margins, cuttings, leaves
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ART & CRAFT REFÚGIO is a collective of artists, migrants and people in refugee situations that collaborate in the practice of art and craft. The group comes together weekly to share the collective imaginary and discover new meanings through craft creation and drawing, speaking a common language that is not made of words, but of images and the process of making. Since May 2021, this group of people from various parts of the world have been meeting in Largo Residências, and since 2024, Jardins do Bombarda. In these meetings, they have learned various artistic methods and experimented techniques such as engraving, drawing, illustration, bookbinding, serigraphy and embroidery, resulting in unique objects and workshops that have led to exhibitions, fairs and festivals.
Introducing The Garden as Sanctuary, Nina opens the project with an exploration of paper and print—inviting participants to reconsider memory and experience through hands-on art making, participatory rituals, and the deconstruction of personal archives. Drawing on natural methodologies, with fungi as both metaphor and method, we reimagine loss not as disappearance but as transformation —emotional, ecological, and communal. The project becomes a living network where material and immaterial legacies decompose, regenerate, and intermingle, expanding ideas of what an artist is and what art can do.
Introducing The Garden as Sanctuary, Nina opens the project with an exploration of paper and print—inviting participants to reconsider memory and experience through hands-on art making, participatory rituals, and the deconstruction of personal archives. Drawing on natural methodologies, with fungi as both metaphor and method, we reimagine loss not as disappearance but as transformation —emotional, ecological, and communal. The project becomes a living network where material and immaterial legacies decompose, regenerate, and intermingle, expanding ideas of what an artist is and what art can do.
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The Garden as Sanctuary
The garden has long been imagined as a sanctuary: a cultivated space of care, repair, and quiet resistance against instability. Neither fully wild nor entirely controlled, it holds tension between vulnerability and resilience—mirroring the lived experiences of citizens who navigate displacement while cultivating new forms of belonging. This year's cycle of Art & Craft Refúgio, situated inside Jardins do Bombarda, Lisbon's former psychiatric hospital, draws on the garden as a sanctuary as a metaphor for the selected artists working methodology. As a site of slow labour, shared knowledge, and seasonal cycles, the garden offers a framework for making that prioritises process over product, attentiveness over extraction. Within these workshops, craft practices become acts of tending—stitching, weaving, shaping, and growing—through which participants can reclaim agency, memory, and embodied knowledge often disrupted by migration. The garden foregrounds questions of access, labour, and ownership, reminding us that sanctuary is always political. By engaging refugees and migrants not as recipients of care but as co-cultivators of space and meaning, the workshops reimagine the garden as a collective commons: a place where artistic practice can foster solidarity, mutual care, and speculative futures rooted in shared ground. 
Collage soup - a root stew, devised in colaboration with participants of Art & Craft Refúgio
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» Residency workshop in the Estufa provided by A Verdejar, Jardins do Bombarda, Lisbon, March 2026
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