In between the youth exchanges participants have implemented some activities locally in their communities connected to the topic of the project: creative activism and art to create a positive change in the society.

Our group started thinking that because we are coming from Finland, we could use snowman with this topic. Snowman is basically been black and white as well. You know; white snow, with black top hat and black charcoals as eyes, mouth and buttons. And why it's called "snowMAN", could we maybe get people to think wider somehow?

STICKERS

We started to design and print simple snowman stickers where people can draw the characters as they like. The different characters represent the variety of humans. The aim is to connect human rights to the campaign.

In school Sofia had a little surprise for her classmates. She printed some empty snowmen stickers. Then introduced our idea about the snowman campaign. There were a couple of skeptical persons who were thinking human rights aren't important topic. And one guy was thinking that making those stickers is childish.

Regardless of some opinions people gathered together around the table. Some skeptical people didn't join for the group. But others started to modify those snowmen stickers. They used some different colors of professional wrap film and as well some markers. During the session they were discussing about human rights together. And they draw many awesome, beautiful and different snowmen characters. After a while the skeptical people involved to the group too. One of them even made two snow persons.

The morning session made the classroom more positive environment. And Sofia believes that it made a change for some of the classmate’s thoughts about the human rights.

PAINTINGS

Also we got idea to paint few snow characters on different locations, with positive messages. So Marko painted his characters to Oulu Finland, on international Valentine's day.

Pete painted one character to the balcony at headquarters of Droni at Tbilisi, Georgia. And other one, 5 metres high snow ninja princess to Helsinki Finland, on wall of abandoned office building.

Naeem talks about the purpose of art, street art and graffiti, how it can be used a tool to raise awareness on different issues in society and how it can be used as a tool for empowerment, self-awareness and confidence among artists. He also talks about his own artwork, how we can support street art and graffiti, and how we all can take part in sharing our thoughts, opinions and honesty through art. We just need to work hard, fail many times and believe in ourselves before we succeed.

We recommend to watch the video and we are sure you will look differently on street art and art after listening to his thoughts.

The event included 3 parts. During the first part werepresented our Erasmus+ projects and what are we doing in general. The second part was the movie screening. We chose a "Bang bang club" because of it’s powerful message. It’s based on true events and is about the famous group of photographers who became famous during their work in South Africa in time of civil war of 90s.Their work brought attention of the whole world because many of their pictures were published in all newspapers around the globe. Afterwards, there was a discussion of the film. Many people expressed their opinions , raised questions about the movie, the characters and problems around the topic of human rights.