Turning the world inside out

I spotted this in Woodstock. It’s part of French photographer and street artist JR’s Inside Out Project.

The Inside Out Project has been travelling around the world and the photographs that were taken in Cape Town were pasted up around the city over five days in July last year. The project aims to address problems specific to each area and in Cape Town it’s racism between black and ‘coloured’ young people.

Unfortunately there’s very little about the project on JR’s website or the Inside Out website but, after some searching for it online, I found the story behind it...

Inside Out Cape Town was a collaboration between local government, Lalela Project (an organisation which provides art and music education to children-at-risk after school and over the weekends), Cape Town photographers Hasan and Husain Essop, as well as JR. The Nelson Mandela Foundation also supported the project as it culminated on Mandela Day 2011, 18 July. Thirty Hout Bay High School students were taught the basics of portrait photography over two months by twin brothers Hasan and Husain. This group consisted of 15 students from Imizamo Yethu (the black community) and 15 from Hangberg (the ‘coloured’ community). The students from the two groups then paired up with each other (one from each community) in order to get to know the other person before photographing each other. JR’s team made the large-scale prints (some as big as 10 x 15 metres) and the kids then pasted their portraits up at each other’s homes and helped paste them up at a number of places around Cape Town, including the Central Library.

JR was awarded the 2011 TED prize. He's said that he wants to catch the attention of people who are not museum visitors. Most people don’t have museums around them or just don’t go to them – let alone pay to see exhibitions. He says his work ‘mixes art and action; it talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit’. He also says that his art hasn’t changed the world – but it might have made someone somewhere laugh unexpectedly (http://www.jr-art.net/).

Well, this photograph made me smile. There’s just something irresistibly mischievous about someone pulling faces...

And I hope that the kids who participated found something that really involved them in the project – curiosity, openness, some recognition, a little more trust and understanding maybe?

At the time, one of the students from Imizamo Yethu Amanda Gaetywa said that pasting up the portraits of black and ‘coloured’ students side by side was ‘like we are bringing the two communities together.’ Another student Zimasa Dyani said that ‘at first we didn’t speak to the coloured people because we have been really separated from apartheid and now we have a stepping stone to communicate with them’ (Cape Times). Students continue to participate in Lalela Project’s programmes.

Watch this if you’d like to find out more about JR: 

If you’d like to participate in Inside Out (you can upload your own photographs which will be made into posters and sent back to you to paste up in your own area): http://www.insideoutproject.net

A SEN school in Margate in KwaZulu-Natal has also participated in the project – you can see their students’ portraits on the website.