On the first day of my second year at Uni, one lecturer said ‘Art/Design creates awareness and can change the world‘. I knew that the statement had weight, but at the time I didn’t understand the weight of it. Then I watched this TED talk (below) with French street artist JR where he talks about how art can changed the world. He makes reference to a three year project in Liberia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Sudan, India, Brazil and Cambodia titled Women are Heroes. This project made me understand the weight of what my lecturer was saying.
Women are Heroes is a celebration of the heroism of women who have lived through wars, experienced violence, poverty and so forth. JR brought out the candid and raw emotions of the women through large-scaled black and white photographs, which were then pasted through the towns of the women, on top of their homes, buses and trains, making their stories mobile. This was all documented in the movie ‘Women are Heroes‘ and book of the same title.
It’s a project of layers, beauty, and most importantly a project of awareness. An imprint in a community and global channel for the stories of the women to be heard. In other words, it is a global exhibition publically displayed.
In January 2009, 2000 square meters of rooftops are covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera, in Kenya. Most of the women have their own photos on their own rooftop and for the first time the material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season.
With the eyes on the train, the bottom half of the their faces ware pasted on corrugated sheets on the slope that leads down from the tracks to the rooftops. The idea being that for the split second the train passes, their eyes match their smiles and their faces are complete.
The Women Are Heroes project has various steps in Africa, in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Sudan.
In 2008, JR went to Sierra Leone, to Freetown and Bo City. He observed the women and understood that they wanted to share their pain as a way to heal their wounds. He took pictures and posted them in a place where they made sense.
In Monrovia, Liberia, when JR posted the pictures of local women, the reactions were immediate, raw, and sometimes brutal. People were asking lots of questions. Why faces? Why women? Did they do something special? Why here? What does it mean? Why is it in black and white, don’t they have colours in France? Are these women all dead? Those who understood shared it with the others.
The women asked JR to send a message in a bottle, not to write it. They asked for a single promise “make my story travel with you”.
As part of the final steps of this project JR pasted some of the images on walls and bridges in Paris. I think the reaction of the Parisians is the climax of this project. The questions which emerged, the ignorance towards it, the curiousity which developed, and the people who uncovered the meaning of the project and volunteered to help spread the project. That was the kind of change and awareness the lecture was talking about that day!
AWARENESS prompts ACTION which can push CHANGE.