At The Social Element we enjoy partnering with many great companies, campaigns, competitions and projects.
These relationships range from the short-term to the long-term and every one is different. We also love giving back to our clients’ communities and the wider world in a positive way.
As the Languages Director I particularly enjoy the conversations around managing multilingual and multicultural projects that span the globe. We have taken on many such projects over the years.
This year was special for us as an agency though. Among all of the doom and gloom of the COVID-19 confusion there was a ray of sunshine when we started working on the Earth Speakr project.
Olafur Eliasson created the idea of an artwork project during the German Presidency of the Council of the European Union to allow children to have a voice about the environment. He and his team created an application that children can use to record their messages. These thoughts and visions for the future will make up artwork.
These messages will be accessible to adults and children alike across the globe. The messages appear in the virtual world for anyone to listen to, share and amplify for more people to hear.
The project is funded by the Federal Foreign Office and is being released in cooperation with Goethe-Institut. Earth Speakr is free-of-charge and promotes collaboration across the European continent and beyond.
For me as Languages Director, this project is particularly interesting because it has all EU languages represented as official languages for the project, including Irish and Maltese. It is rare to see a project with such a level of inclusion. As a social media management agency, this required a lot of thought about how to best serve the needs of the project. Our speciality is finding solutions for our clients and creating connections, so we worked and collaborated until we found a perfect workable way forward to deliver what was needed.
The openness of Olafur and his team is inspiring.
They welcome, encourage and dearly hope for as many languages in the world to be represented on the application. They would like to see pins appearing all over the world and to see as many children’s thoughts, hopes, dreams, concerns and opinions included as possible.
As the Founder of the Polyglot Conference too, seeing this level of linguistic and community inclusion really warms my heart. I am proud to say that the Earth Speakr Team will present something on this wonderful project at the Polyglot Conference this year too. All voices can be heard and all voices are welcome.
I personally encourage you to check out and share the Earth Speakr project with your children, your schools, your social groups and make this project really light up the world.
You can check out some of the children’s messages in multiple languages:
The Earth Speakr app is available on: App Store; Google Play.
Follow the project on social media: @earthspeakr @studioolafureliasson
Facebook Twitter YouTube
www.earthspeakr.art
The toolkits are available free-for-download on the webpage’s ‘Get involved’ section. Please revisit the webpage for updates
We welcome your creative interpretations of Earth Speakr toolkits and look forward to hearing about your events!
#EarthSpeakrinclassrooms #EarthSpeakrinlibraries #EarthSpeakrinmuseums
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