What is This Project Then?

So, I got this idea after the first meeting.

This is formal proposal detail so a bit long...

"Meet Me at the Unisphere"


In the spirit of the Flushing Remonstrance, religious and cultural diversity has flourished in Queens, giving us the unique opportunity to access a variety of different religious viewpoints in one community. However, in our fast-tempo sound-byte contemporary culture, deep consideration of other religious views is often skipped in favor of brief facts, superficial impressions, and hearsay. Thus information is transmitted and repeated from source to source, and like a photocopy, slightly changed and obscured with each generation.

The work I propose will replicate this process, but with a twist. The purveyors of this information will be children, with their uniquely innocent way of grasping, or misunderstanding information. I will have an open call for elementary school children’s drawing, asking them to visit, with their parents’ permission a church, a temple, a synagogue, and/or a mosque, and draw what they see or understand from their visits. These drawings can be of anything they notice on their trips. The drawings collected from this open call will then be passed on to middle school students who will be asked to create booths (one per religion) based on these drawings. The booths will be constructed beneath the Unisphere and each one will represent one of the four major religions included in this project.

Next, I will have leaders from these various religions come and explain their beliefs and practices to the group of middle school students over a series of discussion sessions. I will then ask the middle school students to man the booths and explain a bit about the religion they are representing, based on what they grasped from the sessions with the religious leaders, to visitors on a specified "performance" day. Like a game of telephone, it is likely that certain information will get distorted in the process, but which information, and how it is distorted should be quite revealing.

The entire process would be open to public unless specifically notified.