Russian Embassy Projections

30 August marks the International Day of the Disappeared, an annual memorial for those who have been detained and disappeared worldwide. In Syria, where 100,000 people remain missing, the day is particularly pertinent, and in 2018 we used it to send a message to Russia, a country complicit in the Assad regime’s disappearance of civilians.

We knew that the day alone would not be enough to secure media attention and so we began thinking of campaign tactics that would generate coverage. We knew that whatever we chose would have to be visually arresting and so we settled on projecting a message to Russia on one of its embassy buildings. We chose the Russian embassy in Berlin, where the Families for Freedom were due to visit. With the help of the PixelHELPER Foundation, we projected several messages, including one asking Russia where the disappeared were. We had already alerted journalists to the stunt through press releases, and as soon as we had the photos of the event, we emailed them to picture desks internationally.

Unfortunately, the projections did not get media attention, which could be attributable to several factors. Firstly, we were slow to receive the pictures, making the story old news by the time we sent them out. Choosing the Russian embassy in Berlin may have also been a mistake as it was unclear to the media why we chose Germany and made it difficult to get British and American papers interested. Finally, August can be a quiet time for news, and the story wasn’t really big enough to cut through that. Despite this, the projections made good social media content and were shared by our supporters.