The passivity of the European authorities in the face of the death of thousands of people is something that goes against European values.

So the leitmotiv of the campaign is a European Union flag in which we replaced the twelve stars with twelve drowned bodies. The headline says “Don’t let the values of Europe sink in the Mediterranean”.

This image was shared around social networks with the hashtag #UErfanos, a word play with UE (EU in Spanish), and “huérfanos” (orphans in Spanish). All posts were sent to the site UErfanos.org.

The play on words was written in Spanish, because in theory it was a local campaign. However thanks to Banksy, it spread around the whole world.

To make our Community flag we photographed some CEAR volunteers one by one. The shoot took place in the swimming pool of photographer Ángel Álvarez, who worked free of charge for this campaign. Afterwards the photos of each person were set into a marine background. All this work was done in a week after the idea had been created.

Building the microsite barely took another week, and going viral on the social networks grew gradually, until we managed to get on to Banksy’s Facebook profile.

Before this campaign the organisation CEAR was hardly known in Spain. But thanks to it they have managed to get 8,000 new entries in their data base, and go from hundreds of followers to thousands on their social networks, sign up hundreds of new members, and get a 13 million euro budget from the Spanish Government.

As for the campaign’s reach, in Banksy’s Facebook profile alone one million likes were registered, plus the thousands of impressions generated in Twitter, Facebook and other media commenting on Banksy’s supposed brilliance, followed by the news that in fact this campaign was not his work.