Final Session: Creativity as Survival and Power

Beauty as Resistance: Art and Story as Healing Forces in Displacement

Clark University • November 19, 2025

Speakers:

Michael Spicher, Ph.D., is a philosopher and strategic aesthetics consultant who helps people and organizations integrate beauty into culture, design, and decision-making. With over 20 years of experience, he brings deep insight into how aesthetic values shape flourishing, have spoken at global events on design, fashion, and intentional space. Based in Boston, he teaches at several area universities and also directs the Aesthetics Research Lab.

Francisco Alcalá Torreslanda is Co-Founder and Executive Director of HOME Storytellers. He has a background in corporate leadership and documentary storytelling. HOME Storytellers partners with refugees and marginalized communities to create hope-driven films and campaigns. Their new film, “We Name Ourselves,” explores how art becomes survival, restoring dignity, connection, and hope in the harshest conditions.

Juan Pablo Franco Jiménez, blumont’s Country Director in Colombia, leads programs improving humanitarian assistance, self-reliance, durable solutions, and integration for migrants and internally displaced persons. Previously with Colombia’s government for seven years, he is an Industrial Engineer, Political Scientist and holds a Summa Cum Laude master’s in public affairs from Sciences Po.

Facilitator:

Stephanie Acker, co-founder of Home Ground Lab, is a policy and communications practitioner whose work has centred on ‘home’ and has held roles with the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, UNICEF, and the European University Institute. She has a master’s in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Philosophical perspectives recognise beauty as a necessary human good. Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, New York.

Photo: Ahodges7, July 6, 2009

Summary

Note: This webinar was facilitated by Stephanie Acker, with Dr. Devora Neumark serving as co-host.

The third and final session of the three-part webinar series Beauty, Art, Belonging and the Neuroscience of Place, held on November 19, 2025, explored beauty as a form of resistance through art and storytelling in displacement contexts. Stephanie Acker opened by sharing her personal journey: from a family that fled the Holocaust, through decades of policy and advocacy work across grassroots, municipal, federal, and international levels, to burnout and a pivotal realisation that refugees were already using beauty to rebuild their lives, a discovery that reoriented everything. Dr. Michael Spicher grounded the session philosophically, opening with Primo Levi’s account of reciting Dante’s poetry in Auschwitz as evidence that aesthetic experience is a basic human good necessary for flourishing rather than a luxury deferred until after survival, and tracing the Western devaluation of beauty to the destruction wrought by two World Wars. Francisco Alcalá Torreslanda presented his documentary film We Name Ourselves, following teenage poets in the severely overcrowded Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi who write, perform, and teach spoken-word poetry as a lifeline, an act of resistance, and a refusal to be defined by the label refugee. Juan Pablo Franco Jiménez extended the Casa Pintada work introduced in earlier sessions to include its application in conflict-affected Colombian communities, where collective painting transformed not only neighbourhoods, but spaces physically marked by paramilitary terror, including a health post painted with a death figure that residents had been afraid to paint over until Casa Pintada gave them the courage and means to do so. The session concluded with a rich discussion among all three speakers on why Western culture devalued aesthetics, what beauty as resistance means in practice, and how creative expression functions simultaneously as survival, healing, identity affirmation, and political assertion.

HOME Storytellers’ new film, “We Name Ourselves,” follows a group of teenage poets in Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi. Filming for “We Name Ourselves”. Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Malawi.

