> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.artsoftheworkingclass.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # A Library Like a Living Room - URL: https://www.artsoftheworkingclass.org/text/a-library-like-a-living-room/ - Published: 2026-09-16T15:03:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-21T11:47:49.000Z - Description: Ahead of Untold Stories, Lilipad’s first festival in Berlin, Sara Arslane discusses multilingual children’s books, the power of images and music, and children’s right to tell their own stories. - Author: María Inés Plaza Lazo - Tags: Q&As, Collaborations, Events, #asheredit *What makes a library a place where children feel they belong? For Lilipad, the answer begins with the languages they speak, the stories they recognise and the freedom to express themselves. Working with children in shelters and other community settings, the organisation brings books together with rap, drawing, photography and play. Its first Berlin festival,* Untold Stories*, opens this work to a wider public, placing children at the centre as readers, artists and storytellers. In this conversation, Sara Arsalane reflects on language hierarchies, representation and the responsibilities of making space for children’s voices. We begin with the artists and workshops that bring Lilipad’s libraries to life—and the atmosphere they hope to create.* **Sara Arsalane:** We like to say that for us a library is more of a living room and less of a classroom. **María Inés Plaza Lazo:** Tell me about the languages that you work with among the 100 books that make up the libraries that you are creating, and how have the children responded? **SA:** The languages tend to focus on the community that lives in that particular context. At the moment, within the 21 libraries, over 15 of them are in shelters. So, you know, if it's a shelter for young girls in Morocco, the languages are going to be Arabic, French, English, and Amazigh, for example, always making sure that the native and indigenous languages are represented. In Berlin, it can vary from Gemeinschaftsunterkunft to refugee accommodation. In some, we get statistics simply from the accommodation, knowing that these can always change. But we tend to know that the main languages spoken are Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, for example. Some other accommodations, mostly Ukrainian speakers. German is always there as a main language. It tends to be the federating language anyway when we do workshops, the language in common between all the kids. But it's also very important for us to make sure that we have representation of native languages so that the kids are also exposed to more playful or different settings where they can positively see their native language. **MIPL:** Does this also activate multilingualism? Meaning, do children also learn other languages through it, or how does it work? I mean, childhood is not necessarily defined by literacy. So where does it start? And as you mentioned, this is more of a playground, more like a common ground rather than just an archive or a collection of books. **SA:** Definitely. So we see with our kids in Berlin especially that there's such an interesting relationship to their native language. We start by giving them books in their native language so that they can have access to it and read in Arabic or Ukrainian. It turns out some kids, born here, have lost their mother tongue, or they think it's not cool to speak because they feel ostracized at school. So some of them actually cannot, for example, read or write Arabic, and this is something that we realized with one of the artists that we were close to, with Taha, who's become such an essential part of our project. He's an artist who's also a music producer, a rapper. We did several workshops with him, and at the moment he's our librarian. So one of the programs that we have is learning Arabic through music because he noticed through some workshops that actually some of the kids would like to engage with the Arabic language, but it didn't work for them to go to the traditional Arabic classes that their parents were sending them to. And this is kind of how we also see literacy: some kids may find it very intimidating to enter a library. Not everyone wants to interact with words. Stories can take different forms, whether they are visual or experienced through sound or painting. So I'd say actually at Lilypad Libraries, a lot of non-reading is actually happening all the time. **MIPL:** You have also mentioned a key definition of children's books, namely that there is other language beyond words, namely images. So, Lilipad is a project that also works with artists, visual artists. Can you give me examples of the books that circulate in the Lilipad Libraries? **SA:** We tend to focus on fiction and making sure that we have stories that represent the children that we work with. But there's also a lot of activity books, some language learning books. We always ask the kids what they want, and sometimes we get wild recommendations or a request for what the kids like to read, and we try to fulfill that. Because again, this is such a small cost for us and something that we can get very easily if a kid is asking. Because ours is a small collection. **MIPL:** Can you give me a concrete example? **SA:** One of the books is titled "30 Brave Boys". And it is about different role models for masculinity, or what it means to be a boy. So there's one example of Trevor Noah or Kurt Cobain, who were feminists. Or these really great books at the moment with like 30 female heroes. Like most of our libraries in Morocco are for girls only, so we have a whole selection with feminist books or books from Moroccan authors. So this is, yes, that would be some of our focus, but again, it really changes from one library to another. **MIPL:** What was your first book as a child? **SA:** My most vivid memory is reading the scary stories called "Chair de poule". So I was reading in French, or like, it's the "Goosebumps"s