Peace with Visual Qualities

This ‘coloring book’ and exhibition is a result of a series of visual artistic transformations, adapted from the project Color Up Peace. Color Up Peace invites people from all over the world to submit photographs of what peace represents to them (some elements which inspire thoughts of peace, something which may symbolize peace, something potentially crucial for peace efforts based on the experiences of the photographers). I turn these photos into coloring pages and make them freely available on the Color Up Peace website . Someone else (or the photographer, or me, or you) colors the coloring page and so continues the transformation of the original vision of peace. The original idea behind the project is to encourage participants to think about peace and what peace means to them; to create opportunities for sharing visions of peace; to foster dialogue through collective visual art-making; to challenge the abundance of violence-centered visuals in the media and popular culture; and to e

For three months of 2020, I got the chance to support grassroots peacebuilding in the Holy Land through the Embodying Peace Fellowship. As a peace fellow, I worked with ReGeneration Education , a local NGO aiming to support peacebuilding through innovations in education, particularly trauma-informed and Waldorf approaches, to support resilience of children in crisis zones.  For my capstone project, we decided to create a coloring book of visions of and for peace by teachers and students of the first intercultural Jewish-Arab Waldorf school – Ein Bustan (Maayan Babustan). The coloring book is created on the basis of Color Up Peace . You can now download the coloring book HERE .    As that dear to me peacebuilder said, “trauma-informed education is the way forward, it’s the future”.   Please, bear in mind that this is a peacebuilding effort and guard it from being misused. Do not remove logos or manipulate images. Photographers retain copyright for their photos. Copyright of coloring pag

This post is a continuation of my effort to shed more light on the Art-for-Peace Handbook, a project which I had a pleasure of collaborating on with two peace enthusiasts Olesya Geraschenko and Olga Zeleniuk. As I said in one of the previous posts , my job, among other tasks, was to develop visual artistic exercises, which would allow the readers/creators to connect in practical ways the discussions on peace, visual art and visual art for peace. Besides a re-make of Picasso’s “Guernica” and a number of other exercises, I developed an activity based on the image of dove of peace.  The activity presents eight versions of the dove of peace, all in the styles of different art movements. They are preseted below. Perhaps, an explanation of the doves in symbolism and minimalism would benefit the readers. A symbol of the dove as a symbol of peace, I thought, would be the olive branch. As for the minimalistic version, no dove is needed in the picture itself - the traces are enough. Those workin

I started Color Up Peace in 2016 as part of my graduation project at the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. The university had a program for students to design their own secondary majors - write a program proposal to the faculty explaining the reasons why the area of their interest cannot be studied through the existing programs and develop an effective curriculum of courses (at AUBG and possibly at exchange destinations). Within my self-designed major Identity and Peacebuilding (my primary one was Political Science and IR ), I was, among other topics, exploring the political aspects of graphic design. I read lots of books relating to the topic and took online graphic design classes from different organizations and institutions. Then in October 2016 I came up with the idea for Color Up Peace. What started as a student project in Bulgaria, has by now grown into an international platform for collaborative art-making and dialogue about peace and peace values.

In a team with two other researchers/writers/enthusiasts, I have been working on developing the Art-for-Peace Handbook to work with conflict-affected communities in Ukraine. The idea of the team members - Olesya Geraschenko, Olga Zeleniuk and myself - was to create a resource that would combine both conceptual grounds and practical activities for readers with regards to the connections between visual art and peace as well as the potential of the former to foster the latter. The Handbook is in Ukrainian. The full version of it will later be available on the website of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future. Among the exercises I developed is the remake of Picasso’s Guernica – in the form of a collage. This blog post serves to explain the significance of the exercise in the discussions and empirical experiences of visual art-making for peace. The explanation starts with a background on Picasso’s Guernica, followed by a conceptual discussion on visualizing peace and visuals enacting peace