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The group of women decided to use such a box as the physical containers--as modern reliquaries, if you will--for depictions of their current experiences and aspirations. The tiny boxes of dreams became the prototypes for a decade of transnational community building. Serena writes that the goals of W/BB are: “To honor and document women’s visions; to build community through dialogue; and to inspire all women to express their creativity.” She cites Adrienne Rich, who has written, “Until a strong line of love, confirmation and example stretches from mother to daughter, from woman to woman, across the generations, women will still be wandering in the wilderness.” WOMEN/Beyond Borders has created community in Kenya, Austria, Cuba, Australia, Jerusalem, Sweden and Italy--to name just a few of the venues in which the tiny boxes have been created and exhibited. Starting on April 29, 1993 (the first anniversary of the civil unrest in Los Angeles), Jill d’Agnenica began placing magenta plaster angels throughout the city. She and a growing team of volunteers created the angels--a total of 4,687, approximately ten per square mile of city terrain--and distributed them on street corners, at bus stops, in front of buildings, beside freeway off-ramps, and at other locations where they would be happened upon and possibly “adopted” by passers-by. D’Agnenica intended the random appearance of angels throughout the once-wounded city to serve as catalyst for personal and communal reflection. It was her hope that the experience of seeing an angel (and even more importantly, as word got out, the affirmative act of looking for angels) would become a positive aspiration for the often alienated populace of Los Angeles. Community building projects such as those created by Abeles, Kohl, Clark, Serena and d’Agnenica function as gifts, in the way Lewis Hyde uses the term in his book, The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (London: Vintage/Random, 1979). Hyde sets up an opposition between the gift, which is freely given, and the commodity, which is tied to the market economy. According the Hyde, the act of giving a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. It is this element of relationship which leads Hyde to speak of gift exchange as “an ‘erotic’ commerce, balancing Eros (the principle of attraction, union, involvement) against logos (reason and logic, the principle of differentiation in particular). A market economy is an emanation of logos,” whereas the community building art projects are emanations of Eros. As such, these gifts are agents of social cohesion. They create community by nourishing “those parts of our spirit that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, the group, the race, or the gods.” And we need this art, these gifts, because, according to Hyde, in a society where we maintain no institutions of positive reciprocity, we find ourselves unable to participate in the “wider spirits” he references. We find ourselves unable to enter gracefully into nature, unable to draw community out of the mass, and, finally, unable to receive, contribute toward, and pass along the collective treasures we refer to as culture and tradition.
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