About What’s’Art Project

What’s’Art is a project promoting human rights in a public spaces through street art. Carried out on September 2018 in Poznań (Poland) involved several activities during which youth workers from EU could learn how to promote human rights by modern means of expression like murals, graffiti or stickers.

Marengo N

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What’s’Art Poznan

5 min readSep 18, 2018

What’s’Art | Projest organized by CIM HORYZONTY and funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union

The idea behind What’s’Art

The idea behind What’s’Art was born as a response to nowaday, worrying situation in Europe, when it’s getting more and more clear that even things so — it would seem — basic and undeniable to all of us as human rights, can be lost in just one day.

In many countries we observe growing in strength hate speech, discrimination and human rights violations. Nationalists and facists movements are getting stronger. More and more citizens of EU categorize refugees as a potential danger and even in long term neighbors of different nationality start to see enemies. To not look far, in last two years Polish government rejected the UE’s refugee rellocation system, denying asylum to victims of war, terminated independent courts and was trying to denied Polish women the right to decide about their own body and be able to carry out abortion when it’s confirmed that a fetus is severly ill or might be the cause of death of the mother.

We can write about human rights but not all groups have access to publications. We can demonstrate but demonstrations usally have short impact in time. That’s why it seems neccessary to go out on the streets and reach those who spend there most time — young generations that quite soon are going to decide about the future of the world.

Street art — murals, graffiti and stickers — is one of the most popular means of expression of youth. For this reason, What’s’Art Project’s aim was to acknowledge youth social workers from EU how to use it to promote human rights in their local environments. Let’s leave in public spaces positive statements about others in place of hate speech!

What’s’Art Project in details

The most important part of What’s’Art was the training of 28 youth workers from 9 European Union countries (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania and Italy), during which participants, assisted by local Poznań’s street artists, were creating in the Lazarus Garden (in Polish: Ogród Łazarz) a mural promoting human rights. It was in the narrow, inconspicuous passage between the blocks of Klaudyny Potockiej Street 39 and 41 in Poznań Poland that a tunnel of the history of battles for human rights from the ’60s to modern times was created.

The participants and trainers of What’s’Art Promotion of human rights in a public spaces through art with the final mural in a tunnel behind them

What’s’Art Human Rights Mural, Poznań Poland

This was the culmination point of the training, but not the only one.

The aim of the project was not only to encourage the Poznań community to counteract hate speech and manifestations of violating the dignity of another human being. It is much more important to equip youth workers with the skills to promote human rights in their own local communities.

It is for this reason that What’s’Art training consists of three modules combinded into one in practice:

education in the field of human rights promotion through the organization of various events and street art actions,
education in the field of street art creation (creating murals, graffiti templates and stickers),
and education in the field of public relations and communication strategy in social media and the Internet to reach wide groups of youth and strengthen the impact of human rights promotion actions.