Downtown Phoenix’s FilmBar hosted seven brief and diverse presentations concerning urban development, sustainability and education in Phoenix on Wednesday night.
In the fourth installment of its kind in Phoenix, Pecha Kucha (Japanese onomatopoeia for chitchat) challenged speakers to explain their philosophies and projects in the Phoenix area.
Each presenter was given six minutes and 40 seconds to explain the urban projects he or she planned, completed or is in the process of completing.
Phoenix artist Hugo Medina‘s presentation detailed an ongoing project in the residential areas of Phoenix. He said that murals are the best way to beautify a neighborhood. His goal, he said, is to turn all of 16th Street into an “outdoor museum.”
“Art does not have any boundaries,” Medina said. “It doesn’t know race, culture or age.”
Medina said the project, titled Calle 16 Mural Project, targets children by giving them an outlet for creativity.
Architectural designers Jon Kitchell and Lorenzo Perez displayed their craftsmanship as architects who are attempting to reinvigorate the “souls” within buildings.
“We are trying to celebrate the original architecture,” Kitchell said.
For one of their projects, their team took recycled redwood and built a housing compartment for a dumpster container. This alleviated residents’ worries about the intentions of the duo’s architecture company, Perez said.
“This is not just an economic return,” Perez said. “We’re looking for a social, cultural and ecological return.”
Greg Esser, director of the Desert Initiative at the ASU Art Museum, asked pointed questions aimed at Arizona’s infrastructure.
“Why isn’t Arizona the world leader for using solar power?” he asked. “Where are we heading as a species and culture?”
The Desert Initiative, he said, would help answer these questions by interconnecting the 23 desert regions around the world. He said by looking at the issues from a school of arts perspective, the stories that guide principles can really begin to be told.
“Water is one of our most important resources,” he said. Most people, he added, don’t realize that because of infrastructure, the Phoenix area is home to one of the most fertile valleys in the world.
Katie Charland, another presenter, claimed that education is fundamentally broken, mostly due to requiring high test scores to ensure teachers’ bonuses and continued careers as educators. She said that if children aren’t allowed to fail, they will never learn from their mistakes.
Gangplank, the company Charland works with, has created an outlet for children called Gangplank Junior.
Gangplank Junior, she said, is about creating a practical application for adult professions. In the journalism outlet, children don’t focus on the “dying” newspaper, she said, but on podcasts and online news content, so that they may adapt to the way in which information is distributed.
“We have a 10-year-old doing a profile on Gadhafi,” she said.
Jason Ayers, who organized the event, said he regrets letting work interfere with the Pecha Kucha talks, which “went into a hiatus” during the summer. He said although he has successfully filled presentation audiences consisting of over a hundred people at other venues, this smaller gathering at FilmBar is more what he thinks the creators of Pecha Kucha in Japan originally had in mind.
Ayers said he plans on hosting monthly or bimonthly Pecha Kucha presentations in the future.
Contact the reporter at dmzayas@asu.edu
