I WISH THIS WAS
Candy Chang’s installation I Wish This Was offers residents of devastated New Orleans an opportunity to physically express their desires and demands for their community – through the language of the ever familiar and tactfully unthreatening HELLO, MY NAME IS sticker format.
From a grid of sticker tags on the front of an abandoned buildings (“I wish this was…a community garden, a grocery, Footlocker, not so scary looking”), one begins the realize the abundance of available real estate, and the desperate urge to rebuild the community – not physically, but rather through the implementation of necessary community fundamentals to fill these structures.
The image of getting on a plane, traveling to a barren, neglected, and ultimately less fortunate community to is a familiar one – dare I say, one romanticized in the minds of many of my generation. Getting your hands dirty, hauling, heavy lifting and two weeks later, leaving such a community with a brand new School or Hospital – is that not the greatest sense of contribution one can have?
Last week, I half overheard an interview on CBC with Daniela Papi, a young and very seasoned American volunteer-er who insists that a lot of the programs set up for young kids with good intentions – specifically Gap Year programs – are misguided. Papi is careful not to diminish undeniable value of these opportunities to the kids who are the volunteers – building their confidence, a sense of world-saving, contributing to the less fortunate – but perhaps this good intention is perilously misguided?
As a person who has painted murals of underwater scenes at a post-Hurricane orphanage in Tegucigalpa, contracted heat stroke while landscaping the front of a community Health Centre on a Residence in Nova Scotia, and inadvertently offered my time to a quietly Catholic home builder in the States, it made me question the naivety of my own efforts.
Most interestingly, Papi mentions the abundance of programs which emphasize construction; school building, especially:
“Schools don’t teach kids, people do. There are empty buildings all across Cambodia. Empty health centres, empty schools with people’s names on them – why? Because we invest in things, because it’s easy for us to build something and it’s easy for us to see that it happened. You can see a picture with a school with your name on it, and you know that it’s there”.
Listen to Papi’s CBC interview here
(all images from Candy’s website)
