Empathy Bed: Heart of Africa
- Creator
- Xuning Wang, Jiahui Zhu, Yangtian Yan, and Yinyin Lau
- Date
- 2017
- Collection
- Creative Submissions
- Description
- At U-M Bicentennial, we started to think about what the university can do to continue to be the leader in the future. We believe that students in the future need to have strong global awareness and take responsibilities for the social and environmental changes at a global level. Therefore, we created the Empathy Bed: Heart of Africa to let the audience experience different living conditions in different parts of the world.
We get inspirations from the wavefield for the form of the empathy bed. Inside the bed, recycled objects are stacked to mimic the topography of Africa. Viewers are expected to wear the water bag we made and lie down on the bed. The water bag is created to mimic the physical condition of the African children who suffer from kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition. The Heart of Africa is an interactive piece representing the lack of nutrition in these people's bodies, with a piece of jewelry held in the middle. - Rights
- Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND)
- Relation
- Wavefield