Peace with Visual Qualities

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...