Childhood Dreams

During my EVS volunteer service in the city of Palermo, I was asked to create an art exhibition for preschool children from newly arrived refugee families in Sicily. The exhibition space was a basement with no electrical wiring, which became a new creative challenge for me as a lighting designer and visual artist. I wanted to find a way to express the reality of these children, whose parents had endured the pain of war and famine in Africa. I decided to place the children’s heads inside cardboard boxes that I collected from shops and streets, arranging them in a way that symbolized the colorful dreams inside their minds — dreams of sweets, toys, food, and safety.

The box surrounding each child’s head became a metaphor for the confined world they live in — a small world enclosed by poverty, hunger, and war. My intention was to show that their childhood is beautiful and full of imagination and color, yet trapped within fragile bodies and harsh realities that cry out for care, nourishment, and compassion.