To believe in the miraculous as a norm is always right (Lines and Days, 451)*

All thoughts, opinions, and comments published on this website respect the subjective perception of the individual. To make room for subjective perceptions excludes any judgment or censorship - as long as it is not inhuman or against the constitution.

It has to be taken seriously and deserves to be heard within the badly needed discussion on how to treat the individual within human society - him who takes refuge in Germany after escaping an emergency that has been threatening his existence.

All published blog posts are to be endured. They are not to be understood as attacking institutions, facilities or people.

There is more to it: Khaled's contribution criticizes the system.

Is an 11-years-old boy permitted to say that the HEIM is filthy and awful as a means to express how much his soul was hurt? That very boy who said, "Wow - they're perfect to sleep with" when seeing noise cancellation headphones and thus articulating his own experience of war: those days, weeks, and months underlaid with washes of "boum boum boum." After all, HEIM is unable to provide for him what he needs most - a feeling of security. You don't find it between "a table, a chair, a bed, a locker and a garbage can with lid."

Do we - being the artists we are - get permission to uncover his story to passersby? Printed in big letters on canvas and highly visible? Are we assigned to notify what has happened to him publicly for his voice to be heard? Do we endanger all other inhabitants when doing so? Do we risk an increase of right wing violation when using provocative wording?

Or do we activate that very danger by isolating people who take refuge in Germany in the periphery of industrial areas or in container villages - hence contributing to residential segregation rather than integration?

Today, we reversed the canvasses with Khaled's story and Zineta's picture. There is nothing but neutral white covering that part of the fence one can see from the street.

A painful procedure, a limitation of space - physically, mentally, and verbal. It was with a heavy heart that we agreed on it as a compromise and a testimony of respect towards the HEIM's director and operating company.

"Are you sad?" a resident asked me later in the afternoon. "No," I answered, "it's a mixture of sadness, frustration, and rage."

At home, I would read up an article published in Berlin's daily paper Tagesspiegel (N° 22253, 12. December 2014) at the construction of a container village in Friedrichshagen / Rahnsdorf. Residents had put a fight through legal means and by use of expedited proceedings against the facility. Court would take a stand, answering the question whether or not the compound might be used to accommodate refugees and asylum seekers.

"According to court, an asylum does not serve as habitation, as habitation [is characterized by] self-determined domesticity." However, refugees are not self-determined but assigned to a certain place. Further, it is not a welfare institution; as such an institution's purpose would be to improve the neighborhood's infrastructure. Therefore, an asylum is something unique"

The only appropriate reply to this may be found in the sound of the Arabian shloon?? Waaas?

I like to contrast the wording - incomprehensible as it is - with Vilém Flusser's explanations, published "Taking up residence in homelessness"¹:

"Home" is considered to be a relatively permanent location, but "a home," a house, is a transient, dispensable location. The contrary is true: one can exchange homes or dispense with them altogether, but one has to

live in a house, no matter where. The Parisian clochards live under bridges, Gypsies in caravans, and Brazilian farmworkers in huts. Moreover, people lived in Auschwitz, even though this may sound terrible. For, if one is without a home, then one literally dies. There are different ways to describe this sort of death, but the following is the least sentimental: when one is without a home and unprotected from the usual and what one is used to, everything that comes to us is noise and nothing is information. In a world without information, a world of chaos, one can neither feel, nor think, nor act.

At the end, Gazi, a guest from Albania, made my day. Three Kosovar and Albanian families respectively had been gone for a week. We missed them. Gazi was with one of them. The day he came back to daHEIM and when spotting me through the chain link fence in the back of the courtyard he would through his arms in the air. Highly motivated he would stand in front of me and it was easy to understand his excitement: while in Heilbronn for vacation he had discovered a wooden pot, a flower trough that he reminded him of us. He would take a picture of it to be able to copy it the next day with Endrit, Bashkim, and Aymen. "Tomorrow no food," he added smilingly, "but work." We would laugh too.

… Taking up residence in homelessness. Flower troughs may be a mode of expressing it. When it comes to habitation. When it comes to space. When it comes to self-determination.

But that is not what this is all about. According to court's decision, December 12, 2014.

We have to state our position on this.

Therefore, everyone's voice needs to be heard.