The journey of great projects: from New Orleans to Amsterdam
In February 2011, american artist Candy Chang build the first ever ”Before I Die” wall. In a quest to inspire people in New Orleans(think: Hurricane Kathrina), she took a wall from an old abandoned house and changed it into an interactive artwork. The story behind her inspiration is really stunning, I can really recommend reading it!
All there is really is just this big chalkboard with a lot of sentences on it, all of them say: Before I die I want to………………. and it’s up to the people to fill in the blanks. As you can see, the artwork itself is not that special, it’s the contributions of the people that makes this so cool and that’s exactly what we liked about it straight away.
This project was a great succes and was picked up by a lot of people and media in the USA.
The original project by Candy Chang in New Orleans.
Beautiful contributions were made.
The whole wall was filled in just 1 day!
But we are not US citizens, where do we come in? How did we found out about this project and moved it from a hood in New Orleans to a festival in The Netherlands? Actually it was all pure luck in the beginning, we were reading Jay-Z’s online magazine Life+Times and come across an article about this project. We didn’t hesitate for a moment and e-mailed Candy Chang. After a lot of e-mails, a big package from the USA dropped in our mailbox and it was time to decide how to make the most of this unique opportunity.
Our original idea was just to set up a wall in the centre of Amsterdam(Dam Square to be exact) and see how people would react to it, a sort of guerilla marketing stunt. But when we thought more and more of it, this idea didn’t sound so great after all.
Everybody knows the Amsterdam city centre is all about tourists and people from other city’s shopping in Amterdam. We didn’t want to reach those people, hell no, we wanted to reach YOU! Young, ambitious and creative guys and girls, by far the hardest group to connect with because everybody is always doing there own thing and will not be forced into contributing to an artwork.
So we had to connect to you, in an informal setting, without the feeling of being pushed into something. After sleepless nights and countless brainstorm sessions it suddenly became clear, we had to take a shot at creating our own Arculture x Candy Chang stand at some of the Dutch festivals!
In just 2 weeks we arranged a spot at Solar Festival. As we hoped, they really liked the concept and we were good to go!
Without any construction experience, we just started building and however it took 300% more time than we had planned, the wall turned out quite well.
The stand turned out quite well but we still had no clue how people would react to it.
After yesterday we know, people love the concept and really appreciate it! We couldn’t be more proud, when we started this business, this is exactly what we had in mind to reach out to people!
So thanks everybody who contributed to the wall yesterday and for those who are @ Solar festival today: don’t hate or hesitate. just Participate!
With your help we are sure we can arrange stands @ other festivals as well!
Edit: Check out all the photo’s from Solar!
AC
-
etta-parker reblogged this from arculture
-
arculture posted this
