To begin with the original idea was still to look with in the community but to look at the bad side of it, for example what happens when graffiti is found? What does the community do? or feel? An experiment which we thought of doing was to graffiti in the day time, so we were easy to see and then see the reaction of the public; would they say anything to us? Another would be to start washing the graffiti away and see if anyone would help.
This would all be videoed and shown at the end as an installation.
As we progressed with these ideas we looked at speaking to people who are involved with helping the community, for example, St. Mary’s church does a lot for Lincoln’s community of the homeless and more. A member of our group also works with two people from Horncastle who insist on helping a 92 year old women who struggles to do thing on her own.
We were able to see St Mary’s and see what they had done for the community having spoken to the Priest of the Church who was able to give us examples of how they helped with the community. Their community looked more at helping the homeless and giving them a chance to sleep somewhere other then the street. She told us how they are given tasks to do such as cleaning or baking etc. This meant they would have to help the community themselves.
However we decided to move on from this, but keeping with community we found that Improv-Everywhere had done a piece called ‘Say Something Nice’. I believe this is something we can expand on when looking at community as I think it is always nice to say something nice to someone. This is where the idea of cause and affect had come it. The idea of saying something nice to somebody is a way to cheer someone up at the same time as feeling good about yourself.