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What’s Home: Creative Listening Across Differences is a multi-faceted project with lots of behind and between the scenes connection. I hope we can bring the magic of these connections to you through this blog, a sort of journal that somehow captures the magic and humanity of artists using their creativity to articulate and document the resilience of our community, the joy of connection, and yes, the tragedy of our housing crisis.
Learning to speak a common language…
How do we collaborate on a project when we don’t have a common language, or when our ideas about home are… complex and ambivalent. As multi-media artist Linda Cover talked about working on this project with unhoused participant Robin, she spent some time eliciting memories of what home was or might be. Listen as Robin describes how difficult it is to associate the warm feelings of home with the sometimes traumatic experiences that happen there. How to we find a way to thrive even when we’re in survive mode? Robin calls it Better Tents & Gardens.
Meet our new Artists…
Painters Carmen León and Josefina Rocha V. will collaborate as they converse with Spanish speaking housed and unhoused people. See below as they both talk about their creative processes.
Josefina Rocha V.
Carmen León
Confronting our own judgement…
After 81-year-old playwright Ed Weingold meets his collaborators and begins to assimilate his notes, he is confronted-- and confronts-- his own capacity for judgement. How do we approach the houseless community without bias and with an open mind and heart? Can you identify your own biases?
Timestamp from interview with Ed as he writes his play:
0:23 - ‘Six Up: a play about possibility in an impossible scene’
0:48 - Ed introduces Bonnie and Nerissa as Characters
1:30 - Ed reads notes from his initial meeting with Nerissa
1:50 - Ed invisions a thought bubble over Ed’s head “she’s a motor mouth”
4:45 - Ed talks about his process and what he has yet to add
6:30 - Ed talks about ‘the concentration camp’ and his understanding why Nerissa calls it that
8:21 - Ed writing goes into his internal judgments he has while first meeting Nerissa, and then wonders if these judgments are sound or unfairly projected
10:10 - the home question is about belonging
11:12 - Ed reads notes from his initial meeting with Bonnie
11:50 - Ed makes notes of Bonnie’s relationship to her mother
14:30 - Ed makes note of the age difference between himself 81, Bonnie 23, and Nerissa 43
15:41 - Ed reflects on Bonnie living in a hallway
16:15 - Ed wonders why Bonnie doesn’t stop taking care of her mother, he notices himself judging her co-dependency issues
16:30 - Ed acknowledges it’s hard not to judge others, thanks to his own upbringing with critical unfriendly parents
17:00 - Ed talks about how luck relates to his writing. Luck can dictate where you end up, in a house or a tent