PARIS: In a bright white room in a building north of Paris, Syrian musician Karam Al-Zouhir impatiently clicks a mouse as he presses his headphones against his ears.
The 30-year-old artist, who left his country shortly after civil war broke out in 2011, is composing a musical show for children based on recordings of migrant children telling their stories, with support from French writer Claire Audhuy.
“In many ways, kids are more perceptive and adaptable than adults,” said Al-Zouhir, one of about 200 musicians, painters and sculptors from conflict-affected countries working alongside each other in the workshop in northern Paris.
“There’s so much we can learn from the way they experience a crisis,” he said, totally engrossed in overlaying sounds of clinging forks and crushed cans on quotes from children.
Giving artists from countries such as Syria, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo the chance to continue their work and rebuild their lives was the reason that former theater managers Ariel Cypel and Judith Depaule set up the Agency for Artists in Exile earlier this year.
With funding from the Paris authorities and a 1,000-square-meter space the size of four tennis courts provided by French charity Emmaüs Solidarite, artists need only pay a token one euro a year to work there, explained Cypel.
“Most of the people working here live in extremely precarious conditions,” he said. “So we try to take off some pressure and provide members with a bit of stability, if only in their work life.”
Artists come at all hours and can stay for as long as they want, Cypel added.
“When you’ve suffered torture, rape or forced exile, getting into work early is the last thing on your mind.”
According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), about 400,000 refugees claimed asylum in Europe in 2017, fleeing the war in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, as well as conflicts and poverty in Africa and Asia.
While France has been much less affected by Europe’s migrant crisis than neighboring Germany, thousands of asylum seekers use it as a transit point in the hope of reaching Britain.
Cypel said artists were particularly at risk of persecution from repressive regimes and often forced into exile, where their talent and knowledge too often go unnoticed.
The agency’s art ranges from hip hop workshops to help minors feel more comfortable, to doll collections by Afghan performance artist Kubra Khademi whose work focuses on “those girls who have no choice but to be born women.”
While the initiative is primarily about art, it also aims to facilitate members’ integration into society by introducing them to art professionals, helping them learn French, and even offering legal and psychological support.
“For me, success would actually be our artists leaving us and making it on their own,” said Cypel, a hesitant smile spreading across his face.
For Al-Zouhir, there is “absolutely no chance of going back to Syria, even if it means never seeing my parents again.”
“If however I can make something beautiful out of something so ugly, and help preserve my country’s culture, then I hope they can be proud of me,” he said.
Cypel knows the workspace may not last forever.
Hip hop and children’s voices: In Paris, migrant artists craft new future
Hip hop and children’s voices: In Paris, migrant artists craft new future
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
