The winner of the European Poster Competition "Breaking Stereotypes has been announced at the official prize ceremony and opening of the exhibition.

Date: 19 October 2006

Venua: Berlaymont Building, Brussels

Time: 12h00

At the Esplanade in front of the Berlaymont, a selection of the best 35 posters will be exhibited for one months. To see the exhibition posters online, please click here.

"Together", Aleksandra Woldańska, Academy of Fine Arts, Poznań

Aleksandra Woldańska

The European Commission proudly presents the winner of the Poster Competition "Breaking Stereotypes": Aleksandra Woldańska

Aleksandra Woldańska is a 21-year-old student from Kalisz, Poland. Since 2004 she has been studying visual communications at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan. This is not the first art competition that Aleksandra has won. In 2004, she received the first prize in a drawing competition organised by the local community centre in Kalisz, and in 2005, she was awarded the second prize for a Hewlett Packard T-shirt logo competition.

About her poster design, Aleksandra says:

“In my poster racial diversity does not call for contradiction but is complementary. Thanks to people’s diversity, new qualities come into being which would not exist if we all were the same. Finding the things that we do not possess ourselves in another human being, enriches us and can make life more worthwhile. That is why acceptance of other people is so important. I would like my poster to make everybody aware that only by accepting others as they are can we create dialogue among people. I believe that the struggle with discrimination is still a topical issue because if we look at what is happening around us we can see that such dialogue does not exist in many places or spheres of life.”

Jury Statement:

The design is as simple as it is compelling. The visual and its execution are reduced to a bare minimum: a simple embrace. The strength of the design is that it achieves something rare: it communicates far more on an emotional level than on a visual. The image says more than a thousand words; it is a visual metaphor, which is deeply embedded in our subconscious and the more eff ective for it. We “feel” the poster more than we “see” it.

The effectiveness of the poster is supported by it being completely reduced to a bare minimum. It uses only the most basic of all colours: black. It only uses one of the most basic of all shapes: the human body. The overall result is mesmerising—creating the most human of all messages without explicitly spelling out what that is.

The poster is in black and white, but its message covers the full spectrum of this competition. It manages eff ortlessly to simultaneously transcend and embrace all cultures, genders and ages. It is as specific as it is general.