomes richer.”

“The Body Maps offer testimony beyond the seas and the oceans to that part of humanity that is common to us all, wherever we are, and wherever we come from. Body Mapping is a voyage of initiation that becomes a message : a journey both personal and universal.”

SEVERAL TESTIMONIALS FROM SOUTH AFRICA :

Art Therapy in the context of Migration and the Scalabrini Centre’s Work :

As migration to South Africa has accelerated, there have been growing tensions over the struggle for access to basic services, especially in periurban slums here poor South Africans and poor immigrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers congregate. Their influx is easily identified by locals and has led to tensions resulting in the massive xenophobic violence of 2008. This violence has continued within the Western Cape, notably with the displacement of 2500 Zimbabweans from their homes in De Doorns in November 2009 but also with numerous isolated individual incidences of violence and intimidation across Greater Cape Town.

Due to deteriorating political and economic conditions at home, it is broadly estimated that 2 million people, including Somalis, Congolese, Zimbabweans, Malawians and Mozambicans and others are in South Africa seeking work and asylum. Whilst the South African government has ratified the Organization of African Union and United Nations conventions on refugees, adopted its own refugee legislation in 1998, and reworked its immigration legislation in 2002, it has failed to implement these legal provisions as a result of many factors including lack of resource, lack of political will, lack of skills, lack of management capacity, corruption and high staff turn-over.

It is within this context that the Scalabrini Centre offers welfare and development programmes to refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and local South Africans.