UNESCO 2022 Project - Faces of the World

By Eva Shimkus, Abi Handel, Abby Zheng, Zoya Achildiyev, Cat Lu

Each year, the Newton South High School UNESCO team creates a project based on a theme and presents it at a conference in Portugal. This year’s theme is diversity of cultural expressions, and to portray that in our project, we painted a mural to be displayed in our community.

Cultural expressions have been a source of pride, community, and happiness, and with increasing globalization, maintaining cultural identity has become a constant struggle. Some cultures and languages have merged into larger categories. As a result of this collectivism, certain aspects of individual cultures have been lost. Previous generations are unable to pass on their own cultural expressions, such as music, traditional dress, and idioms. This has been historically evident in the ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation of native societies in many areas of the world.

With the goal of raising awareness around cultures with declining populations and celebrating the myriad of cultures within our community, we decided to paint a mural. The mural was created two-sided. The front side provides a window into the diversity of our world. While the back side of the board includes idioms from many languages.

The idioms we used on the back of the mural are explained below: