Project Description

Home Away From Home
a CENTS collaboration
Barry Beach, Colby Claycomb, John K Melvin, Kit Rosenberg, & Izumi Yokoyama

The transient population living on the streets in the Tenderloin was the initial starting point for our project. Our group lives in San Francisco, so we are familiar with the neighborhood. Homelessness and panhandling are common impressions. The basic need of shelter is quite visibly not met for this population. Creating a structure to represent home was our first idea in project development. As the Tenderloin’s transient population makes wherever they are home, we initially proposed installing a home-like structure in Boeddeker Park. However, access to the park was not possible, as the park’s hours were restricted for budget constraints as well as transient populations using the park as living quarters.

Conversations with people living and working in the Tenderloin changed our focus. We were surprised to learn there is a substantial residential population largely removed from its turbulent streets. Families, especially children, are the heart of this population. Children comprise 40% of the neighborhood’s population, yet they are one of the least visible groups. Most children are completely protected from the outdoors by their families, living, attending school and recreating inside.

Our emphasis switched from building a project to serving the community of children. Our project combines three primary parts of the Tenderloin community: the need for home, the substantial population of child residents and the transient nature of its street life. It begins by collecting drawings from children rendering their ideas of the phrase “a house that moves.”
Children have eagerly shared their creative energies toward this. Through drawing and collages, they have brainstormed some of the most fun and atypical types of houses imaginable. We plan to archive these drawings by creating a book as an associated project.

Next, we will construct a composite house-like structure using a compilation of the children’s drawings. This three-dimensional form is in essence an attempt at building the impossible, making the imagination of children tangible. The largest challenge may prove to be creating this form both physically able to permit entry and portable so we can complete the participatory part of the project. Finally, this fabricated house-like structure will be used as a mobile meeting point for our group to interact with the Tenderloin community. On regular intervals throughout the exhibition, our group will move this “house” to various unoccupied parking spots in the neighborhood to create dialogue with passers-by. Postcards with images of the children’s drawings on front will be exchanged in this dialogue. We will ask people who receive a card to
write a message on their notions of home on the card and mail it to someone they know.
In this way, postcards will be vehicles of communication to hopefully facilitate a greater sense of global community.

Postcards can simultaneously embody the past, present and future. The house drawings on the front represent the past, an idea or a specific time and place. The act of writing messages represents the present, whatever writers deem worth recording in the moment. Mailing the postcard represents the future, as sending a postcard implies someone will read and hopefully enjoy it at a later date. Through postcards, we hope to involve writers (postcard recipients), designers (children) and facilitators (artists) in conversations about time and place. The projects legacy will be when we are notified of postal or personal interactions as a result of our participation with the community.