With regard to celebrate International Mother Language Day (21/02), METAdrasi and AKTO are presenting the team project “Words & Thoughts from all over the world,” established by the UNESCO initiative, in order to promote linguistic diversity and rescue the less spoken languages. The occasion was the bloody sacrifice of students in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in order to prevent the removal of the language “Bengali” (Massacre of Dhaka, 12 February 1952).

METAdrasi as eminently a multicultural organization, with over 250 partners from more than 30 different countries, inspired by the organization’s everyday life, invited the Art & Design AKTO College in this team project, in order to elevate the values of people and cultures, as they are transported through different mother tongues.

Within the context of this project, METAdrasi’s team members picked and translated texts from their favorite authors, phrases from celebrities they admire, poems that inspire them, sayings from their homelands … Everyone carried a piece of their country’s cultural heritage along with the desire to share their culture, thoughts, and dreams.

AKTO‘s graphic design students, based on these texts, created original works that invite us to travel through words, colors and symbolisms. These works operate as a door to the world, highlighting how much we have in common between us and how much we can gain if we get closer to each other with an open mind and respect.

The projects included were showcased at “Technopolis” of the Municipality of Athens in February 2014.

Download the e-book: “Words & Thoughts from all over the world”