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Project Description:

Our urban projection project will project onto large windows of a building in Kensington, seeking to represent the unfair treatment of people who are victims of the broken systems that cause homelessness within cities in the United States, accompanied by statistics about the issue referring specifically to the city of Philadelphia. One of the statistics that will be explored is about the foster care system in this country. Young adults in the system are released at the age of eighteen with no family or social network and are expected to be functioning members of society with little to no guidance. We want to represent this issue with articles of clothing and found objects, ones that appear tattered and assume the condition of forgottenness. One sees abandoned possessions on the street and many times does not bat an eye, but we want to create awareness about how all possessions have a story, are connected to us, and that we should listen to what our surroundings are trying to tell us.

The second issue that we will explore through our projections is that of overpriced housing, through an animated map of the neighborhood’s abandoned lots. We will compare that number to the amount of homeless people in the same area.

We will be projecting on one of the big windows and the space below the window on the brick wall, across the street from our professor Mina’s studio.

Our piece subliminally comments on the issue of gentrification since we will project on an old warehouse in the Kensington neighborhood. The neighborhood has been home to lower income families for many years but in the past couple of years, housing prices have grown, housing mostly young professionals, and forcing families who have lived in the area for many years out of their homes and on to the streets. The goal, in terms of what we want our audience to walk away with, is to have food for thought - to realize that there is a problem, encourage those who have the means to fight for a solution, and give hope to those who are the most affected by these broken systems.

To provide some interactivity for the audience and offer a more informative view on the issues we are commenting on, we will include a QR code within our projection that will lead to a custom website with a collection of relevant statistics and links to their sources, links to articles about the issues, and links to local organizations that are attending to them. This will effectively open up a path for audiences to more deeply engage with the issues if they are moved by the projection.