My first intervention was in the classroom during the intervention showcase. When it was my turn to share, I got up and wrote Humans on the board. I explained that for my project, I wanted to ask random people to give me a word and tell me whether that word represents something that is political or apolitical. One word that had stumped me was “Humans”. Members of the classroom began to ask on the nature of the question. Does “humans” refers to a group of people or an individual? Can we truly say that anything is inherently political or are politics just a phenomenon that occurs? Regardless of what the consensus was in the end, I believe these are important questions to be asking in a world that has become so polarized due to politics.
I wanted to run the intervention again, this time in a smaller group with people who knew each other better. Over the weekend I was meeting a few friends for lunch so I decided to ask them the same question and see if they took the conversation in a different direction than the previous group. After presenting the prompt, my friends took the question as whether a person can live in a way that is unbothered by politics in the current era and what their life would have to look like to accomplish this. Concluding a long conversation, the answer was ultimately no. Even if a person is completely remote, self-sustained, and devoid of any contact with humans or human-made devices the fact that other people in the world can impact their standards of living through environmental impact or invasion means a living person cannot be completely separate from politics.
This project was inspired by Uncle Roy All Around You by Blast Theory and Paper Tiger TV as the goal of the intervention is to get people to ask thought provoking questions in settings that they normally wouldn’t. However, where Paper Tiger TV sought to teach the value of counterculture having a voice, my project is about showcasing the divide between two equal large and increasingly polarizing senses of culture by demonstrating how permeating and inescapable the differences are in our everyday lives. This is similar to Blast Theory’s project as it asks each participate to evaluate their disposition towards strangers but in a political sense as opposed to trust wise.
Photo taken during the second intervention. Permission to post granted shortly after.