ARISE stories continued

On Saturday (5/26/07), most of the kids from Thurs. 5/24 returned. We had so many kids that the next day, Sunday, we began handing out name tags to the kids and ourselves, using some of the hundreds of address labels abandoned in the "office" area, just so we could keep track of who was who, and so that we would all become part of the official team. (This was instigated by Laura Miller.) We took them around and told them a little bit about what the artists were doing. Laura, who had begun her long process of highlighting and attaching documents into a long chain, explained her project.

After hearing what was happening, a new boy, Khalil, enthusiastically asked if they could set up a room of their own. We of course said yes, showing them a few rooms that seemed safe and were not in use, and they set off running to scavenge for their favorite objects.

An interlude on office supplies: One of the most striking aspects of our discovery of objects in the church was an enormous amount of intact office supplies--letterhead paper, address labels, embossed envelopes, photo printer paper, plastic sheet protectors of all types, boxes of highlighters, binders, and more and more and more. Naturally these became the backbone of many or our activities, including the kids' artwork and Laura's exploration of the recent church history.

[We later learned from Vicki Vargo (Executive Director of Braddock Carnegie Library, first Carnegie Library built), at one of the opening events that the office supplies were courtesy of Storehouse Pittsburgh. Storehouse Pittsburgh is a program of the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation that takes in mostly new non-perishables and durable donations from local and nationwide retailers and manufacturers, and then distributes them to their members, mostly religious non-profit groups. The Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation is an ecumenical group of Christian congregations united to approach the crisis in the city, and "transform the city for God." (See more on the PLF history at the Leadership Foundations website.)]

As usual, the history of each mystery we came upon in the church led us onto many different paths and then branched into new information. Salvaging the objects led to a salvage of origins, led to a network of associations--a pile of address labels leads to a set of organizations determined to make "Pittsburgh as famous for God as it was for steel," and the invisible web that is a city becomes visible.

Laura Miller's piece, paper trail was a physicalization of this principle. She attempted to recreate the history of the church from the copious files left behind in the office. The office, though strangely clean, was knee-deep in paper when we first arrived. Laura, an archivist in training as well as an artist, started sorting through the papers and immediately found several interesting strands to follow about the recent history of the church. She decided to highlight the different aspects of the documents--names, dates, interesting information, financial data--and then create a literal paper trail that snaked its way through the space, under and around the balcony. As she went on, reconstructing the fragmentary history of the church that was so suddenly and completely abandoned, a whole cast of characters emerged, and the information from the files was supplemented by information from all the different passersby and visitors. A picture began to emerge... stay tuned.

Next: More visitors, and how to make a game out of anything.