Bryan Mc Cormack, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (YTT)
Using Visual Expression and Art to Give Voice to Refugees, Promote Gender Equity, and Reduce Gender-Based Violence in Rwamjwana and Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlements in Uganda
Bryan Mc Cormack is an Irish-born contemporary artist living in Paris since 2000 with over 40 group and solo art exhibitions to his name. He is the Founder of Yesterday Today Tomorrow (YTT), a Paris-based global, human rights and gender equality education nonprofit.
I first learned about Bryan in early May 2024 when searching on the internet for international nonprofit organizations supporting refugee artists. My search was prompted by the June 2024 Online Young Refugee Artist Expo that I was preparing to cohost with
and , showcasing the art of ten Nakivale Young Talent Community artists.YTT’s vision is: a world where every individual in need is empowered through the YTT Gender Equality Education and YTT Mental Healthcare Support Programs. The YTT Approach revolves around the profound impact of visual expressions in cultivating self-awareness and understanding, gender-equality and mental health support. This distinctive approach comprises two key pillars: the YTT Visual Language and the YTT Methodology
I found Bryan’s 2017 TEDx Talk called “Art That Gives A Voice to the Refugees”. In this 12-minute thought-provoking talk about his visits to dozens of camps and squats in Europe and North Africa in 2016, he shares the pictures that refugees and asylum-seekers drew after he encouraged them with three sheets of paper and colored pens to communicate in the most common and universal human language - art - three pictures: a picture of their life before (yesterday), one of their current life (today), and one how they can imagine it in the future (tomorrow).
The experience for him was profound, haunting and impossible to forget. The people who engaged in this exercise, many of them children, had endured inexplicable trauma, pain and suffering. Some of them left the third paper (for tomorrow) blank, returning it to him without any mark made.
The horror in the drawings; you just cannot not react to that horror.
The project he described was part of his preparation for the 2017 Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy, the world’s largest art festival. He knew he wanted to do a refugee-focused installation, given that 1.3 million people had attempted asylum/migration in 2015 to Europe, the most in a single year since World War II. He just wasn’t sure what exactly it would like like… at first.
I knew I only wanted to do the Biennale if the topic was on the refugee crisis that was happening at that time. But I didn’t know what. I was in Paris then. There were Chechen children on the streets. Noone could communicate with them and they were turbulent. I decided to do drawings with them. And, I realized adults and children who live through trauma can visualize and revisualize their life.
That’s when he came up with drawings in “three tenses”: yesterday, today and tomorrow (YTT). He pulled together a volunteer team of psychologists, researchers and educators to conduct this simple YTT drawing exercise with thousands of refugees in over 30 camps and squats in Europe and North Africa. He soon had a large database of drawings (see YTT’s Drawing Blog) which he then transformed into a mass art installation co-created with thousands of migrants and refugees.
He also shared the drawings daily on social media as he collected them as a way of reflecting back to the refugees that their voice was heard and they are seen. He then presented his installation at the Biennale, a curated collection of refugee voices called “Yesterday/Today/Tomorrow: Traceability is Credibility” (referring to the marks made on paper by the refugees document their existence and give them voice and value).
From 2016 to 2020 (up until COVID), Bryan was driven to continue exploring how art and education could change both the lives of refugees as well as shape the attitudes and perceptions about refugees of the next generation. This included founding the YTT nonprofit in 2017, conducting more research, and partnering with professionals to develop a teaching and learning methodology that could be delivered within refugee communities and the larger world to build empathy, connection, and understanding while also promoting gender equity and human rights and preventing gender-based violence.
Leading up to the COVID pandemic the team was conducting trials and testing various elements of their methodology.
With our University partner, we thought that a universal learning approach through drawing that could touch different themes could be beneficial. We started to test and were surprised at the results. Working with two groups of school children from public schools, we pretested through questions, applied the learning methodology to one group (and not the other), and then did post testing. We discovered the approach reduced all forms of implicit prejudice and increased empathy. The project was based on the concept of “If you want to understand me walk in my shoes; all through drawing.”
Bryan’s words from his 2020 Speech at Reggio Emilia in Italy sum up four years of research:
Through drawing, children can express clearly their thoughts and feelings independent of dialect, nationality or education.