Photo: HOME Storytellers, 2025

Key Takeaways

Dr. Michael Spicher, Aesthetics Research Lab

Aesthetic experience is a basic human good necessary for flourishing rather than a luxury deferred until after survival needs are met, a claim that can be demonstrated not through logical argument alone but by observing what people actually do. Across cultures and contexts, people spend time, money, and energy grooming, decorating, and travelling to experience beauty, and the absence of aesthetic experience is immediately felt as deprivation. Primo Levi’s account of reciting Dante’s poetry in Auschwitz, where he said he would have given up his daily food just to remember a connecting line because for a few moments he forgot who he was and where he was, illustrates that aesthetic experience is not a distraction from survival but one of the most fundamental expressions of what it means to remain human under conditions designed to erase humanity.
The Western devaluation of beauty can be traced directly to the destruction wrought by the two World Wars, after which artists including Max Ernst and Barnett Newman explicitly rejected beauty as a goal, seeing it as complicit in a civilisation that had failed catastrophically. This historical rupture, combined with the efficiency-driven values of late capitalism and the widespread misreading of Maslow’s hierarchy as a licence to defer aesthetic needs, produced institutional cultures that systematically dismiss beauty as secondary. Philosophers including Martha Nussbaum with her capabilities approach and natural law philosophers who identify aesthetic experience as a basic human good offer a counter-framework: not a hierarchy but a constellation of goods, none of which can be completely neglected without diminishing human life.
Acts of genuine aesthetic creativity and beauty are inherently acts of resistance in a world that has systematically beaten creativity out of people. Spicher observed that even Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher most associated with pessimism and the view that life is suffering, argued that beauty and art provide the only moments of genuine rest from that suffering. More pointedly, the world actively discourages aesthetic engagement as people age, replacing the brightly coloured, creatively stimulating environments of childhood with the oppressive uniformity of adult institutions. In this context, every act of beautification in a displacement setting, every poem written, every wall painted, every garden tended, is not merely therapeutic but a form of rebellion against the systemic denial of beauty to those deemed unworthy of it.

Francisco Alcalá Torreslanda, Home Storytellers

In Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi, a camp built for 10,000 people and hosting more than 55,000, a group of teenage poets write, perform, and voluntarily teach spoken-word poetry to younger children three times a week. This is not a programme or an intervention but something that arose entirely from within the community, and it functions as what one of the poets described as a lifeline: the thing that kept him grounded after everything he had been through. The contrast between the harsh material conditions of the camp and the vibrant creative movement within it was, as Alcalá Torreslanda observed, what first revealed to his team that art is a strategy not just for survival but for thriving.
Hope-driven, community-led storytelling that centres dignity, agency, and creativity rather than trauma and victimhood is both an ethical imperative and a more effective tool for narrative change. The documentary We Name Ourselves was made with minimal reliance on interviews, following the poets in their daily lives and personal moments to achieve authenticity, and the protagonists were invited to shape the film’s direction from the outset. The title itself reflects the film’s core argument: these young people refuse to be defined as refugees and insist on being known by their names, their poetry, and their roles as teachers and changemakers. This approach helps audiences connect through recognition rather than pity, which is more likely to shift narratives and generate sustained engagement.
The story does not end when the film does. The visibility generated by We Name Ourselves is being used to resource a set of concrete community-led initiatives in Dzaleka including a national screening tour across Malawi to open dialogue on refugee policy, a virtual portal connecting the camp to global educational and cultural partners, and the development of science, technology, and artistic expression labs alongside an expanded library. This model, using art and storytelling as a platform for longer-term community development rather than a one-off intervention, demonstrates how aesthetic expression can generate material improvements in livelihoods, education, mental health, and cultural participation when it is treated as infrastructure rather than decoration.

