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Peace Murals
Peace mural painted by children of Chios
Since these peace murals can be perceived as big letters children write in order to send their messages, in reality wishes for peace, friendship, trust and openness, into the world to take notice what all children want. Too many of them have been already at a young age witness of conflicts at home with parents shouting at each other. Many of them fled out of the house into the darkness in order to escape those voices causing pain in the ears due to their sharpness but also ugliness.
Interesting is the development of a symbol like the pigeon which Picasso used originally to designate a message of peace as it was interpreted world-wide. Naturally Kids' Guernica does not aim to imitate or derive all impulses from Guernica. The linkage is more formally by using a canvas of the same size as Picasso did for Guernica, namely a canvas measuring 7,8 x 3,5 m. And still there is a language development which means children and youth discover their own hand writings not on walls but on movable canvas.
The latter aspect is something Takuya Kaneda, international coordinator of Kids' Guernica, emphasizes: the canvas is not static like a wall, but can be rolled up like a tent and easily transported when someone goes on a trip and takes along with him one peace mural. Quite often this is how the murals are shipped from continent to continent when an exhibition takes place in Nagasaki, Japan or else in Tallahassee, Florida, USA as was the case in January 2010, the year when Kids' Guernica celebrates its fifteenth anniversary.
But to return to the role pigeons play, they were message carriers prior to the age of the Internet. Maybe this is why they assume still a dominant role in peace murals or else there is a pigeon on the ground, in the shade of these big murals, as was the case in Chios when a Kids' Guernica exhibition organised by Poiein kai Prattein took place there in May 2007.
Kids' Guernica exhibition in Chios, May 2007 Photo by Maya Fischer
For an overview of murals see exhibition catalogue of Tom Anderson:
www.insea.europe.ufg.ac.at/.../KIDS'_Guernica_2009_FSU_exhibition_catalog.pdf
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