On Meeting MS Huber and Mrs Jankowski at IGI Metals Wilkomen Center and The Exhibition in Frankfurt in 2017

In the past I had  travelled to Frankfurt several times in order to take the plane to go to the Middle East.  It was more than  20 years since i  lived in Florence Italy.  One of the German people i had met in Italy was  Jurgen and he was from Frankfurt am Main and  preparing his  PHD at the European University.  Jurgen and his girlfriend had been some of the first people i had known in Florence.   I never imagined that i would one day visit his city.  He had gone off to work in Africa in 1984 and i had envied him for going off to try something completely different {from what i knew}.

In 2017 i was in Frankfurt this time because i was looking for a particular bank , but there werent any  which could help me. I had a refugee status and a residency in France and i was living in Paris.  I was one of the artists of  "The Adzak Art Space " .  Thanks to Ms Margaret Crowther i had an exhibition in a coffee shop in Paris. This was the one round the corner from Adzak on rue Jonquoy.  Eventho the only people who visited the place were the habitués  and mainly not interested in paintings, here I had met Mr Pascal Mallen. Mr Mallen Barrett is a  French teacher who dabbles in creative things.  He told us that he had been trained as an artisan and knew the gold leaf technique i had used in my canvases.  This was one of the main featurs of my paintings.

 I had my hopes and fears by travelling to Frankfurt because i had a very small budget.  This trip was a risky business because i had never stayed in Frankfurt before and infact had to save on the hostel.  In the begining i spent some money on the youth hostel bed  i found on the main street in the Bahnhoffsviertel [station area} .  A young man working at the reception told me that i could stay for a couple of nights but after that  the place was all booked up because of the Book Fair (Messe) which fills up  the city  accomodation.

After having stayed at the hostel for a few days i had had to sleep out doors because the hostels i tried were all booked.
 I want to describe how miraculous it was for me to find Ms Huber in the midst of a busy financial hub. Finding Ms Huber at IGI Metal' Welcome Center  was truely a prayer which had been awnsered.  I was walking around in a street called Gutleutestrasse which runs parallel to the beautiful river Main one Sunday morning and i had taken refuge under the columns exactly infront of  the shop front with the words Wilkomen written on the front door.  Here i had looked in and found some childrens toys in the window. It had started to rain and i was wondering why all the restraunts here in this particular area were closed.
 I had carried on walking and had discovered the opera house {Stadtische Buhnen Frankfurt} and here i had sat down and done a picture of the large  Euro (currency) sign sculpture with the colours and paper i always carried with me.
It had rained hard and some one had called the agents inorder to tell me to go away because i looked like a homeless person !  I explained that the hostels had been full and had continued to finish my art work which i then sold at the exhibit to one of the social workers .{now property of  Mrs Jankowski}.

The next day was monday morning,  and i had walked down the street and in my confusion {because the city was new to me} i had said a little prayer ie "please God i can´t think of a solution .... show me a way out of my problems !]   This is when i found myself infront of the same shop front where i had found the toys in the window; only that now the lights were on and the door was open and a woman was busy making a phone call inside the office.  This is how i discovered a center where they helped the refugees in various ways. The toys were there mainly to keep their children busy while their parents were in class learning german, or busy sorting out administrative issues.

Later on i met Bianca Huber who managed the refugee help center.  She told me that she had worked with artists for many years and she could organize an exhibition of my artwork right there in the front hall of the refugee center.  What can i say ?   My prayers had been awnsered ! ....  and incredible but true ..... i had discovered that the Worker´s Unions had their headquarter right next door.

Ms Huber asked one of her friends Suzanne to give me hospitality in her home.  Here i was allowed to create an image of the Modern Union Building (as i saw it) .

 This discovery of the Unions too was a significant part of  my  own history because i came from a country were worker´s unions were not encouraged.

  Infact i had come out of Iran in 2011 wondering about the evolution of the working peoples situation in the country. There seemed to be a lot of work to be done there if people in charge were asking for the  use of Nuclear Power.  I could only dream that one day, every one all over the world would finally wake up to Solar Panels. Why wasnt it replacing nuclear ?   would it  be used all over the world one day as the sun became unbearable?   It was easy to ask oneself why did industrial countries like Japan have Union´s to protect their workers  and why didnt Iran have any serious Worker's Unions? Perhaps because if  "leading" countries today like North korea  dont have workers unions  then "anything is OK" ie you can live without one and no one can say a thing !   Worker's unions  are only for countries which have been fighting for them for centuries .....

In my tiny experience of modern day Iran i  had seen a worker being left out infront of a hospital because he hadnt had money to pay for his treatment. My ignorance about worker´s conditions in my country is probably as deep as other lay people who live there. No one would know much about how things worked or didnt work for a working person who then found himself { or  herself } in a difficult situation. You had to be a relative or a friend in order to know the real situation of people working on building sites or in factories.
Infact i had come to know about the workers working on the building site next to mine because there was one young man who wore a T shirt with Scotland written all over it. He was a sort of leader for his group and one day he had defiantly jumped into my front yard {since we shared a common wall] and had been obnoxious. I didnt have a man in the house to tell him to leave and had to do it myself.  Later on the man incharge of their group of working men came to ask me for a gas connection.  He wanted me to contribute and help his workers by giving them a  gas supply for their winter heating.  He was demanding it and not asking a favour!  Ofcourse i knew the winter would be very cold and the working men would be sleeping in the rooms they constructed themselves {usually they would have oil heaters which were not efficient or safe}. I had helped them out of a sense of  altruism.  In any case those constructing people were planning to get my property which was next door  :::: that is why they "demanded" and didnt ask.





 I am mentioning this because of the darwinistic powers which ruled would certainly not care about a poor and helpless working man if something, God forbid, happened to him at work.  You can imagine that having a  Union protecting the worker's  rights  in some parts of  the world is equivalent to sending a rocket to Mars. Having found Ms Huber and her friend Susanne  who had worked for Iggy Metal in Frankfurt am  Main for two décades was a very important event.