Survival Project #2
Transition 24
By Rania Ho, Thy Tran, and Bryan Wu
The Survival Project is an exploration resilience during extreme times.
We envisioned a city-wide public art audio installation spanning the city, with interactive locations along the 24 Divisadero bus line.
TRANSITION24 was a public art installation that connects stories and strategies of survival along the San Francisco’s 24 MUNI bus line.
The 24 Divisidero is a highly trafficked artery: each day over 10,000 riders travel along its six miles stretching between Bayview and Pacific Heights. The line passes through Western Addition, Castro, Mission and Bernal Heights—all neighborhoods transformed by great political and cultural shifts in our city, country and communities.
We draw from oral histories, documentary media and archived ephemera to create multisensory immersions. With community members who live, work or commute along the 24, we excavate networks that supported them during times of change and crisis.
Originally slated to launch in autumn 2019, our multimedia installations will highlight literal and figurative spaces of transition to reveal their power as points of shared experience.
With our organizational partner, The Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco, we applied for and were awarded two grants at the beginning of 2018: a generous $139K grant from the Rainin Foundation’s Open Spaces program and a $15K grant from the California Arts Commission.
Over the next 6 months, we sketched, designed, researched, and prototyped our installations. We also conducted gathering tables to collect stories from people on the street. We also connected with neighborhood organizations and agencies such as the Bernal History Project, the SF Public Library, and SF Transit Riders, and the SFMTA among others.
Despite making excellent progress on our part, we eventually found that, to our extreme disappointment, our partner was unprepared for public art at this scale.
We are currently figuring out how to progress.
Transition 24
San Francisco, CA