Walking Arts NGO in prison

For a week 10 Walking Arts NGO musicians accompanied by Maestro Luca Chiavinato and the expert Chiara Patronella created a Music Therapy Laboratory in the Erbil Youth Prison together with 24 prisoners. The activity was coordinated by Green Desert, a local Iraqi organization sustained by Terres des Hommes Germany.

A strong and hard experience, intense from an emotional and relational point of view.

In 2019 Walking Arts NGO began a training course dedicated to music therapy, aimed at giving participants the knowledge to use musical language with therapeutic effects in difficult contexts.
The training course, curated by the Italian expert Chiara Patronella, takes place through an mix of theoretical parts and laboratory parts.
In the sessions held so far, the participants had put into practice the skills acquired by carrying out music therapy activities with children, handicapped or not, in the refugee camps in the Erbil area, which continue to be full of refugees
people from both Syria and Iraq.

Music Therapy in Erbil prison

This time the challenge was more complex.
Thanks to the relationship with Green Desert, the Music Therapy Laboratory has been set up in a prison, the Erbil youth prison in which several hundreds of boys are detained, involved in the activities of Isis, the Islamic State, Daesh as it is called in Iraq.
It is useless to hide the complexity of an activity like this in a region where the wounds, not only material, caused by armed Islamic fundamentalism are still open. We must not forget that old and new powers, clans, militias and apparatuses use religious and ethical use differences to command through violence.

The Walking Arts NGO group that entered the prison, together with Luca Chiavinato and Chiara Patronella from Padua, represents a real cross-section of Iraqi society: 10 young people, men and women belonging to various communities, Iraqi, Syrian, Kurdish and Arab, including the Ezidi, who paid a heavy price for the attacks perpetrated by Daesh, in particular against women and children.

In Iraq we must always remember that there is no one whose life has not been marked by thirty years of wars, past and recent.

The prisoners who chose to participate in the music therapy activity were 24, all men obviously, aged 15 to 24 years. Here, too, life stories with various belonging but marked by participation in extreme and organized forms of Islamic religious integralism. The fact of having wanted to participate in an activity with music is already a sign, given the ban on music as entertainment imposed by fundamentalists.
In some ways victims and executioners, in other ways lives sucked into the vortex that has transformed Iraq into a battlefield, in which religions and affiliations are used for the interests of local, regional and international power.

An impossible relationship between the 10 musicians of Walking Arts NGO, accompanied by the 2 Italian experts and the 24 prisoners?

Perhaps, except that the music created the possibility of interaction.
The artistic language was the occasion for an encounter that otherwise would not have been possible.
The techniques and practices, learned by the 10 Iraqi and Syrian musicians, allowed to melt the cold through games, body percussion, eye contact, creation of stories. Practices that Walking Arts NGO musicians have come to know in music therapy training. As in refugee camps with minors, also in the prison Iraqi and Syrian musicien were the protagonists of the activities coordinated by Chiara Patronella and with the collaboration of Luca Chiavinato.
The participants were divided into 4 mixed groups. Each group has developed a piece of music, to be presented to everyone. Again divided into the 4 groups, the participants arranged the songs with the lyrics, mostly of love, and then sang them in front of everyone.
After another week-long workshop, before the summer, the pieces will become a CD that will come out of the prison walls.
Song writing, writing songs together, transforming the notes accompanied by the words into a meeting place, in a different way to talk about oneself.

At the end of each day, outside the prison, the 10 musicians of Walking Arts NGO met with the Italian experts in a moment of shared circle, sometimes lasting hours, of discussion, of elaboration of what they had not only done but of what they had felt in "meeting the enemy".

Music Therapy in Erbil prison

The challenge of working inside the prison was not just an opportunity to do something with the prisoners, but to grow in therapy by working through music to improve certain psychophysical and emotional states. A profession so much needed in Iraq where traumas between adults and children are unfortunately a dramatic reality.

The balance of the past week with the prisoners is very positive: the hope of something that could happen by breaking habits and divisions.

In the hands of Iraqi and Syrian musicians remain the gifts that the prisoners made for them, small objects made with what is in prison, in the minds of the prisoners remain the faces of other young people with whom perhaps for the first time they met outside the schemes.

Music therapy in Erbil prison is another piece of the journey undertaken with the birth of Walking Arts NGO in promoting artistic languages ​​to increase social cohesion, freedoms, respect for differences, also giving young people the opportunity to create new job opportunities the arts.

An intense week that will be repeated in the coming months, together with the other Walking Arts NGO activities, among which the organization of the first edition of Walking Camp, Festival of Independent Arts in Iraq in the month of June 2022 stands out, in which five days will alternate moments of training with the realization of public artistic and cultural moments.

In the complex situation of Iraq, experiences related to the use of artistic languages ​​are establishing themselves as a plural and effective space to contribute to the development of a society based on rights and freedoms and for this reason it is worth supporting them.