'What Does it Feel Like to Have Everything?' Project
What Does it Feel Like to Have Nothing?
What Does it Feel Like to Have Everything?
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, homelessness visibly increased in my neighborhood in San Francisco. As I was walking home one day, a man who seemed to be living on the street asked me, “what does it feel like to have everything?” I began to seriously ponder this question, thinking about questions like: What does it really mean to “have everything”? Does it mean having material goods, a home, wealth...and as an extension of that, what is the privilege of having things to throw away? What does our waste say about our socioeconomic status, our lifestyles, our preferences? As a way to further develop this idea, I created a socially distant collaborative art project. I put out large wood panels on my front stoop, and asked people in my community to bring waste objects from their homes - old cables, toothpicks, packaging, disposable cutlery, anything they were planning to throw away. As the detritus from these different homes built up layers on the wood panels, themes about the financial privileges of consumer waste became clear - packaging from online deliveries from Amazon, contact lens cases, old concert tickets - none of these past lifestyle choices were possible without some measure of financial privilege. However, I recognized most people in my community did not feel that these items made them feel like they truly “had everything.” The works What Does it Feel Like to Have Everything and What Does it Feel Like to Have Nothing are essentially the same on purpose - meditating on how the having of things may signal a socioeconomic privilege, but may do nothing to indicate the fullness or lack thereof we may feel in our lives.