We talk about CSR as  “Corporate Social Responsibility”. So what about “Creative Social Responsibility”?

Do we artist have any responsibility or are we free to create whatever we want in our urge to express ourselves? Or should we first look under the hood and see what drives us? Do we want to contribute or accumulate, give or get? We need to ask us what values we are sending out in the world, where do they come from, what do they lead to at the end of the day and can we use our creative expression to create positive change in the world?

I don’t really know what our “Creative Social Responsibility” is as artists, but it give me a good feeling to think, that what I create can make a difference for future generations. In many ways I feel that the whole conversation about “social responsibility” is rather confusing and in many ways just a measure on how of track our society is, do we really need a concept for caring? CSR “Common Sense Responsibility”, that is what it is, but common sense is unfortunately not always common practice. The idea that we need to create a concept for caring is rather frightening and that it is about only giving 1-3% of our profit many times, shouldn’t it be 100%? Or at least 50%, like our breath, we get equally as much as we give back with every in and out breath. Earth is giving birth to all of us but we treat our mother as a commodity and call her a nature resource, whilst she is giving unconditional love to every one of us including the animals, stones and plants. Mother Earth hugs us with her gravity making sure we don’t fall of her pretty face that we walk upon. The air is like the blood that we all share, connecting us all to each other.

Why are we on this planet if it is not to care for one another? We all know that at the end of our lives we will not look back on all the stuff we had and be happy, we will see what we did for others and the moments we created together. However, CSR is a great step to get in contact with our inner compass and when we do that we don’t need rules and regulations, we just do the right thing because it is the right thing.

Live life as you breath, give and receive equally much. Aim for a balanced 50/50 life.

Can art change the world?

Of course it can! Art changes the world all the time. Wherever we go we are bombarded with advertising art that does it absolutely best to impart us, in our pursuit of happiness. Many of the world’s greatest artist work with advertising creating irresistible, breathtaking art, making the masses blind believers of consumerism, just adding to our global over consumption problem. But is this the best we can do? Or could we artist use our creative expression to elevate all of humanity? Imagine if people 300 years from now look back at us and says “thank you”. Thanking us for waking up and taking our creative responsibility as artist using our gifts to contribute. Imagine if we unite and start to value human life above material wealth. Together we can create the greatest piece of art ever done; WORLD PEACE! What could be more important for us to focus on in a world that looks like the one we live in?

My CSR Story

by Filip C Agoo

I got interested in CSR back in 2005 when my brother Peter Cederholm started talking about it. We ran the production company YAYA Creative together, during the days he worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers and the CSR conversation had just started . Then Al Gore came with the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, I saw it +5 times and we arranged movie nights at the studio to spread the message. We did what everyone did and changed light bulbs, used less water, change electricity supplier, turn of all electronics at night and so on. Then we started to look at what we were creating to see if we could improve our product, that lead to an attempt to do more pictures that spread awareness, like the one below with September/Petra Marklund published in Veckorevyn as one in a series of pictures about the effects of global warming. After a while I started to think more about “why” I was creating and what it lead to in a larger perspective. I felt that I was just propelling the over consumption problem with glossy advertising. I asked myself could I as a photographer take a larger responsibility? That thought gave birth to CSR as “Creative Social Responsibility” and I realised that I wanted to do ever more. I wanted to create an advertising campaign for love and compassion that generates money for kids in need and when I came up with the concept of photographing the first ever human alphabet with thousands of kids around the world then I left my career and endeavoured on my life mission.