This project takes if only and considers its earthly opposite:
I wish.

The initial idea was to record wishes from strangers, edit them together, and send the final recording over a wireless transmitter to radio receivers mounted inside seashells.   This entire project was set in the community center of San Diego's Mission Valley Library. 

The thought was that people would enter the room, hear sounds from the shells, pick them up,  and listen to the broadcast message from within; a quiet roar from a sampling of humanity instead of that from the sea.

Many people declined to participate in the project, often with a very strong negative response.  Their reasons were pretty much the same.   "I'm working," replied one shopkeeper.  Another businessman at a used record store responded suspiciously, "I have nothing else to wish for." I also had a few people say, "No thank you."

There was one response which added an unanticipated dimension to this project.

It came in the form of a question from a random interviewee who asked, "What is your wish?"

I thought for an instant and said, "My father.  I wish I could speak with my father again." 

The woman looked at me for a brief moment from across the gulf that separates space, time, and strangers, leaned across the counter and hugged me for a healing moment.

Loss and vulnerability combine to create that numbing touch of death felt each time we lose someone we truly love.  Beyond despair, pain, and the knowledge of our inevitable destiny, lurks a certainty more absolute than faith. 

I initially thought this program was about the wishes we all make, about things we want for ourselves, and possibly to reveal a collective effort for a greater good.  I now see this work was about all that we have in common: Love, Loss, Desire, Fear, and lastly Hope.  

Beyond bi-pedalism and an opposable digit, it is what we aspire, do, dream, mourn, and wish, which defines us as human.  It is also the certain knowledge of our human limits which propels us through our journey on earth.  Earth which waits patiently to hold us in her arms again like a wave vanishing against a sandy beach.

Peter Terezakis
Pacific Beach, San Diego
September 19, 2003

Lara Segura