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The work of Art Refuge (UK registered charity: 1114353) and the Paris based extension, Art Refuge Canopy (association: RNA W751280610), supports the mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of people displaced due to conflict, persecution, poverty and climate emergency.

Since 2015 our work sits across a number of contexts in Europe focused on people who are still in transit or waiting to claim asylum. We are small and mobile teams of artists and art therapists, with practitioners from a range of fields and diverse backgrounds, Artists with lived experience of displacement are integral to our teams across all our programmes.

Our work takes place in many settings; From the makeshift camps in northern France where we work in indoor and outdoor settings with our partners Médecins du Monde and Secours Catholique, to day centres and specialist psychological support services in Paris with the same partners. In the UK we work in the government run asylum camps and hotels where people are housed whilst waiting to have their asylum applications processed. All of these settings constitute ongoing crisis contexts for the people who exist in them.

Across all the different settings, we run long term programmes using a psychosocial and trauma informed group-work model of adapted art therapy practice we have developed as a team called “The Community Table”. Here we will present what form this adaptive model of practice takes in our Paris programme, where we straddle interventions in crisis settings to collective resilience building in a community garden.