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Experiencing 10 Lives over 24 Hours

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By Michael Gallant

Global Lives Project brings world diversity into focus

Inside San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 10 large televisions placed throughout a sun-filled, white-walled gallery space streamed unedited documentary footage. Each television represented a part of the world’s diverse population, and followed a full 24-hour day in the life of a volunteer subject, each from a different country and a drastically different walk of life.

David Evan Harris, founder and executive director of the nonprofit, San Francisco-based Global Lives Project, the creator of the exhibit, said the goal was to intimately present the dramatic differences that exist among how people live around the world — while emphasizing the shared human experience.

“Since we focus on documenting and presenting the everyday and not some disaster or other specific event, our approach can be disarming,” he said. “Watching people’s normal lives puts you in a different mindset in terms of seeing what it means to be in this country, this city or this human body.”

Visitors to the exhibit were encouraged to sit and lounge while watching the video. Depending on the life of the subject, a participant’s perspective or physical relationship to the screen changed. One subject, Rumi, lives in Japan and travels by wheelchair, so exhibit elements were low to the ground and the floor was covered in tatami.

About 20,000 people visited the exhibit between its premiere at the center in February and the end of its run in June.

BUILDING GLOBAL LIVES

Global Lives was born from a year of international study that Harris undertook while an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. “I lived with host families for two months each in the United Kingdom, Tanzania, India, the Philippines and Mexico,” he said. “In the Philippines, for example, I lived in a bamboo house in a village called Barangay Daja, spent a lot of time with my host family, saw their water buffalo and their rice patties and took classes locally. In Mexico City, I lived with a family in a former squatters’ settlement. It was an amazing, eye-opening experience.”

Sleep-deprived and culture-shocked toward the end of his travels, Harris, while waiting in a Philippine airport, reflected on his experiences. “After spending so much time in other countries, I realized that most of the rest of the world has a completely different way of life than in the United States,” he said. “How could I communicate everything I’d seen to friends and family in the United States?”

The answer became the seed of Global Lives. “What if I were to use video to give a similar experience, to go into homes and see the daily lives of people who represent what the world population’s daily life is really like?”

On returning to the United States, Harris discussed the idea with friends, but several years passed before Global Lives emerged as more than a compelling concept. A colleague, Daniel Jones, had completed a freelance project and unexpectedly inherited high-quality video equipment in lieu of his last paycheck.

“He called me and asked, ‘So what about that video idea you’d mentioned?’” Harris said. “We split the price of his plane ticket, and he flew out to San Francisco in November of 2004 to do the first shoot with me.”

PEOPLE BEHIND THE PROJECT

“We wanted the subjects of our videos to roughly represent the world population,” Harris said. “About 60 percent of the world’s population lives in Asia, for example, so six of our 10 participants are from Asia. We also learned that the world has just passed about 50 percent urban population, so we have five urban participants and five rural ones, as well as five men and five women.” Other factors the Global Lives team considered included age, religious background and economic status.

Harris’ and Jones’ 2004 pilot subject was James, a San Francisco cable car driver. Shortly thereafter, Harris moved to Brazil to pursue a master’s degree in São Paulo and conducted the second shoot in collaboration with Brazil’s Museum of the Person. Once word began to spread, Global Lives took on a life of its own.

One colleague who lived in Malawi wrote to Harris saying that he had a video camera and wanted to do a shoot in that country; a producer of the São Paulo shoot, who happened to be of Japanese descent, organized a shoot in Tokyo, collaborating with students and professors from United Nations University and Temple University, Japan. Local volunteers worked with the camera crew. Other shoots followed in Serbia, Indonesia, India, Kazakhstan and Lebanon, all shot by volunteer camera crews.

More than 650 volunteers worldwide have contributed to the success of Global Lives. Many of those volunteers continue to contribute significantly to the project, spearheading recent documentary screenings in France, Poland, Hungary, Serbia and Great Britain. Harris has found himself continually surprised by the strength and size of the international support base the project has inspired. “Our team members in Mumbai, Tokyo — pretty much everyone we’ve worked with — want to do exhibits in their own cities,” he said. “It’s wonderful.”

To see video footage and to learn more, visit the Global Lives Project website.