Before I Die, I Want To...

During Dying Matters week in May, we were very excited to launch something that has never been seen in Liverpool before. We put a chalk wall in an empty shop in the beautiful India Buildings, and asked people to tell us what they want to do before they die.

"Before I Die..." is a project started by artist Candy Chang. She struggled to cope with her bereavement after losing someone close to her, and was looking for a way to channel her grief. She painted the side of an abandoned house with blackboard paint and stencilled it with a grid of the sentence "Before I die I want to________" and left some chalk. People passing by would pick up pieces of chalk and add to the board. By the next day, the board was bursting with people's lift aspirations and wishes of the things they'd like to achieve in their lives. Candy realised she wasn't alone in trying to make sense of her life, and felt a great sense of consolation.

She found that people were asking her to help set one up in their local area, and she began to send out toolkits all over the world. The global Before I Die project was born, with people in all over the world doing their own walls and uploading them to the Before I Die site. There are now over 200 walls in 15 different countries.

We decided that there was no better time to launch one in Liverpool than Dying Matters week. We worked closely with Liverpool Commercial District BID who helped us to secure an empty shop in the beautiful and historic India Buildings on Water Street. Our creative Project Manager Rachael managed to work around the conundrum of not being able to drill an actual chalkboard up anywhere, and made one out of black paper that we could take down and replace when it got full.

We managed to almost fill our wall on the first day it opened, and we noticed that hardly any of the responses related to material things. We'd expected to see "before I die I want to own a Ferrari" or "own designer clothes" but most of what people wrote was about family, happiness and experiences. Some people were reluctant at first to write when gently coaxed by us to come in... but as soon as they had a piece of chalk in their hand they said it had really made them think about the things they'd like to accomplish.

Here are some photos of the two chalk walls we ended up filling before it was closed on 3rd June:

The sign outside our beautiful shop

Mini chalk boards

We have our very own mini site for the chalk wall over at Before I Die, where you can view more photos and a bit about the project: Before I Die: Liverpool

Unfortunately our wall closed on 3rd June. We are currently looking into ways to keep it alive all over Liverpool, and we'd love to hear any ideas if you think you know where we could put one. If you had visited our wall when it was open, what would you have written on there?