Who are we? Short introduction
Our tiny, yet very productive and open-minded group consisted of Jarmiła, Joel and Łukasz: the activist, artist, and scholar; two Poles, one U.S citizen; two males, one female; three unique characters in one group.
When we formed our cooperative, we had heads full of ideas, but we lacked time to run them all, so we agreed to produce a series of info-graphics, and an artistic movie, a visual poem. We stuck to that idea, and were very eager to skip the regular course of the day, and start working on our assignment. We, of course differ from each other significantly, but the odd mixture of our natures worked well enough to critically pursue our project.
Why did we choose to work on issue of migration?
UNHCR research conducted at the end of 2013 indicted that there were 45 million people in the world who, because of persecution or war were forced to leave their homes. Moreover, 62% of Europeans think that discrimination based on ethnicity is widespread. The aforementioned is why we found the situation of migrants and refugees critically important. Additionally, all of us had some familiarity with the subject despite coming from different contexts. Thus, we decided to focus on hate speech towards this group. We defined hate speech as all kinds of expression that attacks a person or a group on basis of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation.
Considering the Polish context in 2013, the biggest group applying for refugee status in Poland were citizens from Russia (mostly Chechens), followed by Georgians, Armenians, Kazakhs, Syrians, and Afghans. Research made by TNS OBOP by request from UNHCR indicates that 40% of Polish refugees struggle with some kind of homelessness or apartment exclusion. The same publication says that in all refugee camps in Poland, 50% of children do not attend school. Regarding the teenage population, the figures are much worse, as none make it to high school.
The Polish population has a relatively positive, yet hypocritical attitude towards refugees. 72% Poles think Poland should accept refugees. On the contrary, more than 60% of Poles would not like to live in migrant neighborhoods or send their children to school with migrants.
What is our project about?
The goal of this project is to be informative and to sensitize the neutral majority regarding the harsh conditions of everyday life for migrants. After many long discussions, we decided to produce a series of three info-graphics and a short film. The produced work can be seen either on our tumlbr site (http://invisiblepeoplepoland.tumblr.com) or facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/invisiblepeoplepoland?fref=ts).
The info-graphics depict important issues and statistics concerning migrants in Poland, most of which have been already mentioned above, and are aesthetically integrated with a photo of a person’s face. The face of the person is the biggest part of the graphic, which creates a strong emotional and human connection between the viewer, the image and statistic. Simultaneously a red line bisects the picture vertically into sharp and blurred sections. The proportion between sharp/blurry is dependent on the percentage mentioned in the statistic, which is at the bottom of the info-graphic. One can therefore see the face of a possible migrant, which is blurred, or disappearing in front of one’s very own eyes. Thus, the concept serves as a metaphor, which should trigger feeling of disagreement, responsibility, and compassion that are supposed to be the first steps in changing attitudes towards migrants.
We thought at the beginning, to create info-graphics based on an image of a whole person walking or standing, with a similar concept in mind. However, eventually we withdrew from that idea because we realized that by doing that we keep migrants invisible by maintaining the distance between the majority of society and them. There is nothing more personal than a human face, especially eyes, which hold great emotion.
The other portion of the campaign was the creation of the Invisible People film, in which our group attempted to avoid the typical form adopted by many social campaign audio/visual PSAs. Thus, we focused on wanting to tell a genuine story, through a poetic and at times, very experimental film form. The narrative which one follows while watching, attempts to grasp the perspective of everyday life for migrants in Poland with relation to verbal and publicly written hate speech. Thus, the viewer listens to and sees the words of psychological abuse appearing and being heard throughout the cityscape. Later, the film transitions to a forest, which is often considered a symbol of diversity. Moreover, a shattered forest was used as a symbol following the holocaust to represent loss of life. However, further analyzing the aforementioned, forests consist of many and often very different types of trees and plants, and function as a shelter for a multitude of species, yet forests remain one organism. This is what society should be like. Its diversity should be a sign of its richness.
The ends and the beginnings
We encourage all of the readers of this entry to join our facebook profile, watch, and like our film. Even though the HIA program has finished, we keep monitoring our facebook page, and hope to remain active. Our film has been well received. Consequently, we have submitted it to a short film contest concerning topics of multiculturalism. Our group, although split, keep in touch, and think about more collaborations. Like us, and stay tuned!
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