context, context, context....

We are on our third location. We started in a church, in the central valley, filling a fellowship hall. Then we moved to Interplayce, “a dance studio”—for lack of a better description—in the heart of a city. A finally, on the walls of a seminary gallery, that used to be a library, sharing space with archeological artifacts from Jesus’ time (and earlier…). Some of the exhibition has not changed. The words of the poems are the same. Most of the panels are the same. The poster is the same. And much has changed. The work must change (we must change) with the context… whether it wants to or not. I should not have been as surprised as I felt when I discovered that despite my best efforts, I could not exactly duplicate the way the installation hung in its first location in the second location. It just would not work. So, we improvised, adapted and transformed.

And we do again. Our panels are attached to the walls of the Bade Museum at Pacific School of Religion, stretched and squished to fit. Yet, as awkward as that may feel, it also feels like coming home. The exhibition hangs across the quad from where we had out first meeting and started this journey almost exactly two years ago. The ground that birthed this movement within in us, made sacred by the transformation that happens here, is where we return. Though as holy as it was two years ago, it is not the same. It is a dynamic place. This will be as new, exciting and dynamic of an experience as that initial meeting—so full of dreams and possibility—was.

In the next two months, while unFound hangs in the hallowed halls of Holbrook, we will (re)discover, (un)find, and (trans)form along the way.