Provincetown’s Phone on the Wind allows the grieving to ‘call’ departed loved ones - SouthCoastToday.com

PROVINCETOWN — Abstract painter Janine Evers kept the black rotary phone from her childhood, enjoying having it around simply as a treasured object. But shortly after her mother died 11 years ago, when Evers was particularly missing their conversations, she picked up the phone’s receiver.

And talked as if her mother were there.

“I was really comforted,” Evers said. “And sometimes (after that), I’d just ‘call’ her. It kind of became a thing. It could be about anything.”

She has now shared that phone for an interactive art installation with the same purpose: a chance to call the dead. The phone sits on a shelf in a nonworking phone booth in the new sculpture garden at Provincetown Commons to offer a connection between people and the loved ones they miss.

Provincetown Phone on the Wind — referring to messages being carried on the wind — is a collaboration among 10 local artists that was inspired by the Phone of the Wind created by Itaru Sasaki in Otsuchi, Japan, who built it to call a cousin he missed. In 2011, after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, he opened his phone booth to others. Thousands have traveled from all over the world to make a call there.

Cape Codders only have to travel to 46 Bradford St.

“As we know, art is a great vehicle for the human condition,” said curator Dawn Walsh, who came up with the idea for the community project after seeing a documentary about the Japan booth. “So for me, being in Provincetown, in an arts colony surrounded by artists, it’s just so important to utilize art-making as an invitation for us as a community to engage in (discussion of) death and dying, grief and loss.”

The booth was set to officially open at a ceremony on Saturday, but word had already spread and the calls had begun. Walsh said reaction has been positive.

“Every single person who I’ve talked to ... the first thing they would say is who they’re going to call. ‘I’m going to call my brother, I’m going to call my mom, I’m going to call my nephew.’ Every single person,” she said. “All of us have someone that we miss and that we want to feel connected to, and the Phone on the Wind gives us that opportunity to feel connected with the loved one who’s no longer in this realm.”

Walsh is summer program manager and community outreach coordinator at the Fine Arts Work Center, but also has worked for years trying to demystify death. She is an end-of-life doula; has led Death Cafe discussions and Day of the Dead festivities; and co-founded the Lily House nonprofit group, which aims to create a home for people to live out their final days and has sponsored the phone booth as a community art project.

Death “is a topic people don’t like to talk about and (Walsh) takes it head on,” said Jill Stauffer, executive director at Provincetown Commons.

As a culture, Walsh said, “we are a little bit death-phobic, kind of nervous and awkward and don’t know how to talk about death, how to share our grief with each other, and to talk about our loved ones once they’ve passed.”

While people may already think, dream or write about a deceased loved one, the booth can take the experience to another level and perhaps be a way to share grief by visiting it with others, she said. “This is a way to really offer a kind of embodied experience: a verbal, out-loud experience, a tactile experience. You’re dialing the phone, you’re holding something, you’re talking out loud and you’re listening.”

Walsh herself was one of the first to use the Phone on the Wind and, like Evers, she wanted to call her mother.

“I didn’t know what I was going to say, and I just picked up the phone and started talking. I found that immediately I got emotional and knew exactly what to say. And ... she was definitely there listening,” Walsh said. “When I ended the call, I said, ‘OK, talk to you soon.’ I felt like I have renewed a connection with my mother in a new way and have reestablished a communication line with her that hasn’t been there for awhile.”

Walsh’s past work with death, and the art project’s collaborative and interactive natures were all reasons the booth was chosen as one of the temporary installations in the Commons garden, said Stauffer and board president Peter Hocking.

The phone booth “extends what (Walsh) is doing in the social service realm to the artistic realm, and that’s exciting to us,” Hocking said. “The board loved the dialogue globally (with the Japan connection), and the opportunity for people to interact with art and have a place of meditation and solace.”

From reactions in person and on social media, he said, “people are both delighted by the project and find it necessary. It’s something very personal, very meaningful to them.”

Provincetown Commons is a year-old reimagining of the former community center as a communal creative space, with studios, exhibits and art activities, a co-working space and meeting rooms. Walsh was thrilled to install the booth there because the commons’ mission already focused on collaboration. It was important to Walsh to have as many artists involved as possible and for the phone booth to be as hand-crafted as possible.

“I thought this (would be) a great way to bring a group of artists together to interact with death, and to offer that up as a piece of art to the community so (other people), too, can have their own interactions with death,” she said.

Artist Bailey Bob Bailey designed, built and installed the glass-and-wood-paned booth; Jerome Greene helped to install it; and Barbara Grandel painted it, according to Walsh. Besides Evers loaning her phone to try to help others heal, Amy Kandall agreed to create flower vases, Jody Johnson created wind chimes, and Sylvia Tomayko-Peters and Vicky Tomayko handmade a call log for visitors to record thoughts and experiences.

In a stroke of serendipity, Walsh last spring read an essay about visiting the booth in Japan and realized it was by Tessa Fontaine, a memoirist who has written about her mother’s death and was due to teach a class just weeks later at the Fine Arts Work Center. Fontaine agreed to be part of the Provincetown installation and contributed a solar lantern that literally lights the way to the Phone on the Wind.

“To have that kind of one degree of separation from the booth in Japan feels very significant, in a very spiritual sense,” Walsh said.

While many visitors will have what she calls “the muscle memory” of using the iconic rotary phone, she acknowledged the object may be foreign to younger generations.

“It adds another kind of metaphysical element, right?” she said with a laugh. “There’s something kind of quantum physics-ey” about using an iconic device from the past to contact the dead.

The Phone on the Wind will remain in the sculpture garden through the end of the summer, and Walsh is excited that people from all over the country and world will be able to use the booth when they visit Provincetown. Bailey built the booth in modular sections, so next fall, the artists will be able to dismantle it and move it so the art can possibly “have multiple lives and multiple locations,” Walsh said.

She and Bailey have discussed a natural setting, perhaps in the dunes so people can simply discover it. Wherever it is, Walsh hopes the Phone on the Wind can create both personal and communal experiences.

She’s planning to gather a group of friends for a “community calling session.” Maybe, she said with a laugh, for some people living in or visiting Provincetown, rather than saying “Let’s go for a walk in the dunes,” they’ll say “Let’s go call our dead.”

Follow Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.

2020-01-27 11:05:13Z
https://www.southcoasttoday.com/news/20200127/provincetowns-phone-on-wind-allows-grieving-to-call-departed-loved-ones