The Mosaic Rooms

This year, we continue to support young people aged 15-20 to encounter the visual arts and learn new ways to consider, discuss and produce work as a collective through The Mosaic Rooms Young Collective project.

Artist collective Febrik deliver monthly sessions throughout 2023 (between 14 March—12 November 2023) with a group of young people from local charity New Citizens’ Gateway. Collaboration between the young people and artists has been the starting point for discussion, thinking and making. The collaborative sessions introduce a series of methods and themes such as ‘collaboration’, ‘co-production’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘resistance’. The group considers questions including Why and how do we collaborate, for what purposes? How do we operate collectively, and who do we invite to work with us?

This project runs in tandem with a sister project by De La Warr Pavilion in East Sussex. The two groups from De La Warr Pavillion and The Mosaic Rooms will meet one another online, and in person if possible. The final public event will be designed by the group and will invite a wide audience.

Febrik is a not-for-profit collaborative platform for participatory art and design research projects with practicing architects, designers and artists active in the Middle East and the UK. Febrik’s main area of concern lies in the dynamics and practices of public spaces in relation to social and urban change; in specific in relation to negotiations of right of space within spaces of refuge of previously unrepresented groups such as children and women. They focus on the use of art-and-design-based research methodologies and processes (architecture/art/film/photography/text) to enhance community participation and action and to develop propositional thinking with regards to the immediate social and physical environment. Through a series of project (primarily in Palestinian Refugee Camps in the Middle East and more recently in marginal housing estates in London) Febrik has developed a series of research and design projects exploring ideas of the social playground, as public multi-functional and intergenerational spaces enabling spatial and temporal negotiations and overlaps in appropriation of previously unrepresented groups. 

New Citizen’s Gateway works to promote the wellbeing of young asylum seekers and refugees in London.

Young Collective 2022 with artist Nia Fekri
In 2022 the group worked with artist Nia Fekri to take on a multidisciplinary approach in collaborative storytelling. Through speculative exercises, the participants were invited to create interweaving narratives, intersecting worlds and hybrid characters. The collective also received guidance and support on routes to further knowledge and education from IntoUniversity. The project included a paid opportunity to organise the public launch of the project at The Mosaic Rooms. This is a partnership project with New Citizen’s Gateway.

Watch the video below featuring interviews with artist Nia Fekri and the incredible young people of the collective: