We love to hear what our alumni are up to since graduating, and this week one of last year’s students, Shareen Elnaschie, let us know about her some of her new projects. You may remember Shareen for her post on Building disaster-resilient communities in flood prone areas, which she wrote during her internship with the Manila-based NGO TAO-Pilipinas. Shareen continues her work as an architect and urban researcher, and just recently launched unREPORTED, an initiative that although not directly related to the field of architecture, promotes a better world through creative activism.
“I have my fingers in lots of pies at the moment,” Shareen explains. While working to get a few architecture projects up in developing countries with Kimberly Pelkofsky, one of her former fellow classmates, , she received word that one of her friends had become one of the Artic 30 Greenpeach protestors to be forcefully detained by Russian authorities under piracy charges late last month.
In response, Shareen and a small team of friends including Kimberly setup the competition website unREPORTED, through which they aim “to promote peaceful protest through the creative use of multimedia in order to raise awareness about global acts of injustice, whether social, ecological or both,” and “generate original creative works, to reach as many new audiences as possible, filling the gaps left by mainstream media.”
The competition asks for creative protests to raise awareness for an important cause, which in this case, as their first campaign, is the ongoing detention of the Artic 30.
Protests can explore a wide range of multimedia: art work, sculpture, performance, video, music, poetry, graphics, animation, comedy, legislation…but must be submitted as a jpg image or a maximum 1-minute video format, accompanied by a brief synopsis. They must address the campaign at hand, demonstrate critical thinking and push the boundaries of how multimedia and the creative arts can be employed to spread messages of global significance.
Cash prizes will be awarded to three winners, and a Viral Bonus prize will be awarded to the first entry that ‘goes viral’ within 7 days of the project launch via the competition’s Youtube or flickr channels. The competition is open to anyone and is free to enter. For more information about how and what to submit, visit unREPORTED.co and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.
We wish Shareen’s new endeavour the best of luck and encourage creatives everywhere to participate in the competition!
Also: See the competition on Bustler