Inside Out
Country: All over the world
Participants: Communities all over the world
‘People Who Dream of Peace and Connection’, Nicosia, Cyprus, 2022
© Marina Neophytou
When JR, the French photographer, was awarded the 2011 TED prize he created the global participatory art project Inside Out. The project provides a platform where communities from anywhere in the world can submit their photographic portraits and get them printed as oversized black-and-white posters. These posters get sent back for the local organisers to paste in locations in their communities – on walls, buildings or any other structures – and create ‘actions’ that make the issues that they cared about visible. In the years since, Inside Out has printed nearly 600,000 portraits for more than 2,600 actions in 152 countries.
Many Inside Out actions have sought to make peace and tolerance visible, to stand up against violence, to celebrate co-existence and to show respect for diversity. An action in Bogota in 2016 called ‘The Story Behind Our Wrinkles’ sought to encourage people to vote in the peace agreement referendum. Another Colombian action in 2022 celebrated the ‘power of hybrid identity’ in Cauca, a region deeply affected by Colombia’s decades-long conflict. This action representing those on the frontlines of ongoing violence sought to re-frame diversity as their greatest strength, challenging the oft-used explanation for the conflict that Colombia’s multi-ethnicity was the source of the country’s divisions.
‘The Story Behind Our Wrinkles’, Bogota, Colombia, 2016
© Emilia Ospina
In 2012 an action called ‘The Celebration of the real Afghanistan’ pasted happy portraits of ordinary Afghans on the security barricade around the headquarters of the multinational military mission in Kabul to demonstrate to foreigners how there is hope and laughter in the country and to encourage Afghans to appreciate the diversity of the their people that want a peaceful future. In 2022 a group in Cyprus created ‘People who Dream of Peace and Connection’ bringing together portraits of people from all over the divided island to display them as one and challenge the conflict narratives that bred ongoing resentment and aggression.
Inside Out builds on JR’s own form of “artivism”, which has seen him paste giant portraits all over the world in projects such as Face to Face where he put portraits of Israelis and Palestinians in monumental formats on both sides of the West Bank wall. With the Inside Out team setting a standard visual frame for the photos – just a single-person portrait, no writing, no logos, nothing else in the frame – and taking charge of the image production, local organisers are freed up to concentrate their creative energies on putting their images out into the world and using them to create connections. This involves finding good locations to paste or install the portraits, generating attention around their message through actions which can involve the actual collective pasting itself, demonstrations and press work. Local organisers can also maximise their potential exposure by using Inside Out’s social media channels.
Celebrating ‘Cauca and the Power of Hybrid Identity’, Popayan, Colombia, 2022
© Patrick McGrann
‘The experience of pasting is so visceral – hundreds of thousands of people have bonded elbow deep in wallpaper glue, holding ladders steady for one another, pulling the image of a grandmother or a teacher or a shop clerk taut while a neighbour smoothes the edges. And the witnessing – the moment when passersby crane their necks, kids drag their friends over to see traffic stops. Whole communities feel legitimised by beauty at such scale. It is playful and also undeniably profound’.