The Global Lives Project World Premiere

Client: Global Lives

Location: San Francisco, CA

Team: Adrienne Aquino, Liz Ogbu, Matthew Toon, Deanna Van Buren

Status: Completed 2010

The Global Lives Project is a video library, compiled by the nonprofit Global Lives, designed to cultivate empathy across cultures and show us our common humanity. Global Lives curates a collection of films that capture 24 continuous hours in the lives of individuals from around the world. This exhibit consisted of the world premiere of the first 10 films, held in a small gallery called the Room for Big Ideas. In order to truly experience each life, we created a separate room for each video so that a visitor could have complete focus on one life at a time. This series of rooms was lined up along the east and west walls of the gallery.

The structure of each room was comprised of steel scaffolding. This scaffolding was hidden and revealed as a visitor moved through the exhibit. The scaffolding formed a light structure that slipped into the existing room to form 7 new rooms. The modular nature of the assembly was meant to reflect our shared physical qualities as human beings, while the incredible diversity and uniqueness of each life was reflected in the materials, textures, and images used to dress the steel structure and create an enclosed viewing room. A greater sense of intimacy was created in each space by a common ceiling of wood pallets or slats that floated above each room, modulating the light filtering in.