series. Maybe you know it. **MIPL**"Goosebumps" Worldwide! **SA:** I was really obsessed with these books; sometimes I would read two in one day. I grew up with my parents who didn't read to me, just asked me to do well at school. But I had one grandfather in particular who was an avid reader and used to write a lot as a child. He was very unimpressed whenever I told him I was reading "Goosebumps". So I started reading some French classics quite early on because he grew up in Morocco under the French protectorate, and they would make kids read Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. "Le Petit Poucet", for example, was one of his favorite books. So that actually also drove me to read some classics, definitely sometimes a bit early on, but I think this defined my relationship to books moving forward. ![](https://artsoftheworkingclass.org/assets/Screenshot-2026-09-16-at-15__ResizedImageWzYwMCwzNTld.13.17.png) Lilipad Library. Courtesy Lilipad **MIPL:** And also multilingualism, right? So what did it mean for you to read in French, but also interact differently beyond the books in Arabic? **SA:** Yes, for sure. I realized this further down the line. My main reading language has always been French because the Arabic we speak in Morocco, Darija, is not the Arabic we learn from books or the Arabic that we learn at school; that's Fusha, and that's almost a different language. Morocco is so far from the Arabic world that our dialect is completely different from what we read in books. So I read some books in Arabic, "Najib Mahfouz", for example, and some of those classics, but it was a lot more of an effort. And especially now, I think that I've been in Europe for half my life; it would be more of an effort than reading in French. It's statistics that say that half of the kids in the world are actually bilingual. And a lot of us actually grew up going to school being taught in not our native language. And this is something actually we're trying to address in our libraries: even though maybe we don't have books written in Darija, we do our workshops in Darija so that you at least experience culture in your native language, so it's not that the spoken language, it's something that is just at home. And that's showing up more and more in our work now. **MIPL:** I would like to know how you also challenge the hierarchy between a written word and spoken word through the Lilipad Libraries. Because as you mentioned, through your own experience, between Danish and French, there is undeniably a hierarchy as well. How can this be challenged now that you are also looking from afar, from another cultural context where these language hierarchies are also predominant, right? How do you see yourself doing that? **SA:** This is such a great question because it really shows some of the maturity, like, also in our work. Because one of the very first lessons is that it's such a naive assumption to think we're gonna have a room full of books and that they're going to be read. Because, as I mentioned earlier, some children- and especially we work with kids with such different backgrounds have issues with literacy; they may have experienced interrupted schooling. It's not the best way to approach them, and storytelling can mean so many different things. So the book becomes a minimal part of our entire organization, because we just want to meet each kid where they are. But you could come into the library and just simply draw, or simply you could take pictures. We've done a lot of workshops with photographers, or also just come in and talk in your native language to the librarian who's in there at the time. When it comes to hierarchy. Something we've also been reflecting on in the last few years is the hierarchy between different art forms, because literature is a highbrow art form, but some more urban media like just rap or graffiti, for example, are just not as— obviously like considered more lowbrow. And we've started creating these programs where there's a bridge between both. One of our workshop series was rap and poetry, and just drawing a parallel between- actually, rap is— a lot of rap is actually coming from poems. So going from initial classics of poetry to rap. Our initial idea was to look at poetry from Mahmoud Darwish, and see actually how it would translate into rap. And we worked with artists I mentioned earlier; Taha recorded some songs with the kids inside the library. So this is something that was very popular because the kids just loved interacting with music production, and all of it happened in the library. And another example is what we've done recently: what we call calligraffiti. And it's also moving from the art form of Arabic calligraphy into just spray painting, and we did that in one of our accommodations. So I would say it's definitely something that we want to continue doing more often, so going from this heritage art form to a more urban art form with the whole idea that all of it is equal. **MIPL:** So these are not only children's books for children, but books with children, right? Are the children writing their own stories? ![](https://artsoftheworkingclass.org/assets/Screenshot-2026-09-16-at-15__ResizedImageWzYwMCwzNDNd.14.34.png) Lilipad Libraries. Courtesy Lilipad **SA:** In some of our programs, for sure. Our flagship workshop series this year was in Morocco. We worked with an author, Hajar Chokhiri, who worked with the girls from one accommodation in Casablanca that actually has one of our oldest libraries; it's been open since 2018\. And the girls were invited to write their own text. They were also invited to take their own photos with the photographer Murat Fiduweş, who actually just left Berlin. He was doing a residency here. And it all culminated in an exhibition called *Our Stories, Our Power*. It was all in the girls' own words—what they wanted to convey. So ultimately they are the authors. **MIPL:** And their stories are unavoidably connected also with the hardships of forced displacement, with the hardships of