ACCELERATOR
Lina Maria Giraldo
Golden Home, 2018
Golden Home by Lina Maria Giraldo is a community storytelling project exploring how many neighborhoods in Boston are experiencing and coping with gentrification. The project focused on Egleston Square and Hyde Square and sparked community conversations around forced migration and cultural preservation while highlighting locations that have been affected by the rapid economic development.
Conversations focused on the efforts communities have made over the last 15 years to preserve neighborhood culture during a period of constant change. Questions asked included "How is your community reacting to and integrating newcomers?" and "What is your neighborhood doing to preserve its cultural roots?"
Through these conversations and story sharing sessions, Giraldo created a project that highlights and documents the growing lack of affordable housing in Boston and increased the visibility of people and communities that are being actively displaced by the rapid rise in housing costs.
LOCATION
Father Jack Roussin Center (3130 Washington St, Roxbury) home to the Egleston Square YMCA and the Greater Egleston Community High School.
ACCELERATOR
Lina Maria Giraldo
A Colombian born, Boston-based artist, Lina focuses on Interactive Storytelling towards social change. With a diverse body of work ranging from digital educational tools, public installations, and screen-based computer generated work, she explores the questions of being Latino, the impact of Mankind on our surroundings and the power of collective storytelling. Over the last 15 years, her work has been focused on creating messages where she depicts the fragility of our environment, community equality and immigration concerns. She likes to think of her work as a visual poem with an educational and civic purpose. One that explores the search for a society that is responsible for its consumption, environment and understands its own communities from within its storytelling. It is a journey of exploration and research for better ways to create spaces of communication by building alongside with the community she works with while exploring different ways of storytelling and new paths of conversation. From her window installations in Poppy Fields through massive digital projections like Rain or collective storytelling using cellphones in City Journalist, Lina explores how art can help understand the challenges of our society.