Making Through Drawing

Workshop at RCMC ( Rohingya Cultural Memorial Center)

At Camp-18, Rohingya Refugee Camp, Balukhali

For hundreds of years, there is this universal language of communication used by Architects and Engineers and it doesn’t really change with borders and continents. In Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre, I designed and organized a workshop to teach that language, in other words, Technical Drawing, to our artisans.

The Rohingya artisans learned their craft from their ancestors and they are very skilled in making particular products. Many of those cultural elements were destroyed in Myanmar and almost none made it to the refugee camp with them. Learning Technical drawing will give them the ability to draw and present their lost culture in front of the world. It will broaden their horizon of creativity and they can take their craft & culture to the next level.

Architect Z. A. Saleh Zebermai and Assistant Professor Shuvra Das conducted these classes in Rohingya language and taught them manual methods of scale drawing, measurements and plan-elevation-axono drawing. Rohingya artisans were delighted to draw and exercise the basic methods. They were quick learners, though some of them drew on paper for the first time in their lives. They made a Rohingya toy cart following a technical drawing given to them. The workshop ended with a commitment that they will keep making their cultural elements and won't get biased by external forces.