Why did fluffy colorful flowers start to appear in the youth centers the Cultural Platform collaborates with? Here we reflect on a new page of the ontology of Ukrainian beauty: the sphere of mental well-being of adolescents.
“The whole world…
hidden, like a beautiful flowering tree in grain, but in the spring
it emerges from it again”
Hryhorii Skovoroda
For Cultural Platform Zakarpattya NGO, 2024 marked the start of the launch of KONTENTA audiovisual studies—the digital infrastructure of the new generation’s mental resilience. During their launch in the youth centers of the South-Eastern part of Ukraine (in Kropyvnytskyi, Kamianske and Kryvyi Rih), a big fluffy flower “sprouted”. Gradually, it also began to growing in other spaces of interaction with young people: for example, in the Kids like Kids inclusive space, and will soon appear at the location of the Spilno Camp in Kryvyi Rih, where young people will be able to interact with the flower every day from May 25 to June 30. This flower has multi-colored soft petals and stems that you want to touch, and a convex mirror in the center as the new trend of youth selfies.
This cultural artifact of mental resilience carries not only a utilitarian function (as a photo zone), but also declares the importance of creating a “New Garden” in which young people will have the opportunity to develop their empathy. This artifact enables recognition of other people’s emotions. The skill of looking openly at others and truly seeing their emotional states opens the heart of personality that is still being shaped to empathy and support. Empathy thus becomes a necessary skill for the future of Ukraine. After all, if you have never seen whatever you are studying, why should you study it? It is only worth talking about love and beauty from within them, and not by relying on lovelessness and ugliness, which are alien to a healthy personality.
Young people have the right to respect towards their choices in shaping and determining their future, and the state must enable the development of the potential of young people through the formation of their skills, one of which is emotional intelligence.
The reality of youth spaces in many communities is that they are dominated by Soviet aesthetics (sometimes reinterpreted, but still ever-present), which suppress individuality. We must remember that according to the decree of the President of Ukraine “On the National Youth Strategy until 2030”, one of the tasks of implementing the strategy is to overcome the consequences of the influence of the Soviet period on young people. In addition, since May 2022, the All-Ukrainian mental health program “How are you?” aimed at developing a culture of mental health care, has been operating in Ukraine. Therefore, the artifact of the flower is a point of wonder that pushes the youth to turn their attention inwards; after interacting with it young people will be interested in taking the next steps to acquiring new knowledge in the domain of mental health.
Our civil society organization is an active participant in the implementation of these two state programs, that is manifested, in particular, in the framework of participation in the Third Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen, where Cultural Platform Zakarpattya NGO enabled a conversation about mental health between the active creative youth of Chernihiv and Poltava regions with international state-makers and cultural public figures of Ukraine. Also, for the Summit, we created soft interaction-friendly mental spaces, and held traditional Muzykuvannia formats which allow young people to jointly make mental sound music and express their own emotions creatively. The inclusion of youth in such events is a key condition for building the mental well-being of Ukraine in the future.
In addition, Cultural Platform works with new educational infrastructures that reflect the need for adequate transformation of cognitive approaches to education of the modern generation, in particular, in the “How to Teach Children Mine Safety” online course. Thanks to it, educators, representatives of the National Police and the State Emergency Service can become closer to understanding the educational needs of young people and integrate high-quality (and beautiful) materials into the teaching of vital topics.
The first flower of resilience is the beginning of the “New Garden” of empathy, a substantive message that we are on the same page with the youth, that we understand and respect their thoughts and needs, their aesthetic tastes.
The tactility of the material from which the petals and stem are made grounds a person, brings them back to reality. Virtual spaces increasingly become the only “meeting” point for young people, but unity and joint action must also be formed in physical reality in order to have a full impact on society. To touch is to have direct contact with the fact that you have a body, and it is aware of the world through its senses. To touch the soft and bright is to find contact with the soft and bright parts of yourself.
The mirror inside the flower also appeared there for a reason. The trend for distorted selfies and images in convex mirrors (Traffic mirror selfie) appeared in 2023, and reflects a certain structural change in the perception of oneself and the world around. Ordinary selfies in the mirrors of public spaces are already losing their relevance, and strange and distorted angles of vision are coming to the fore. Nothing is as it appears in an ordinary mirror, so perhaps reality is more similar to a curved mirror?
The youth making flower selfies in the youth centers
The aesthetic of the imperfect is more like the truth of how we perceive ourselves. For teenagers and young people, issues of identity and self-expression through visual attributes are very important. You are whatever you tell about yourself, how you construct a story about yourself, and the new sincerity is still convex rather than flat. It is no longer possible to reduce oneself to one flat slogan — everyone has their own prominence, peculiarity, multifacetedness, their own volume of personality.
We have to take care of the spaces that surround us so that bright flowers grow in Ukraine. Because beautiful objects that can and should be touched are objects that are friendly to you. And when we are surrounded by them, we feel safe to be ourselves.
Mykola Khvylovyi wrote, “One of the signs of art is its unstoppable influence on the developed intellect”. Work on emotional intelligence undoubtedly begins with reflection (literal, seeing yourself in the mirror, and rational, analytical). The artifact of the flower of mental health combines these aspects and nurtures the idea that the beautiful must be empathic, that the aesthetic and the ethical are intertwined in the same stem and germinate in the fruitful soil.
The flowers of mental health must grow among the youth, so that they want to spread beauty (in their understanding) further and grow new gardens of their mental resilience.
Yevhen Zabarylo, Anastasiya Mishustina
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