By IPS Correspondents
BERLIN, Dec 5 2007 (IPS)

“You try to adapt, but you become like a mute person,” said Teresa, who was born in Colombia and has lived in Germany for over 20 years, describing what it feels like to be an immigrant.

Credit: Migrantas

Teresa is a participant in workshops organised by the Migrantas group, where women draw what emigration has meant to them, and share their experiences with each other.

The difficulty of speaking in another language, the impossibility of expressing exact shades of meaning, the embarrassment that often results, and the accent that marks them out as foreigners are only a few of the topics discussed in the groups.

The workshops are the basis of the work of Migrantas, a group formed in the German capital by Argentine women immigrants, which “aims to offer a means of making visible in the urban space the feelings and reflections of those who are now living in a new country.”

The material produced by the women in the drawing workshops are designed into pictograms – clear, simple line drawings with a strong symbolic content – which are put out on the street as publicity posters on walls and hoardings and in public transport, handed out as free postcards, or otherwise made visible.

The project thus serves a double purpose: “On the one hand, it helps migrant women to assert themselves, and on the other, it reaches out to the whole population, confronting pedestrians in public spaces so that they have the opportunity of encountering the emotions and opinions of migrant women,” she said.

A woman with her head bowed looks at a suitcase, with the question “Why and what for?” A pregnant woman asks about her child, “Where will she belong to?” Another pictogram shows the new language as a steep mountain with a woman struggling on the lowest slopes, and in another all the woman’s love and emotional life is bound up in a telephone. The short captions on some of the pictograms serve to reinforce the message.

“As an artist, I propose a viewpoint in which the pictogram ceases to be part of an established signalling system (like in airports and train stations), and starts telling a story,” Marula Di Como, another co-founder of Migrantas, told IPS.

She and graphic designer Florencia Young, also a co-founder, design the pictograms that interpret the women’s drawings from the workshops.

“The pictograms are very economical images which can convey deep emotions,” said Schindel, who added that they offer a means of positive identification for immigrants as a whole.

Marjan, a young woman who was born in Iran and has lived in Berlin from an early age, received a postcard with a pictogram showing a woman wearing a classical Muslim headscarf and the caption “Not a terrorist.”

Interviewed by IPS, she said “it’s amazing how a few strokes of a pen can overcome prejudice,” referring to the discrimination women wearing headscarves often experience in Germany.

The Turkish community is the largest group of foreigners in Germany: nearly two million people, equivalent to 25 percent of the total number of foreign residents, according to the latest official figures.

At Migrantas, participants and organisers can identify with one another because of their shared experiences as women and as immigrants in Germany. The founders, Di Como, Young and Schindel, came to this country from Argentina.

“They also emigrated, and they have the same feelings. They’re not German women coming to analyse us or experiment on us,” said Ivone, born in Monterrey, Mexico, who has lived for the past five years in the northern city of Hamburg, and participates in the Migrantas workshops.

“You begin to realise that your feelings are very similar to those of the woman beside you or the one sitting across from you, who know that it’s not easy to leave everything behind and start over in a new country,” she told IPS.

The empathy between the women is one of the main features of the project. “Talking collectively helps to overcome the perception that people have unique, isolated experiences of migration,” the organisers say.

Out of the German population of over 82 million, nearly nine percent are foreigners, that is, about seven million people. Another 10 percent, or some eight million people, have German citizenship but were born to immigrant families.

Migrantas, which is celebrating its third anniversary, has held workshops in Berlin and Hamburg that have been attended by nearly 400 women from 35 different countries. The association, which receives funding from public and private sources and from charitable foundations, now plans to take its activities to other major cities in the country.

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