Public Art: 12-Foot Puppet of Syrian Girl Travels Through Europe to Raise Awareness on Refugees' Plight

Public Art: 12-Foot Puppet of Syrian Girl Travels Through Europe to Raise Awareness on Refugees' Plight

A London-based theatre company has conceived a rather elaborate means to use public art to draw attention to the pressing humanitarian issue of Syrian refugees and displaced children finding refuge in continental Europe.  

The ambitious campaign started by Good Chance theater company is a project titled The Walk. Planned to kick off in the summer, The Walk will see a 12-foot puppet of a Syrian girl—christened Little Amal, a Syrian name that means hope—journey 5,000 miles across Europe, starting from the Syria-Turkey border on July 27 and ending in the UK on November 3. 

Created by a South African company, Handspring Puppet Company, the articulated statue projects the image of a nine-year-old displaced child searching for her mother, a symbolic representation of the thousands of war and conflict displaced children separated from their parents. According to a UNICEF estimate, there are about 30 million such children worldwide.

The exciting figure was made from cane and carbon fiber and requires four puppeteers to operate: one inside on stilts controlling her facial movements, one for each arm, and one to support her back.

“The Walk is there to celebrate the potential of refugees, children, grownups. It is not a march of misery, it is a march of pride,”  Amir Nizar Zuabi, Good Chance’s artistic director, told the Guardian. “We hope this corridor of friendship will last much longer than the actual 12-week journey. It will become a network of collaborations in the future.”

Little Amal’s trans-continental expedition was initially planned for last year but the pandemic struck and her walk was delayed; another metaphor for the challenges displaced children face as many find themselves stranded at border towns and on no man’s land due to health-related travel restrictions. But Good Chance producer Tracey Seaward believes that Little Amal’s walk through Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and England this year will “rewrite the narrative about refugees.”

Reinforcing this message of solidarity and empathy, David Lan, co-producer of The Walk, told DW News that “through making this very articulated, very powerful puppet, we think we can say something in a very simple way, in a very poetic way, about endurance, about courage. What we hope she will convey is this very simple message: ‘don’t forget about us.’”

Little Amal will make a total of seventy stops during her journey. These stops will comprise more than eighty free events staged in collaboration with some 250 partnering artists and organizations. Some of the highlights of the walk will be Amal meeting a minotaur in Athens after leaving a trail of yarn through the city’s labyrinthine streets, dancing with hundreds of performers after throwing a fit in Naples, eating apple pie with the elderly in Cologne, visiting a refugee camp installation outside Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe, and the French port city of Calais, which was home to the infamous Calais Jungle refugee camp from January 2015 to October 2016. This will all culminate into a 10th-birthday party at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and then, Little Amal will reunite with her mother at the Manchester International Festival.

“At times like these, we need art more than we ever have,” Stephen Daldry, a director of part of The Walk project, told the Evening Standard. “I very much look forward to thousands of people across the world being able to follow Little Amal’s dramatic journey across Europe in search of her mother.”

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