Candy Chang Before I Die, I Want To https://www.ted.com/talks/candy_chang_before_i_die_i_want_to
“How can we lend and borrow more things, without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? How can we share more memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? How can we share more of our hopes for our vacant storefronts, so our communities can reflect our needs and dreams today?”
And so begins Chang in her search to revive the sense of community for the people that live, eat, breathe around us and we so often regard coldly as strangers. Chang attempts to break down the barriers between us, so we do not regard ourselves as separate, but as a whole, as a one; to revive the humanity and individuality within everyone, share in their dreams, hopes, and aspirations as one. She takes the ugly and abandoned and rebirths it into something beautiful, a reminder of culture, of identity and value of history, of community. Her project “Before I Die, I Want To…” (in which people take the prompt and fill in the blank on a public mural) is a reminder of that, of the wonder and purpose of life, the reason to go on and move forward with hopes for something greater; it reveals the beauty of human hope, of our aspirations and desires that take shape within each of us, no matter who. Together, we dream, even under the most unendurable circumstances, the heaviest and most brutal hardships, we dream. If there isn’t a beauty to that, then I don’t know where else to find it. It is unique in that doesn’t focus on the individual situation of experience,but instead on the things that make us all the same; it revolves around community, of universal hopes and dreams that connect us not to our fantasies of paradise, but to the lives of the people around us, an idea and approach that has never been attempted within any of the class material. I love that the piece is incredibly inspirational, a reminder that the people around are not strangers, but peers, people of our communities, of our homes; that we are all human, all the same on the insides.It's about building hope from desolation, creating a future from ruins. It regards humanity’s dream as something far reaching and universal, something we invest all our hopes into, dedicate our lives to finally grasping.
“It's about knowing you're not alone,” Chang says. “It's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways; it's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change”