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By Drake Di Paolo ‘24

In the McMullen Museum’s Spring 2023 installation, The Shared_Studios Portal, Boston College students, faculty, and visitors had the opportunity to transcend borders and time zones in a virtual experience to foster conversation about our world’s most pressing issues. The portal is a unique video conference experience that connects two locations, “live and full-body,” through eye-level cameras that create the illusion that both parties are in the same room. During the exhibition’s tenure at the McMullen, the Boston College community connected to portals around the globe in hopes of increasing a collective dialogue. Some of the McMullen’s partner portals included ones in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nakivale, Uganda; and Walkers Reserve, Barbados. Working with the United Nations and COP27, Shared_Studios, a New York-based company, organized these connections to expand climate dialogue in all corners of the world.

Many of the connections made within the portal last semester focused on but were not limited to, issues of climate change. The portal became a place to discuss the impact of rising temperatures on individual lives and overall environments, and our portal-goers found ways toward common ground and shared experiences by hearing previously unheard perspectives from the Global South. Scholarly discourse has begun to heavily criticize the current conversation around climate change as Western-centric, in which views from the majority of the world go unnoticed. For example, during a connection with the McMullen portal, a curator from the Barbados portal, located in a former-quarry-turned-nature reserve, discouraged using the term “quiet voices” to describe the climate activists in the Southern Hemisphere and insisted on using “unheard voices.” This particular portal is hosted by the Walkers Institute for Regenerative Research, Education, and Design (WIRRED) and aims to “bring solutions to complex problems by creating disruptive design systems that increase biodiversity, enhance ecosystem services, and improve the well-being of individuals and communities.”¹ Conversations such as these gave Boston College students and other portal users a chance to hear those voices. 

One memorable conversation I attended was on Tuesday, April 11th, 2023, when the McMullen portal connected with curators Haya and Ahmed in Erbil, Iraq. While our portal was on the third-floor gallery of the McMullen, Erbil’s was in a renovated water station, which is now a cubic structure in an Iraqi refugee camp for people displaced by ISIS’s invasion of Mosul in 2014. Haya, the translator, is a young female Iraqi novelist. Her first novel focuses on forgiveness in hardship and tells the story of a blind girl who lost her eyes in an accident and has a complicated history with the family who later adopts her. She is currently working on a second novel about climate change and pursuing a degree in architecture. She joined us with Ahmed, who works for the WISH Organization and runs an NGO as an elementary school teacher in the refugee camp, primarily teaching Arabic and science. After asking how climate change has affected their lives, an insightful yet grim discussion blossomed. 

Haya explained how it has become impossible to avoid the climate crisis in Erbil. Each year, the temperature continuously rises, most likely due to the high pollution levels and the overall loss of the green cover. Historically, ancient forests and vegetation once covered many parts of Iraq; however, as the vegetation decreases, they can no longer help moderate the increasing temperature. Haya noted that in summer months, temperatures reach 120° F— so hot that you can crack an egg and cook it on any surface—Ahmed added that he was hospitalized due to heat exhaustion. Haya stressed that climate change is affecting the community; she pointed out that the divorce ratio in the summer is higher than in the winter. When asked if this was normal in Iraq, Haya and Ahmed noted how, according to their parents, it was not like this forty years ago. In the past, the highest temperature typically reached was around 95° F, and people did not need AC. So, Iraqi architects designed the houses to let in the sun and regulate the home based on past temperatures. However, these past designs make houses feel far too hot today and require numerous AC units. This conversation exemplified one of the many ways man-made environmental destruction continues to affect our lives.

Not all portal connections focused explicitly on the Climate. As a Student Ambassador, when I curated an exhibit with the Nakivale portal, located in a Ugandan refugee camp—populated mainly by those escaping Civil Wars in the Congo—I had an extremely compelling connection that had nothing, yet everything, to do with the planet’s health. Seeing that the session was open to the public, meaning the museum had no class scheduled to attend, I anticipated being on my own for most of the connection, if not all. To begin, I asked Jim and Benjamin, the Nakivale portal curators, about their careers as entrepreneurs. They talked about the two businesses they had started: Jim created made-at-home farming kits for refugees to grow and sell mushrooms and Benjamin shepharded a troubled youth school, where he taught English and life skills. The conversation shifted, however, when I asked them what their “why” was to be an entrepreneur, a routine question taught in entrepreneurial management classes. 

Jim answered, “to reduce young girls getting pregnant in the refugee camp.” Thinking I had misheard him, I asked him to clarify. He explained, “a lot of girls in the camp don’t have soap or clothes or food and go to men to get those things, which leads to them getting pregnant.” 

Not knowing how to respond, I sat silently, and Benjamin began to explain why he founded his company. “To help kids,” Benjamin stated, “to keep these kids fleeing the Congo and other war-torn countries on the right path.” He described life for young men in the refugee camps and the importance of making the right decisions early before becoming trapped in a cycle of mistakes made out of desperation. Benjamin is a role model at his school for kids who never had one.

Planting spores like Jim or teaching English like Benjamin is far from the typical Boston area start-up but arguably more consequential than most. It is not that these small actions will save or change the world, but they have the potential to pave paths that do. This connection, among others in the portal, showed me and other Student Ambassadors that behemoth ambitions, fighting climate change or combating inequality, may begin at the most minor and most uneventful levels.

While the portal left the McMullen in June 2023, this November, the portal has returned to BC’s main campus, rebranding itself as the Global Engagement Portal, with connections to Erbil, Iraq; Mexico City, Mexico; Lagos, Nigeria; Walkers Savannah, Barbados; and Nakivale, Uganda. Whether your classmate has told you the portal is a genuine social experiment aimed at overcoming barriers or a performative gimmick seeking to serve a voyeuristic gaze, students now have the opportunity to see for themselves in the pop-up shipping container located between O’Neill and Devlin during its walk-in hours Monday, November 13th through Thursday, November 16th. Regardless of whether you can visit the portal, impactful conversations are always one difficult question away.

1. For more on the Barbados Portal see https://www.sharedstudios.com/portal-sites/walkers-savannah-portal ↩︎