The resulting images transmit a distinct and individual voice from children living in extreme inhuman conditions and produce the visual storytelling that is intense and brutal but exceptionally coherent and clear.
They use these drawings to create and develop a universal human rights and gender equality education program. Using specific visual storytelling techniques and a teaching methodology.
The methodology was developed over three years with assistance from leading universities. Presented and taught in several hundred schools in various places around the world with a team of over 40 international volunteers, pscyhologists, educators, researchers. We can prove that it removes all forms of discrimination and give a profound understanding of human rights and gender equality.
Just last week (July 21-26, 2024) during the International Congress of Psychology in Prague, YTT researchers presented a study conducted in partnership with Roma Tre Universita Degli Studi and Sapienza Universita Di Roma with the title “Reducing Gender Stereotypes in Primary Schools; A Multi-Faceted Educational Program.” The study which used a control group showed that YTT Program delivery significantly reduced children’s implicit and explicit gender stereotypes and bias. The group receiving the intervention also showed an increase in the gender egalitarian attitudes.
YTT in East Africa
While YTT has delivered its teaching and learning programs in various parts of the world (e.g. Bosnia, Italy, US), the focus of my interview with Bryan was about YTT’s programming in East Africa, specifically the Bidi Bidi and Rwamwanja Refugee Settlements in Uganda since 2022. The two settlements collectively are home to 500,000 refugees from a dozen or more East African countries including Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan.
Bryan explained that they chose to locate YTT programming at these settlements based on the premise that the most marginalized people in the world are refugees and the most marginalized refugees in the world are young girl refugees living in proximity to conflict zones.
YTT works with local partners in both settlements and specifically women refugee-led programs when possible like Alpha Elimu in Rwamjwana.
We develop the programs locally always. While we have the approach they are tailor made. The gender equality program at YTT is in the broadest sense, gender equality is the main issue. Young girls are facing child trafficking and forced marriage. And, not finishing primary school is biggest issue. If we can show that the economic value of a girl increases once she learns, once she has learned to read and write once she finishes school there is personal empowerment. The wish and desire to go forward.
In 2023 alone, YTT collaborated with 17 refugee schools reaching 26,000 schoolchildren and training 92 teachers and 37 educators. They also held 14 community interventions and 9 online teacher trainings.
YTT is currently conducting a pilot program with I Can South Sudan to implement trainings of trainers and education in schools in all four sectors of Bidi Bidi (finishing the project by April 2025).
I don’t even think about it. I just want to aid as many as people as I can.
Bryan is a contemporary artist who has used his art to bring attention to social justice issues. As such, he has been playing the role of ChangeMaker for decades.
I asked him whether his art has always had a social justice message and why. His answer was more about the role of art… “good art,” he added as a qualifier:
All art should be political. All contemporary art should speak about the world in which we live today. At the very least it should be proposing something.
I then asked what propelled or compelled him to expand his reach from artist to humanitarian, and specifically focus on refugees. Were there any watershed moments in his childhood, as a young adult or later that caused him to not only not look away from the refugee crisis of 2015 but to do something, anything?
He started his answer with a smile and the statement, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but…” followed by:
I don’t even think about it. I just want to aid as many as people as I can. It’s such an effort to do just that. I never said to myself, “Why am I doing this?” The goal is the next step - more, bigger, more.
The amount of effort required to raise the funds to deliver YTT’s programming is what he’s focused on, not why he’s doing the work. “L’argent, c’est le nerf de la guerre”, he said in French. Translated into English, “Money is the nerve of war,” meaning money is what makes everything happen.
He then rattled off YTT’s stats, a significant accomplishment in a short period of time: since April 2022, in 2.5 years, YTT has taught 60,000 school children and 180,000 family and community members. They’ve trained more than 250 teachers in over 100 schools in the YTT method. And, tested the program for 7 years. On top of that, 80% of their funds raised go directly to programming, one of the highest rates of funding-to-program delivery in the international NGO world.
We’ll give the last words of this interview to Bryan who during his interview at the MeltingPot convening in Prague in July 2018 said:
Refugee children cannot always read or write. But everyone can draw. Everybody needs to be heard. Everybody needs to have a voice. It's their voice not my voice that has to be heard.
