Arrels Fundació #VISIBLE Case Study / Making the invisible homeless visible - (2022) 2:00 (Spain)

Sherpa, Barcelona hit upon a hard insight when they created a campaign for Arrels Fundació, homeless people are invisible. So their street art ad campaign that we showed you here, made them visible. The idea forced you to not look away. 

There are more than 4,800 homeless people in the city of Barcelona, more than 1,100 of whom are sleeping rough on the streets. Being destitute has made them invisible to the public eye. Putting an end to this invisibility is key to changing their stories, transforming the way society perceives them and breaking down the prejudices that surround them.

We made the invisible visible through urban art by creating 13 giant portraits of people who managed to escape life on the street and now represent the city's homeless. We put their large-scale photographs in the places where they slept for far too many nights in order to raise awareness among the neighbours who didn't see them back then.

The artist Teo Vázquez took photographs that captured the personality of 13 homeless people and exhibited their portraits in a way they had never done before in the chosen sites, which had never been used for campaigns.

We looked for the locations where these people had slept for far too many nights and used the Paste Up technique to place each giant portrait on the façade of what had been their refuge in a way that no neighbour could ignore.

We also shot 13 short videos to make their accounts visible. Alongside each mural was a QR code passers-by could scan to hear the stories of each protagonist and reflect upon them.

Ad agency: sherpa.agency

Client: Arrels Fundació