Neighboring: Making Connections Where You Are
/By Theora Kvitka and Catherine Oldershaw
August 31, 2019
Were you ever frustrated by not feeling rooted in the place that you live? Have you wished you knew people around you and were part of a community? That’s how we, Catherine Oldershaw and Theora Kvitka, felt as two recent transplants to Pittsburgh. Efforts to get to know the people nearby were hit or miss, and yet we had a desire to make friends and turn this new city into our home.
Out of this desire grew our project called Neighboring, which encourages relationships between people living in Pittsburgh, PA. This was the first project that we have collaborated on, but definitely not the last! Catherine runs a storefront gallery (Late Space), and Theora is a cartoonist and illustrator. We both also work full-time as design researchers.
In addition to our personal connection to the project, we were also inspired by the increasing division in our country, and also by Donella Meadows, a systems thinker. Meadows said, “The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience.” We hoped that if we encouraged our neighbors to get to know their neighbors, we could build small but sturdy links between people.
We launched Neighboring as an interactive gallery show at Late Space on September 7th, 2018. Using post-it notes, markers, and whiteboards, visitors were encouraged to share how well they know their neighbors, when was the last time they interacted with them, and how the idea of interacting with their neighbors made them feel. We were pleasantly surprised by how many people took the time to anonymously leave their thoughts in the gallery. Gallery visitors expressed a full range of emotions; we heard about neighbors helping each other, avoiding each other and resenting each other.
The show was also a kick-off of our call for submissions. We encouraged Pittsburgh residents to spend some time with someone they live near (but not a relative or classmate), and then make art or an artifact that reflected that interaction. The call was very broad; we asked for “anything that feels meaningful to the creator and the relationship formed with their neighbor”.
After the show closed, our project became even more relevant. On October 27th, 2018, a gunman killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue, just a short distance from the gallery. As the city grieved and processed the tragedy, many felt the need to express themselves. There were vigils and marches, and community projects such as making over 2000 Star of Davids to decorate Squirrel Hill. We hoped that our project could be an outlet for a city processing this terrible hate crime.
In the meantime, we did our best to advertise the call for submissions but it was a lot harder than we expected. We put up posters, left postcards in coffee shops, emailed our artist friends and posted on social media. Since we are designers, not marketers, we weren’t sure if our promotional efforts were too limited, or if the challenge was something larger. Was our prompt too vague or too broad? Was the deadline (which we extended twice) too far away from the initial kick-off show? Perhaps it’s harder than we thought for people to reach out to their neighbors, and maybe all the more important.
Front of a postcard used to advertise the call for submissions. Illustration by Theora kvitka
When the time came to review submissions for the show, we were surprised that themes around the shooting and violence in the community did not come up. The 10 works we chose were incredibly thoughtful but we were surprised that they are largely positive.
Our intention with the exhibit was not to gloss over the challenges that come with the reality of being a neighbor. Beyond just interacting with each other, maybe what people need is to evolve their notion of “neighbor” beyond just positive idealism to the complex nature of these relationships: good or bad, weak or familial, dependent or isolated.
At the final show (which occurred during the neighborhood’s first Friday event), we had some wonderful conversations with gallery goers. One was with Kortni, the co-founder of BereaveMed, who invited us to write this guest post!
In the center of the gallery, we provided another opportunity for people to reflect on their current neighbor relations. A large table displayed a timeline for people to add their most recent interactions with their neighbors, and explore those of others. The timeline extended into the future so that people could consider the role they play and the relationships they’d like to have in their community.
The neighbor interaction timeline created at the final show, incorporating ideas for future neighbor interactions. Photo credit Long Hong.
While it’s impossible to measure the impact of this project, we are confident that we touched at least a few people’s lives, including the artists, their neighbors, and of course, our own! We spent hours working on this idea and we weren’t always sure where the project was headed. We are so glad with where it ended up, and that our final show was such a success. We plan to continue the Neighboring project with a self-published book and tool-kit so that others can bring the project to their own city. We hope that future instances of Neighboring will inspire more conversations, artwork and a feeling of connectedness between people.
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Check out some of the artists’ websites:
Grace Wong: http://www.gracewcreative.com/
Kevin DeLand: http://delandbeforeti.me/