First of all congratulation for the wonderful project that you are developing. For me was a useful experience and I hope that the project could grow and take a solid form in the future.
It was good to share our thoughts and concerns in the first part and become part of a group "outside the world". Listening to Laura and Lale concerns, and talking about my own ones was a enrichment experience. We use to forget to worry about the important and deepest concerns in our daily lives; to establish a space to do it is necessary to impulse new changes and find our personal and collective challenges. It also helped me to put in order my ideas and give shape to thoughts that usually i´m too busy to take care of.
Doing the "performance", standing with the stick and the vest in a public space near the sea was an interesting experiment. I love the idea of sculpting society and become an agent of change give the possibility to open a dialogue with people that is not aware, involving them in the project. My own concern was related with inertia as a human state and problem. During the first part I shared with Laura my feelings about the disappointment that my generation suffer, and the lack of hope that make people think that everything is too big or in such bad state that it´s impossible to be changed. People that have all their necessities covered and are immerse on the consumerist society prefer not to think about many problematics because they think that they will not affect their lives. For me ego, comfort, selfish and inertia make people blind and are obstacles to develop social changes.
In relation with this I love what social sculpture essentially means and the possibilities that it offers. It can be a useful tool to open people´s mind and agents of change that wake up other minds are completely necessary to try to have a better world. However, after this first day, I feel that the project or maybe myself, need a more concrete proposition to make a bigger impact. When I talked with some people I found difficult to connect with them to share personal thoughts and concerns. When
It will be great if someday the project become from a experiment to a tool. It´s clear that there is people that stop in the street only because you are wearing strange complements, so we can use that time with them to give a message and change their minds.
From my personal experience I felt too connected with the idea of the rising level of the sea and climate change. I´m worry about climate change but I think it has become a hook for politics and bussines and is enough covered by mass media. During the experiment, when I explained the meaning of the stick and why we were near the sea, I noticed that many people is bored and tired of listening about it. Some talking with the people that asked what we were doing confirmed my concerns about inertia, ego and selfish. When I told them about the rising level of the sea most of them answered that they won´t be alive to see it, so they just does not care.
When I asked them about their own concerns they told me about personal worries and didn´t think globally or in more abstract terms (one guy how was moving from another city or the marihuana law, for example). In other occasions they said that they didn´t know, or that they were also worried about the climate change but ended talking to me about soccer. In one hand it confirmed my impressions about occidental contemporary society, and in the other hand make me want to put more effort in changing it.
From this I´ve been thinking about how to engage people, and how to truly make them think and share their concerns. One person was grateful because our conversation made him think about his concerns and he realized (as I also did in the morning) that he didn´t think much about them for being thinking in other things. It was the person that was more interested and not only asking about the stick, so I could tell him about my concern about the inertia. He understood and agree with my point of view but he didn´t had the time to think about a proposition. The good thing is that maybe he still thinking about it after our encounter.
As a personal conclusion I feel that o become a real Agent of Change is necessary to have a solid discourse to share. When I was there and people asked me what we were doing I realized that It can be the perfect situation to make other people that are not involve to think about their own concerns and change their minds in some kind of ways. Most people were only curious and stop for a moment but that is enough if we achieve some kind of engagement or effect. The question "what are your concerns?" is the starting point for make people stop and think, something that they seemed to have forgot to do.
By Clara
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