We all know people in the world can be horrible and there are countless atrocities happening right now as you read this article. When these topics arise the same question seems to come up, do we just hear about bad things more because we are all so connected now or is the world really worse than it was before? I don’t think the answer to that question matters. I think what matters is that if you know something is wrong and you have the ability, you should do something about it. Thankfully there are still some good people in this world, and Light Painting Artist Vicki DaSilva is one of them.
Light Painting is magic. It is an artform that gets people talking, if you have ever created a live light painting you know how quickly people start talking. No other Light Painter I know of has used our art form to share a political message better than Vicki DaSilva. For Vicki’s most recent and probably most important work to date, she teamed up with the Global Humanitarian Organization OxFam for the #WITHSYRIA campaign, urging World Leaders to Turn The Lights Back On For Syria! Vicki so strongly believes in this cause she declined the commission for her work on this project and donated all her images for the campaign.
Vicki said this about the With Syria project “Activist art contributes and communicates messages that powerfully transcends borders, governments, nationalities, age, gender and religions. Light graffiti and light painting allows for the exceptional element of access to location and photography documents the actions. As a global collective we have the extraordinary opportunity for global activism through a coordinated, orchestrated light graffiti smart mob or simply as individuals. Collectively or single handedly we have the ability to speak to any issue through our words or images drawn with light, in any language, anywhere in the world and inspire others to do the same. Turn the lights on to share important messages!”
Some facts, since war took hold of Syria in 2011:
83% of the lights have been turned off in the Country.
97% of the lights are off in Aleppo.
35% of the lights are off in Damascus.
At Least 200,000 people have been killed.
10 million people have fled their homes.
3 Million children are no longer in school.
We take our comfortable lives for granted. Can you imagine having everything you have, and the ones you love taken away from you tomorrow. Can you imagine having to literally run for your life with only what you could carry while your home town and every memory you made there was destroyed. For many of the people in Syria this is the reality, many of them are starving and dying from lack of basic needs. The people of Syria are just like you and me. They only want peace and security, they only want to be happy, healthy, and free.
As Light Painters we have a unique ability to bring awareness to things that matter with the magic that is Light Painting. This is only one of many humanitarian crisis that are happening right now.
We are calling on light painters around the world to use your unique abilities to help bring awareness to a crisis, help get the word out by creating a light painting including the phrase #WITHSYRIA. Tag them on Instagram, on Facebook and on Flickr. Vicki has got us started lets show our support for her and for the Syrian People.
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