For my 3rd intervention I was inspired by the guerrilla girls complaint wall project where they set up a space for strangers to write down their anger or frustrations down and pin them to a wall. I think that giving yourself permission to express frustration or what you need is a very powerful form of catharsis. Sometimes we hold on to our grievances in our mind and to write it down is a form of not only permission to speak and feel that issue, but to be heard. But anger or complaints aren’t the only thing we don’t always give ourselves permission to feel. I know from my own personal experiences and many others, that sometimes we don’t give ourselves permission to rest or to take time for what we need. When I visited the WW12 gallery exhibit I really liked Sharron Lee De La Cruz’s installation. She had a medical script with ‘the itchies’ written on each script, made to be torn of and taken home by the viewer.
For my own project I combined the format of Sharron Lee De La Cruz’s piece and the guerrilla Girls’ complaint project into my own. Since it was really difficult to get a fake script pad (for obvious reasons) I drew my own in a small sketch pad and brought my blank scripts to work. I asked the other servers what they needed, whatever they felt would be good for their emotional or mental health at the time. A lot of the responses were not as easily given, but it allowed my coworkers to reflect on what they really felt they needed and to give themselves permission to explore that. Since we all work in such a busy restaurant, many of the servers are working 50+ hours regularly. As you can imagine that takes a huge physical, social, mental and emotional toll. Here are some of the responses above.
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