witnessing wars, in the flesh and from afar witnessing loss, experiencing loss prematurely or at all in a, in a very violent way. How does Lilipad approach the violence embedded in these stories, and how do you maintain a safe space for childhood? **SA:** That's a very important question. It was one of our learnings, for sure. So I will give a very concrete example: one of our very first librarians in Casablanca, she started with us in 2021, someone young. She just did her internship; she studied early education. She has very much of a kind of teacher approach. She's great. She's still with us today, and it's become her full-time job. But something we had not prepared her for is just the backgrounds of the girls and what they had to deal with. And she was not prepared as an educator, as a librarian. This shelter where we work hosts girls who are usually between 12 and 18 who have experienced,, very often, abandonment and this whole episode of domestic violence. They don't have a legal guardian, so they're sent by the Court of Minors. Or some girls have had issues with the justice system, and because they're minors, they don't go to prison; they go to this shelter. So we started realizing that we have a responsibility not only to prepare our storytelling programs or the books, but actually we need to make sure that our facilitators, our librarians, and us, that we are properly trained, and that we have a safeguarding policy that is as informed as possible. One of our last workshops was with a psychologist on psychological first aid. So all our librarians had to attend this full-day training to make sure that they can create a safe environment for the children but also for themselves. So to kind of answer this question, it's not easy for sure to read a text where a child is just very clearly depicting an episode of violence. **MIPL:** And also, who are the stories being told for? Is the storytelling serving a therapeutic, a healing process, or is it more— or the faults and the pitfalls of identity building? In a way that can also go wrong, namely stigmatization or the stigmata that cannot be properly banished. **SA:** Of course, that's also the question of consent. Working with children, if we're going to be sharing their work, like, do they fully understand whether we can share this story, even though we have a very strict policy: we don't show faces, for example. But it goes— it's the same for their own artwork. We say kids are their own authors, but who gets to give consent on whether this can be shared, and how can it be shared? So it's a little bit tricky for sure in Berlin, especially since we work with younger kids. Usually the kids are between 6 and 12. **MIPL:** When is the 6th grade? **SA:** 16, 17; it's a bit easier. We don't want to depict this kind of a victim stereotype, or that these children and young people are only defined by this migration or displacement or abandonment as kind of a crisis or like identity moment. And this was the whole idea of one of our latest projects, which I think I mentioned earlier, called "Narratives of Hope", where the entire project does not mention at any point all of the hardships, which I think we are fed plenty of times by all types of media and somehow imagination that we don't need to add to that debate. But the whole idea of our "Narratives of Hope" project is to show that, above all, these are actually teenagers, that they share a lot of similarities between them regardless of whether one is in an emergency shelter in Paris or one is in a community center in Sicily. And that was the beauty also of expanding beyond borders because you notice that so many stories are the same. And this will be available quite soon, as we're going to be publishing a digital archive of some of the artworks. **MIPL:** Dealing with stereotypes also means dealing with growth and coming from early childhood to adolescence. Whilst in adolescence, stereotypes mark sometimes the majority of the identity-seeking efforts. How does Lilipad network deal with stereotypes? Just also following up on my previous question. **SA:** I think stereotypes are human. So we cannot claim that we are all coming in with this perfectly well-thought-out kind of approach to all our work. I think we definitely all make mistakes, and the whole idea is to talk about it and continue learning. So what we do to alleviate the potential harmful effect of stigmatization, even with our best intentions, is to make sure that we are including as many different perspectives as possible. So within our team, it's a very conscious effort to make sure that we have not just representation for the sake of it, but that we are working with artists who have lived experience, who themselves have experienced forced displacement, or have— in some of the times, some librarians actually, one of our librarians has lived actually in the shelter herself for 10 years and has become our librarian in another shelter. And giving them a voice because they're ultimately the experts, with their own experience of how we should be talking with children. So it's a constant kind of dialogue between— within our team. **MIPL:** "Untold Stories" festival is deliberately promising to tackle one of the biggest problems in the mesh of colonial capitalist oppression that continues to suppress people through the world's migratory conditions, as well as the questions of how, in our fascist times, non-white people are being objectified again as, yeah, for identitarian purposes. What is "Untold Stories"? ![](https://artsoftheworkingclass.org/assets/Screenshot-2026-09-16-at-15__ResizedImageWzYwMCwzMjhd.15.33.png) Lilipa Libraries. Courtesy Lilipad **SA:** "Untold Stories" is happening next weekend. It is the first time we've taken our work outside of the closed doors of our libraries and into the public. So it's been almost 10 years of practice where most of our work was happening inside very closed spaces, sometimes almost like police spaces, like refugee shelters because we deliberately wanted to