My Experience Creating A PSA
Barcelona artist, Maria
In a world where we are all connected through the internet and social media, it seems easy to communicate with everyone. However, I sometimes find myself powerless when I see so much injustice but there’s nothing I can do. When Breaking Walls gave us the opportunity to create a PSA that changed. I was not only given the chance to change and improve what I was seeing through social media but they also gave me the means to speak up and to be heard. Creating this piece for an international youth organization such as Breaking Walls is a real honor due to the love, respect, and gratitude I have for their work.
In the development of the PSA I created together with my two colleagues, Fran and Oriol, I learned a lot about activism around the world. As part of the 2020 Virtual Artist Cooperative in August and representing the Barcelona delegation, we were asked to create a public service announcement over the theme “Fighting stigma, xenophobia, hate speech, racial discrimination, and domestic violence related to the COVID-19 and beyond”. This was included in the project for the Breaking Walls 2020 Creative Activist Lab where each delegation from every country chose a specific topic and had to create a video message, only one-minute long, to be distributed and played in each delegation’s major media channel. During the process, I got to know and understand the different problems young people go through and I also learned how to overcome or deal with issues such as discrimination, abuse, stigma, prejudgment, or xenophobia. I got a small insight into what the professional world is like, having to take care of the music, images, time restraints, and the words we were using. Personally, it felt really gratifying to express my concerns and to make people aware of “taboo” issues in order to help others.
I really hope that the passion with which we created our piece is reflected in it and that we are able to get to as many people as possible. I expect our PSA to really reflect what some people go through and that it is useful. If only one person gets inspired by my words, or our video opens someone’s eyes to the truth, that would be amazing.
