Body That Reminds / Thing That Remembers

 I'm really happy with how my final installation turned out! Around 15 people came through it. My original plan was to be decorating my room when people came in with little interaction with the viewers, but what ended up happening instead was kind of a communal story-telling and painting session. I focused on asking each participant questions about themselves:   

Where are you from? What makes you think of your hometown? 

What is something that reminds you of something you care about? 

Then a lot of the participants also wanted to paint on me. I asked them to paint things that make them think of me (many of them knew me personally), or to paint absolutely anything. I wanted to be open to whatever they wanted to put on me. 

 

While I was painting and new people would arrive, they would ask me questions about my work on my walls, and I would tell stories.  So the final result of how the installation felt was people telling stories about places and people that mattered to them, their people reminders, and me telling them stories about other objects in my room. 

Another thing that happened was the participants would play a sort of scavenger hunt game to find where on my walls were the things that made them think of me. That became a fun game for them. Below I have some last pictures of the 'community' that formed around my installation, and the photos of comparing my objects on my walls/in my room to the ones painted on my body. 

I had an artist's statement posted on the wall outside my room as well for people to read, which I've included here.