7: Making Visible

It’s just an average high school hallway. The walls are lined with lockers, broken up intermittently with doors to classrooms full of students.

But the floor tiles bear an extra marking. Tape lines divide, subdivide, and make paths through the hallway. My eyes visually guide my feet, weaving from left to right, just trying to make it to the end of the hallway. It slows my pace, heightens my thinking. Like a child who jumps around, refusing to “step on a crack and break your mother’s back,” I am bound by these 1 inch walls.

I didn’t stay long enough to see classes change, but I remember that experience. A similar weaving, slow from congestion, and a constant thinking, rethinking, routing, and rerouting, to effectively navigate the sea of people.

In the busy-ness of it all, are students aware of the maze, or is it trampled underfoot?

When I reached the other side, I noticed I’d actually worked my way back to the start. A bulletin board informed me that the Architecture Design Club created this installation. What a curious group of students. It reminded me of a story a professor told at one of the first KU NAEA Mishaps and Mayhem talks about a brick wall in a hallway, erected overnight by an art club, that disrupted routine and forced people to find a new route to their classes.

Interruptions have a way of making us look at the everyday,
the ordinary, with new eyes.

They challenge us to truly see. They disrupt the norm.
_

My flight was delayed. My gate was changed. I finally got in my seat and crashed. I woke up to exit the plane, drag myself to the luggage carousel, find my bag, and hail a cab. I zonked out for most of the cab ride back to my apartment, finally turning the key at 11:45. I dropped my luggage and headed for my bedroom, ready to jump into bed without brushing my teeth or washing my face.

And then the door wouldn’t open all the way.

Interrupted. Disrupted. Erupted.

Strung from behind the door, clear across the room from the built-in cabinets to the curtain rod, were six massive Chinese lanterns. I was furious for about 5 seconds, then burst out laughing. My partners-in-crime took our drama decorations from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and repurposed them in my bedroom. The red orbs did not seem large in a 400-person auditorium, but they disrupted everything in my small master bedroom.

The lanterns were a lot of mafan (a bother, nuisance, trouble), but only tonight did I cut the string from which they were hanging, and only because I needed to get into a cabinet and the string tied the handles together.

Every day, for the past week, I have contorted my body, ducking under the string, walking in the narrow path along my bed, opening my door, closing it, wiggling behind the lanterns and into my bathroom.

It is an interruption.

But each time, it reminds me of friends who love me enough to prank me. To disrupt my life, my routine (be it at 11:45 at night when I had to wake up at 5:00 the next morning for work).


Xu Bing’s work sheds light on cultural understanding by disrupting the foreign and making it more accessible than one would ever imagine. It invites the viewer to “pause to think about how we are creating the culture in which we live through our small, daily interactions—our words, glances, and actions.”



Sometimes an interruption is art for art’s sake.

          Lanterns in a bedroom
          A maze on a floor
          A brick wall in a hallway

But sometimes it’s a divine intervention.

An invitation to something better, if you can just get past the routine and see what else waits for you.

It can be a catalyst for reflecting on relationships, allow you to see what you truly value, and ask you to make space for something different, something new, something that is just waiting for you to open your heart and allow it to enter.


                    But first comes the disruption.




_

Author's Note: As I wrote this post, I was in shock over the recent news that my downstairs neighbors, a family with which I spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, and Sunday Night Dinner, would be moving to a sister-school in another city in China. While I was grieving the upcoming loss, and its interruption to plans for my future and theirs, our school experienced a greater interruption that no one could anticipate. On Friday, March 25, during Parent/Teacher conferences, a 5th grade student was playing near his house and had a tragic accident. The injuries from his fall were unsurvivable. He was taken to the local hospital, then medi-evaced to Hong Kong, but the doctors in Hong Kong pronounced him dead on Tuesday, March 29. He was the son of a high school teacher, the younger brother of a middle school student, the older brother of an elementary student, the son of the PTO president, the friend of the clubhouse kids who run around our apartment complexes, the classmate of the 5th graders, and the student of the elementary teachers. My student, for three years. I attended a two-week training with his family and other new staff prior to moving to China. Then on July 25, 2008, we met up in San Francisco and boarded the plane for our journey together to teaching abroad. He will forever be part of my story of teaching ARTabroad, but for now, our community weeps, wails, and draws near to support each other in this interruption.

Assignment: Find something that invites the public into a different route or routine, i.e., a pause in their typical everyday way of seeing and moving through space and time. Take a photo, sketch it, or make it visible. Create a story that contextualizes the everyday routine way of knowing and how the something that you found (or placed/did) in that everyday environment disrupts, challenges, or changes public action and knowledge.

References:
http://www.kimberlydark.com/activism_frame.html
Shirer, Priscilla (2010). Jonah: Navigating a Life Interrupted. Nashville: LifeWay Press.