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Pirkanmaan rahasto
Color Up Peace: Supporting Ukraine and Ukrainians since 2016
28.9.2023
From June 2022 to June 2023, I have been conducting “Art for Ukraine – Art for Peace” workshops at Ukraina Talo and Monitoimitalo 13 in Tampere for Ukrainians who have come to Finland since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. These workshops are based on the peacebuilding startup I started back in 2016 - Color Up Peace.
Text: Lisa Glybchenko
Color Up Peace works at the intersection of art-making and technology to leverage artistic innovation as a peacebuilding tool. I invite people from all over the world to submit photos of what peace is to them – and then turn the photos into coloring pages by drawing every outline manually. The idea is that then someone would be able to color the outline and connect to another’s experience of peace in visual and digital ways. Like this, the outlines become instruments of deliberative and participatory futures design – where people build demos of peace arrangements by exploring and multiplying peace values through the ways they engage with the outlines.
In general, Color Up Peace aims to encourage participants to think about peace and what peace means to them; to create opportunities for sharing visions of peace through artistic and digital means; to foster dialogue through collective artmaking; to challenge the abundance of violence-centered visuals in the media and popular culture; and to employ digital visual artmaking as a peacebuilding tool. My motivation to start Color Up Peace in 2016 was to help people like me – who suffered from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine since 2014.
I think it is in every peacebuilding startup that the founder would wish their startup did not even exist – that there would not be a need for that, that there would be no violence and cruelty that make such startups and the services they offer needed. And I never imagined I would be helping Ukrainians in Tampere in 2022–2023, after 8 years of collective suffering for the participants, myself – and lots of other Ukrainians in Ukraine and abroad.
Participants came from different places in Finland: not only Tampere, but, for instance, Vaasa and Jämsä. Part of these workshops were supported by Operation Pirkanmaa and the City of Tampere.
I recently also finished a Nordic-Ukrainian initiative to create art-based support programs for my compatriots in Ukraine and abroad like in their host communities in Vaasa and Tampere in Finland; Reykjavik in Iceland; Kyiv, Kharkiv and Chernivtsi in Ukraine. The programs were supported by The Nordic Culture Point and they attracted around 250 participants and received extremely positive feedback. Within the programs 390 artbooks were printed and distributed in Ukraine, Finland and Iceland. New projects are already in implementation too!
Some new opportunities for helping Ukrainians and generally people affected by wars came out of these workshops. With the virtual education company Claned we collaborated to create the virtual version of the workshops so that people in other places around Finland and in other countries could join and have this experience too. The workshops are self-paced and available both in Ukrainian and English.
I think the most important highlight for me so far has been that I could see that the workshops make a difference and that I was able to help holistically, as well as use my skills and talents to help. I also learned a lot from the people I worked with and from their experience of restarting their lives in a new place they did not choose and may barely know anything about. Based on this, I think it is important to highlight how it would be good to continue supporting Ukrainians:
- creating employment opportunities that do not require fluency in Finnish
- mentoring Ukrainians about certain topics of interest, like entrepreneurship or NGO management, as they are done in Finland, since it could be very different in Ukraine
- creating ways for connections between the Ukrainians under temporary protection in Finland and the Ukrainian diaspora, since they could be scattered around the country with difficulties moving around
- asking Ukrainians, including diaspora members, what kind of help they may need
- and realizing that supporting Ukraine and Ukrainians is essential for everyone who appreciates freedom.
One more thing to note is that Ukrainians in Ukraine and away from Ukraine are also simultaneously doing a lot of decolonization work to protect their culture, and the ways their culture is part of their everyday lives even abroad. It is important to make space for this kind of work and actively support the needed conversations and initiatives, even if they are difficult to hold.
Follow the Facebook and Instagram pages of Color Up Peace for more information!