focus on where we thought there was a need. We wanted to work with the children growing up in the institutional care system. It's become very clear that, as a society, we demand so much of our refugee communities, of migrant communities, to integrate. This is like the buzzword. They have to integrate. They must integrate. And if it doesn't happen, it's ultimately their fault, but most of the work is actually happening with who is actually ostracizing them. What are the institutions that create this social isolation? There's so much we can get into, like what is happening at the moment. Also, the situation is so much worse than when we started 10 years ago. There's no funding; there are much harsher conditions for refugee families and children. And we need to be more active on the advocacy front to make sure that this— that the community also, like, does not, like, get forgotten, which it really is not forgotten, being erased. And this is our whole idea of creating "Untold Stories" and making it a very public space to—where we really reject this idea that Berlin is an immigration city. We have moved past that: migration is not stopping; it's going to continue, and it's the responsibility of the institutions, the systems around us, to just adapt. And so the whole idea is to kind of really celebrate all of these stories in different languages and not create a festival that is inclusive of the children we work with, but that is really created entirely around them, where they are themselves the storytellers, and they're like the creative cultural workers. **MIPL:** Let's speak numbers. How many participants does this festival have? When, how many days, how many hours, how many books? And even though you're a not-for-profit and you just mentioned how defunded this labor is, this fundamental labor, how do you finance and sustain all of this? **SA:** "Untold Stories'" finance is through public cultural funding. We're lucky to have been selected by Hauptstadt Kulturfonds, which is our first cultural funding of this size. It's happening in three different locations next Friday, Saturday, and Sunday: Refugio in Neukölln, Amerika Gedenkbibliothek in Hallesches Tor, and Spore, which you mentioned earlier. I think earlier I said that we don't want to reinvent the wheel, and it's something we're really proud of to make sure that we collaborate with public libraries like the Amerika Gedenkbibliothek; we don't want to reinvent the wheel. Then we are going to be working with around twelve independent book publishers. There are dozens of workshops that will be happening. And very important also to mention that there's going to be a lot more than just books. We have some interactive readings and,, of course, the book fair with the independent publishers, but there are also all the different ways that we have been talking about now of how you can tell stories. So we are working with some of the artists that we usually work with in our libraries doing rap, illustration, graffiti, there's puppetry to be split across the three days. **MIPL:** And just for people to mark it in their calendars, which are the events that you would specifically recommend each day? **SA:** Friday, 18th of September, the program is going from 2 p.m. until 10 p.m. It's important to know that it's centered around families and children of all ages, but there are also parts of the program that are very much adapted for all book lovers alike. There's an interesting keynote at 6 p.m. by Aya Publishing where we're going to be discussing the power of multilingual reading, as well as a lovely concert that is happening at Refugio. Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek: the program is starting really early on Saturday at 10 a.m., and there we have a program of interactive workshops. There's the puppetry workshop. This is the part of the program that is perfectly suited for children who are a bit younger. So parents with toddlers or with kids under 8 years old, I think that would be like a good time to attend the festival. We're also having a really beautiful workshop with the founder of Baking Hope, which is an organization that uses baking as a means of healing and empowerment. And the program continues at Refugio in the afternoon. This is again where you participants will meet, all the publishers. Spore is where we have the rap workshop that I'd love to highlight because this has been kind of a staple of the workshops that we've been doing inside our accommodation. And the program is going to culminate with a little kids' rave at 4 p.m., so it's all ending on the dance floor with some movement and playfulness as well. **MIPL:** Thank you so much. Sara, just to conclude our conversation, which books are you reading these days? **SA:** I am reading at the moment a classic of Moroccan literature called "For Bread Alone" by Mohamed Choukri, which I highly recommend. It's a very difficult read. I read it actually when I was a teenager in Arabic, and now I'm reading it in English. This is an autobiography by this author who had a very difficult life, grew up entirely illiterate, and only learned to read and write at the age of twenty. And then he wrote this masterpiece, um, from the '50s. So I really highly recommend it. It tells a lot about colonial Morocco, about what it was like in the Rif, about independence, and also ultimately just the story of a young boy who was actually the author, Mohamed Cheikh. Thank you. **MIPL:** Thank you so much, Sara! **SA:** Thank you, Maria. Thank you so much for having me. // Lilipad’s festival “[UNTOLD STORIES](https://www.lilipadlibrary.org/community-events/untold-stories-festival?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org)” will take place in Berlin from 18–20 September 2026 and will bring multilingual children’s literature to Refugio Berlin, ZLB, and Spore Initiative. This conversation took place as part of the [Softpower Festival](https://www.anahitasadighi.com/softpower-festival?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org).