Exploring Constructive Change Through Color: A Coloring Book Collaboration Between Color Up Peace and Changing The Story

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 employ visual art-making as a peace-building tool.

For Changing the Story and this coloring book and exhibition, I decided to twist the plot a little bit and think along the lines of change in general. While I still see the visual artistic transformation showcased here as peace work, I have also allowed myself to think of it as a way to reflect upon and creatively track change - in the stories that Changing the Story refers to and in the individual experiences of its participants. The contributing photographers were therefore asked to send photographs which they associated with their Changing the Story experiencesIn such endeavours, imagination is key. And similarly to how I connected the peace work of coloring pages to the ‘moral imagination’, I correspondingly connect change to such imagination as well. 

The concept and the practice of the moral imagination, articulated by John Paul Lederach (2005), refers to the capacity to recognize the opportunities for constructive change within conflict realities. Making the best out of an opportunity like that, one would create an arrangement for peace which, while rooted in the context and realities of a given conflict, would also reach up to something so far non-existent - peace or change. This arrangement would enable its dwellers to build a network of relationships where even former opponents would live peacefully and enjoy life side by side. Below, I explain the parallels I built between the visual transformation happening here and the ideas of Lederach. And I invite the visitors and artists in this exhibition to think along these lines as well, to make sure that the art making, which the contributing photographers and I are hoping to inspire, is for change, not just for fun (even though fun is often a great ingredient of learning and change too). 

–  The original photograph can be considered a reality in which a vision of and for constructive change is rooted. It is not necessarily the same as the conflict realities Lederach talked about, since here we show the experiences with Changing the Story. Yet, this connection highlights how challenging it may be to capture a ‘reality’, even if not a dramatically and dynamically changing one. 

–  The coloring page then is a platform for the moral imagination to roam visually. The outlines (manually drawn to be very similar, but purposefully never identical) represent the roots in the reality of the photograph and give the coloring artist plenty of opportunities to add visual features, delete some of the existing ones and transform the outline through the choice of colors.

–   The filled-in coloring page is a product of the moral imagination: something that is rooted in what is and that reaches towards what is not there yet. My hope with this project, as it has always been with Color Up Peace too, is that collective imagining through mixed-media art-making becomes a constructive dialogue and shows that change is possible - on the paper of the coloring page and in our environments. Moreover, constructive change can be fun and rewarding to work on, just like with the coloring pages. 

Photo by Fatlinda Daku: “Three Youngsters in their 20s are watching some cultural traditional dancing performances. The young man and the young woman from the left are wearing the traditional clothes from Peja and the young woman from the right is wearing the traditional clothes from Medvegja (a city in Serbia that is mostly populated by the Albanian community)”. Download the coloring page HERE.

Photo by Berina Porča: “As a part of the "Izazov" project, we disseminated our films in London, UK. This was only one of the cute corners in the apartment where we stayed. After many tiring, but amazing days, I found this little corner give me so much peace, and it captures my love for good old fashioned way of listening to the music - using music records." Download the coloring page HERE.

Photo by Berina Porča: “One of my favourite parts of the day we spent at the Symondsbury Manor during the Izazov project. This is the dinner table where all of us would sit down in the evening and share the love for amazing food, exchange recipes and stories about the cuisines from our own countries, all with laughter and nothing else but an open heart and pure emotion.” Download the coloring page HERE.

Photo by Henry Redwood: “This is about the warmth and beauty of Bosnia, how much there is beneath the surface, and about a coming together of people from different contexts to work with each other, support each other, and explore how the arts might enrich their lives.” Download the coloring page HERE.

Photo by Francesco Pipparelli: “Lightbulbs and the moon, on a hill over Sarajevo”. Download the coloring page HERE.

Photo by Fatlinda Daku: “Two old men in the mountains of Rugova sit together and talk about their life. I don't have a specific story about them since I don't know them, but the horizon, the place and both of them looking at the mountains looked very peaceful to me.” Download the coloring page HERE.

Photo by Fatlinda Daku: “Tentene is a decoration that used to be very famous in Balkan to put on the tables or any other object at home. Surprisingly, you will see them when you walk in the streets of the main square of Gjakova.” Download the coloring page HERE.

Photo by Berina Porča: “Symbondsbury Manor - our temporary home during the "Izazov" project, filled with laughter and pure joy derived from a cultural exchange that positively changed the way I see and perceive the world around me.” Download the coloring page HERE.

Photo by Berina Porča: “Early morning in the yard of the Symondsbury Manor, peaceful and tranquil. We loved to look at this scenery, as it made us feel as we were actually in a film, in the olden days in a distant England castle.” Download the coloring page HERE.

Photo by Francesco Pipparelli: “Links”. Download the coloring page HERE.

Photo by Francesco Pipparelli: “The Festina Lente bridge in Sarajevo, at the sunset”. Download the coloring page HERE.

This is a collaboration with CoLearn & Changing the Story, coordinated by the University of Leeds, UK. It is part of a larger project to create a coloring book / exhibition of photos the participants of Changing the Story associate with their experience as well as the coloring pages created by Color Up Peace on the basis of those photos. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be sharing the photos and coloring pages by the participants, while the online publication of the whole coloring book / exhibition is coming up shortly on the websites of CoLearn and Changing the Story.