An exhibition on women’s rights was seen by tens of thousands of people in Slovakia and abroad

For millions of women around the world, housing is not a promise or guarantee. They face prejudice and discrimination that prevents them from owning land or building houses. They are also exposed to the climate crisis, war, and dangerous living conditions in slums. Here in Slovakia, we are mostly indifferent to global issues. In our campaign for the international development organisation Habitat for Humanity, we were faced with the challenge of how to make the topic visible to as many people as possible.

We created an original exhibition called Everything Starts at Home, which presented the stories of six women and their struggles to find their own housing. We set it up in an exposed location in front of the Old Market Square in Bratislava and on the website vsetkosazacinadoma.sk. 

We also united with the IKEA department store in Bratislava to convert one of the model rooms into an exhibition space for the first time in Slovakia. We created an installation with a simple, narrow bed that said, “This is the greatest luxury for millions of women around the world.”

We created a successful influencer campaign

In order to bring the topic closer to the widest possible audience, we also placed the exhibition in a simplified form on Instagram and involved well-known Slovak influencers led by Celeste Buckingham, Lujza Garajová Schrameková, and Zuzana Kovačič Hanzelová. Those on Instagram showed people why home is so important to them, and they ended up pulling their followers into the debate about women’s issues.

We launched the exhibition on International Women’s Day. The topic also attracted the attention of the media, who covered it in the form of interviews, reports, a special double page, and a podcast. Journalists worked with facts and stories from our exhibition.

We are particularly pleased that the concept for the exhibition and campaign was so successful that Habitat for Humanity decided to adapt it for other European countries, including Ireland, Great Britain, Germany, and the Czech Republic.