Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. Together with Luis Silva Dias, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque he created the flags campaign, using the national flags to show the social disproportions and facts we are not always aware of. Brazilian Artists - a website promoting Brasilian culture in the UK - managed to get some background from Icaro on the project:
We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.
The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc.
With regards to the email presenting the campaign as being done by a Norwegian diplomat, this information is completely wrong. There is no Norwegian diplomat called Charung Gollar, there was no presentation in the UNO, and the campaign is not called ‘The Power of the Stars’. This was all invented and is going round the world via email.
That’s it, basically.
ICARO DORIA
