Ποιειν Και Πραττειν - create and do

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The Chios Declaration of Peace

Peace poster in Chios

 

To retain tranquility in perception before starting to paint a peace mural, there is a need to build bridges of understanding so that a wish for peace can be based on long lasting friendships due to trust and openness making possible entry into a collaborative learning process and painting together.

Basic principles:

The concept of 'peace' needs clarification by entering a peace process based on dialogue between cultures.

The biggest task is to end the ‘permanent war’, so as not to institutionalize war as means of
keeping security. But can peace be institutionalized?

Without peace many more people risk to be if not killed and wounded, then displaced, with no where to go but to another country often hostile to those fleeing for their lives. At personal level many castigate themselves wrongly so as cowards when they flee rather than fight.

If peace is to unfold, then people need to have such cultural roots which lets them grow and unfold in terms of knowing who they are. Yet the identity question cannot be resolved in strictly national or international terms if it leaves out human self-consciousness.


Entering the peace process as exemplified by Kids' Guernica means to free the imagination of adults by bringing them into contact with murals not merely painted by children but touched by their souls, so as to bring out the best in every human being.

Once children, youth and adults can together envision a future without war, then a cultural actions starting with painting a mural becomes a community based action. These actions need to be based on trust and friendship and by entering this collaborative work to be experienced when painting together a peace mural on a canvas of the same size as Picasso’s Guernica painting (7,8 x 3,5 m).

Aesthetical principles linked to the peace process entail among other things the doing away of all sorts of enemy pictures too often produced to justify the going to war; instead redemption must be the work of the imagination so that children and the youth can become the imaginary witnesses of peace.

The human language and human self-consciousness has to be fostered as well so as to bring together culture and the economy. It means a language is spoken which brings together the categories of productivity and creativity so that people can address the other as human beings and thereby attain themselves a human self consciousness.

Part of growing up must ensure that children can play again in the dirt, in the streets for they
need to learn the dirty words of the street. For this reason Kids' Guernica must retain the character of an informal learning process and therefore should not be integrated into a regular school and educational system.

How important this informal learning is, can be reflected in what the writer George Crane says about is the American English being much more lucid and open to changes compared to the British language because the former has much more a street language-like character, and therefore is bottom-up, flexibile, naughty and daring because open to people of all walks of life, and not merely 'good' in a conformist way which gives the child growing up virtually no literacy to defend itself against all kinds of violence.

based on insights that we can no longer live with revenge and rage as if they only way to
restore social justice.” - George Crane

Any declaration of peace is helpful if it facilitates the realization of a vision of peace by articulating not only something new but also by validating and strengthening already existing insights into what constitutes peace. There has to be shown a way on how to go beyond the usual vicious cycle of violence and the spiral of revenge.

The existence of rage and ever more violence in the world beg the question, but how to be
convincing to those who want to resort to violence not to go down that pather and rather wait for an answer as to what is convincing to others in a peaceful way?

 

Proposal to Prefecture of Chios / Municipality of Izmir
By Kids’ Guernica International / Poiein kai Prattein
Status: Athens 17.6.2007 (revised 30.5.2013)

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