Sister Garden Exchange is an ongoing collaboration between Dr. Ann Holt, Assistant Professor of Art Education and Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies and Mohamed Sleiman Labat, a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and writer, born, raised and based in the Sahrawi refugee camps in southwest Algeria. Labat is the founder and director of the community art space, Motif Art Studio, a creative hub for art and education in Samara camp. He has been a longtime partner of the international community-based collective Arts Action Group on which Holt serves as an advisor and artist teacher.

Since Spring 2023, Holt and Labat have been engaging in an ongoing collaborative living-arts pedagogical project called Sister Garden Exchange. The project started to take shape through a series of exchanges online and in person. It involved classroom based teaching and learning exchanges, book making exchanges between the two different locations. film screenings, discussions, photos documentations of the garden progress in the two locations at PennState and Samara Refugee camp. Using arts-based modalities, explores the notion of knowledge generation like a garden through living arts embodied pedagogies and relational practices. It reflects both a physical and metaphorical garden for research, teaching, learning, and artmaking and coalesces into our respective practices– Holt’s teaching in art education, engaging students in learning about the garden as a critical site for transnational/decolonial dialogue, social/environmental justice, and artmaking as community-building, and Mohamed’s art practice focused on small-scale family gardens in his community. They use arts-based modalities, exploring the notion of the garden as a site for cultivating knowledge through dialogue, sharing, and creative practice, nurturing learning and growth through living arts, embodied pedagogies, and relational practices. 

For these exchanges, we invited different partners and to take part in the conversations from both sides, PennState Students and Members of PennState Student Farm  and Almasar Library students from the Saharawi side as well as Saharawi women contributing their fabrics. 

The greenhouse serves metaphorically and literally linking the notion of gardening as a relational space for dialogue, sharing and knowledge generation as a creative practice, for learning, and for nurturing growth connecting community members such as the Penn State Student Farm (Leslie Pillen, Associate Director, Farm and Food Systems and Sylvie Alexander, Environmental Resource Management major) and the Almasar Library Center (Najla Mohamed-Lamin, activist and director) have been cultivating this continuous exchange.

Throughout the project, a number of activities enriched the practice of exchange, through images, texts, videos, poems, lectures but also seeded paper, books, zines and fabrics. PennState students put together different art books and Ann Holt was able to send them to Spain and from there, they were able to find their way to the Saharawi Refugee Camps where Mohamed Sleiman Labat delivered them to Almasar Library Center and the library assistants shared them with the kids. The kids at the library decided to create their own art books in response to this exchange. This time, Mohamed was able to bring the art books himself from the camps to the US when he came as a visiting artist to PennState University. The art books were shared with the PennState students to read, explore and interact with. They also joined a number of exhibitions and presentations at PennState and other places. 

A dedicated page for this collaboration is still being developed by Ann Holt on another website.

(This page is still being edited, more sections and more info will be added)