Bridge Assignment #4: Intro to Research

For the Bridge 4, we were working as a small group and created a specific project based on a interesting research topic we chose from the interviews at the Washington Square Park. When we looked back to our interviews, we came up an idea about a sense of away home since most people we interviewed missed their homes. Then we narrowed down this common topic and decided to create a visual project concerning refugee and immigrants’ problems. We did some researches on the refugee problems and realized that most refugees’ homes were destroyed by wars and disasters so that they were fled from their own country in order to find peace.

In this project, we chose five of the most famous countries that refugees were coming from, Syria, Afghanistan, Lake Chad Basin, South Sudan, and Somalia. We used each of these countries’ map as the bottom to hold different local houses which refugees lived in, and the sizes of these maps were varied based on the population of refugees this country had. Then, each of us was assigned with different countries to work on. In this case, we built different styles of architectures on each map and they were represented an abstract form of traditional or local houses in each country. Some of them presented as half destroyed or fully destroyed because we wanted to let the audience know these refugees have no choices but fleeing from their own home. We also put five black balloons on each piece to make all the maps float in the air in order to show a sense of lost and homeless. Personally, these black balloons looked like bombs for me and they were the major causes that drove refugees away from their home.