Displaying students’ dreams
An 11-person campaign team began crafting the project last winter with the goal of helping fellow students find and share their dreams.
For months, Tafadzwa “Taf” Matika has been asking Carolina students to share their dreams.
As he stood in the Student Union’s gallery this week — surrounded by visualizations of others’ goals, hopes and aspirations — Matika saw one of his own dreams come to fruition, too.
The nearly 200 photos filling the wall created the final product of Matika’s “I Have A Dream” campaign, which features Carolina students sharing their dreams and aspirations. In its inaugural year, more than 360 students participated in the project, which will remain on display until Feb. 1.
“I’m more than ecstatic with the turnout,” the junior public health student said. “I’m very much humbled and thankful that people responded.”
The 11-person campaign team began crafting the project last winter with the goal of helping fellow students find and share their dreams. Throughout the fall semester, the team asked students to share their aspirations through photos and whiteboards. By taking photos in the Pit and receiving others through social media, hundreds of dreams poured in.
“We essentially asked what their dreams were,” Matika said. “This was to help them think about their sense of purpose, trying to think of what it is that they cared for and what gave them a reason to wake up in the morning.”
The team then took the photos and transformed them into an exhibit, which opened as part of the University’s Martin Luther King Jr. celebration. More than 100 people attended the exhibit’s opening Jan. 20; in addition, several Board of Trustees members and UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol L. Folt also visited the exhibit this week.
With dreams ranging from traveling to helping others, the photographs paint a picture of the diverse dreams at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Matika said. He hopes the exhibit inspires students to consider their own sense of purpose, while also celebrating the diversity of other people’s dreams.
“Martin Luther King left many legacies, but definitely one of them was the awareness of the importance of dreams, particularly in shaping society,” Matika said. “I think that Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech was about the courage to pursue what nobody else saw or what many other people were afraid to see. That, in itself, is highly encouraging at a college level where we’re just starting to make big life decisions.”
