2016: PORTRAIT OF A CAMPUS

"Our Portrait of a Campus series is part of a larger student-led project inquiring into the mental well-being of this campus. We are a collective of students from various faculties who feel that there is a gap in the way that issues of mental health are currently being addressed on this campus. While we do not claim to represent campus in its entirety, we are aiming to involve our community in sharing their personal experiences and observations in navigating mental health at UW."

Using art intervention to disrupt the administration’s rhetoric and reclaim student space, WPIRG’s 2016 project, Portrait of a Campus, marked a memorable engagement with the University community. Students engaged students, staff, and faculty at the University of Waterloo in one-on-one conversations on mental health on our campus, driven by the single question: “What weighs us down?”.

The result was a striking visual display of large-scale portraits seen everywhere on campus, each accompanied by a compelling quote from the interviews.

Borrowing from the aesthetics, methods, and politics of street art, students wheat-pasted the portraits onto panels and distributed them across campus without the permission of university administration. The result was a broader statement about reclaiming our collective voices, community, and environment. That student space should belong to students became an even more pointed concern when UW Police confiscated the portraits and threw them in the dump. A campus police sergeant stated at the time: “They’re garbage, so now they’re in the garbage.” In true guerrilla fashion, students insisted on repeating the action with new panels to reclaim their voices and spaces again.

“As members of this community who are either paid or pay to be here, we believe we have a right to influence the way we interact with campus space.”