At De Vrolijkheid, I joined as a workshop leader in 2025 and have worked in two locations: Ter Apel and Delfzijl. De Vrolijkheid organises creative workshops and art projects with children and young people in asylum seeker centres, creating space to make, imagine, play, and connect.
At Ter Apel, we worked with the theme of rituals. Each class, we made something new, and by the end of the workshop series, we had built a dinner table full of things we had made together. We explored rituals through food, especially the act of sitting together and sharing a meal. We made utensils from clay, decorated plates for our “meal”, cyanotyped tablecloths, made bouquets of flowers and decorations for the table, and created photo frames for the people who couldn’t join us.
At the end of the workshop series, we laid out all our findings and explorations, and shared some food together.
In Delfzijl, we worked with printmaking and impressions. We created a zine with our findings. Each session, we went deeper into a theme, like “weather”, a favourite memory, or an object that meant something to us. We worked with blind contour drawings, trusting our hands to guide us, carved lino, and wrote poems. At the end, we had a beautiful booklet of our findings.
Our finished zine