Juan Pablo Franco Jiménez, Blumont Group Colombia

The Casa Pintada methodology, introduced in earlier sessions as a tool for building social cohesion between displaced Venezuelans and host communities in Colombia, has a deeper and more challenging application in communities affected by decades of armed conflict. In Lammono, a community of approximately 200 families who had all fled in the late 1990s and were slowly returning, a woman who had returned to a house almost consumed by jungle painted it purple and painted the door and façade with paint rolls from the Casa Pintada technique. The testimony from that community captures what followed: seeing their houses painted gave residents the motivation to return and reclaim the space they had abandoned when armed conflict took over their homes.
Some spaces carry the physical imprint of terror in ways that make them psychologically inaccessible to the communities that need to use them. In one Colombian community, a health post that had been used as a jail and torture site by paramilitaries had a death figure painted on its front wall, and residents were afraid to paint over it even years after the paramilitaries had left. It was only through the Casa Pintada process, which gave communities both the practical tools and the collective courage to transform such spaces, that residents were able to say: we were afraid, but now we are strong enough to change it. The entire building was eventually demolished and rebuilt with two of the original walls retained as a deliberate act of memory, and a school remembrance hall was created at a site where a teacher had been killed, transforming a place of daily trauma into a space of collective dignity and historical witness.
Scaling dignity-centred aesthetic interventions within large institutional systems requires working as locally as possible and demonstrating impact in terms that local governments already value. Franco Jiménez described how one municipality in Santander de Quilichao allocated approximately 50 thousand dollars of its own local funds to continue the Casa Pintada methodology, framing it simultaneously as violence prevention, youth engagement, and a public health intervention led by the health secretary. This reframing, similar to Carolina Helena’s strategy of advancing beauty through the language institutions already speak, demonstrates that aesthetic interventions can be institutionalised when their benefits are articulated in terms of measurable outcomes that decision-makers can see, fund, and take political credit for.

Implications for Practitioners

Recognise aesthetic experience as a basic human good and design programmes accordingly: Humanitarian practitioners, policymakers, and programme designers should internalise the philosophical case that aesthetic experience is not a luxury deferred until survival needs are met but a basic human good inseparable from flourishing. Drawing on the capabilities approach articulated by Martha Nussbaum and the natural law philosophical tradition, organisations should audit their programme frameworks for implicit hierarchical assumptions that treat creativity, cultural expression, and beauty as secondary concerns, and replace them with frameworks that treat these dimensions as simultaneously necessary rather than sequentially optional.
Support community-generated creative movements rather than importing external interventions: Practitioners working in displacement contexts should actively seek out and resource creative movements that have already emerged organically within communities, following the model of the teenage poets of Dzaleka whose spoken-word practice arose entirely without external prompting. Supporting what communities have already created, providing space, materials, platforms, and connections to wider networks, is more sustainable, more dignified, and more culturally rooted than designing aesthetic programmes from outside. The question to ask is not what creative intervention we should introduce but what is already happening here and how we can amplify it.
Use storytelling and documentary practice as tools for narrative change and community empowerment: Communications practitioners, filmmakers, journalists, and advocacy organisations should adopt hope-driven, community-led storytelling approaches that centre displaced people as agents, teachers, and changemakers rather than as victims defined by their suffering. Following the methodology of We Name Ourselves, this means spending time without cameras before filming begins, following people in their daily lives rather than relying on formal interviews, inviting protagonists to shape the direction of the work, and ensuring that the visibility generated by storytelling is converted into concrete resources and opportunities that benefit the community directly.
Facilitate the transformation of spaces marked by trauma and terror through participatory aesthetic processes: Post-conflict reconstruction actors, urban planners, architects, and community organisations should recognise that some spaces require not just physical rebuilding but a collective process of aesthetic and symbolic transformation before communities can fully reclaim them. Following the Casa Pintada experience in Colombia, where communities found the courage to paint over representations of paramilitary terror and to create remembrance halls that transformed sites of violence into spaces of collective dignity, practitioners should design participatory processes that give communities both the practical tools and the collective empowerment to decide what their spaces mean, what should be remembered, and what should be transformed.
Advance beauty through the languages that local institutions already speak: Practitioners and advocates seeking to embed aesthetic values within larger institutional systems should follow the strategy demonstrated across multiple entries in this compendium, from Carolina Helena’s reframing of beauty as sustainable construction and preventive healthcare to Juan Pablo Franco Jiménez’s reframing of Casa Pintada as violence prevention and public health, by translating the case for beauty into the terms that local governments, health ministries, donors, and institutional decision-makers already value and fund. Working at the local government level, where officials can directly observe the change in communities, offers the greatest opportunity for aesthetic interventions to be adopted, institutionalised, and resourced from within existing systems rather than remaining dependent on external humanitarian funding.

Casa Pintada used collaborative arts-based projects as a tool to build social cohesion between displaced Venezuelans and host communities in Colombia. Casa Pintada workshop in Alto Bonito. Colombia.

Photo: Blumont Group, 2024