CALL ON OUR IMAGINATION

This piano, developed for Luke Jerram’s Play Me, I’m Yours project and supported by Celebrity Series of Boston, began with music. And a question: What policy shifts could effectively address the continued killings of civilians by police officers? The day I met my piano, visiting artist Rafael Pondé composed on it the first chords of a song we would write together during his exchange from Brazil. Both the song and the finished piano ask us to collectively imagine these shifts.

“What federal law could you dream into existence?/ What Supreme Court Ruling could take us the distance/ and stitch the divisions in these broken-down systems/ so we’d fight united with faith n persistence?” asks the song, and this became our prompt in arts workshops at the Community Arts Center in Cambridge, the Cacique Youth Center in Villa Victoria, and the Lena Park Community Center in Dorchester. After brainstorming through music and poetry, participants wrote and/or drew their ideas on fragments of spray painted CDs. These were later integrated into the final mixed media piano, which now lives at the Lena Park Community Center.

To watch the music video for the song that accompanied this project, click the button below.