A community project of artistic creation that promotes social and laboral inclusion for women who are vulnerable or at risk of social exclusion. It is a transformative project, based on urban art as an engine of change and social awareness, which builds community and allows the discovery and modification of the environment.

Persianes amb ànima –in English, shutters with a soul– is based on a series of workshops on the restoration, design and painting of shutters taught by professional illustrators and muralists. The project covers the whole process: after an initial theoretical and practical part to introduce participants to the artistic discipline, they carry out a final practice on the shutters of shops in the neighbourhood. Apart from being a collective learning space, one of the objectives of the project is to create safe and comfortable spaces for the participants. In this way, Persianes amb ànims aims for art to be, apart from a distraction, a source of increased security and self-confidence.

During the implementation, an important part of the project is the participatory process that takes place between artists, students and the people in charge of the shops. It is in collaboration with the neighbourhood and the neighbourhood associations that the shutters to be rehabilitated are selected. Once they have been chosen, the task is to jointly decide on the messages that the shutters will communicate, understood and used as a loudspeaker to educate and raise awareness about equality, social inclusion, feminism and sustainability. Also during this process, the stories of the neighbourhood’s small businesses are discovered –which allows neighbourhood ties to be forged– and these stories are then captured in the drawings on the shutters. Thus, Persianes amb ànima highlights the potential of art as a tool for social inclusion and a space for female empowerment, capable of making visible what is not visible.