Rethinking Your Neighborhood: A Collaborative Experience is an interactive multimedia public installation inviting visitors to construct a shared vision for their community. It serves as a platform for community memory, highlighting relevant aspects, problems, and improvements to advance advocacy work collectively. Starting with interviews and surveys, followed by interactions with multifunctional sculptures, the project encourages people to share stories about their relationships with the park and community. This collaboration is key to redefining public spaces, relationships, and a sense of agency. Through deep listening, data gathering, and collective action, we create an environment for dialogue, advocacy, and preserving collective memory.
At Irvington Park in Houston’s City Council District H. This project was sponsored by the City of Houston Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs and Art League Houston, with funding provided by the Houston Arts Alliance. The estimated number of visitors to the park was 40,000, with 3,500 scanning the sculpture codes. Despite the COVID pandemic, we collected 225 surveys from the community. The survey results and community feedback were presented to Houston’s Mayor Sylvester Turner and District H Council Member Karla Cisneros, urging them to address local community needs. As a result, we successfully installed lighting in a previously unlit area of the park and we were able to bringing positive changes to park users and the community.