Created behind an vacant house across the street from the Hermann Kiefer Hospital Complex.
As the complex undergoes a slow redevelopment into a “world class innovation campus,” what lives on and must be protected are the crickets, ants, and rollipollies, and the groves of trees hugging the alleyways, and the memories of homes that used to be here that have now been turned over into fields of clover and chicory and queen anne's lace, and the people that hold onto those memories with care and liveliness who stopped to ask me what I was doing as I grabbed bricks from a pile that had spilled off the side of a burnt out house and stacked them neatly.
The cicadas emerged to the steady thump of a techno festival happening across the street in the parking lot of the old hospital. They click in mass, a rush of sound encompassing the fullness of the maples and elms and a lone old cedar (maybe 80 years old!) that live in this grove. What frame of reference lives deep in their delicate bodies that can help them find each other amidst the impeding rhythms of our human lives?
Wishing wells house spirits, and spirits make themselves known to us. Perhaps to coax us into building structures and monuments to protect the freshwater springs they live in. We protect these places because they protect us.
Wishing wells are technological objects that receive the intentions of the wisher and spit out new conditions of reality in which those intentions may be realized. A wishing well makes wishing work.
I hope some kid stumbles upon this thing and gets it.
