With 'Complex City,' Bethesda-Chevy Chase Students Document the Stress of Being Teenagers

A group of students decided to capturing the experience in an exhibition, displaying copies of text messages, showing the fear – and in some cases, desensitization – of students That day. In one exchange, a student is instructed by his parent to “keep texting,” to which he responds “I will” and then “I’m bored”.

The space was a late addition to a larger project that approximately 200 B-CC anthropology and cultural studies students worked on over the past school year to examine the varied – and often complex – pressures that come with being a teenager these days. One section focused on how gender influences how teenagers think they should act socially, and another headlined a series of controversies. swirling around the Montgomery County School system.

“It’s our way of presenting our own experiences as teenagers – American teenagers – and highlighting contemporary issues that we go through as a member of this population,” said Fernando Castro, a student at B-CC . “Our goal is not just to talk about it. We want to take you with us through our experiences.

“Complex City” was presented at the B-CC in May. With classes finished for the summer, the exhibit will soon be on display at American University and will later be part of next year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival, said David Lopilato, who, along with another instructor, Angela Young, guided the students in the project.

Lopilato's classes have for years chronicled the pressures that come with being a teenager. In 2017, his students created an “ephemeral” museum in an empty restaurant in suburban Maryland that documented challenges — such as the college application process and exposure to excessive drinking — through murals, performances and selfie sculptures ceramic. The Museum of the Contemporary American Teenager still coordinates events, and many of its contributors are enrolled in Lopilato or Young’s classes.

This Last school year, students wanted to challenge the idea that their adolescent experience is defined by social media anxiety — an argument they read about in a book called “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt, Lopilato said, but they found it “too simplistic.” adolescent culture. So they began to build exhibitions on the theme “Complex City”.

“They treated this as a personal mission to show that there is much more to teenage lives than just anxiety and that even among the anxiety, anxiety is not limited to social media and cell phones” , Lopilato said.

One exhibit, “Escape the Toxicity,” was a series of three rooms that showed the stressors of adolescence. In, The students pulled several newspaper headlines and articles on the DC Urban Moms blog about recent events surrounding their school district and high school, which they said illustrated some of the pressures surrounding them. One read: “Student found with pellet gun at Clarksburg middle school” and another: “Student arrested at Albert Einstein HS with weapons, police say.”

During a recent visit to the project, Elana Bilbao, a 17-year-old high school student, opened a padlocked door to a second room that contained a maze made of neon strings. Like the first piece, it was dimly lit, but instead of newspaper headlines there are were Phrases like “situations” and “FOMO” are written on the paper walls of the room with neon paint. Bilbao explained that these phrases are representative of the negative aspects of adolescent culture.

She then peeled back the black paper to reveal a hole leading to a third space. The sunny room was filled with photographs – some dating back to the 1970s – of lighter moments of high school, like school dances and track and field events.

“Our main objective was that you have to go through the negative to see the positive” Bilbao spoke about the design of the exhibition.

The project also captured other stressors affecting adolescents. A collage shows the struggle to find a sense of belonging as a biracial person. Another features a fake newsstand with hanging newspapers containing student interviews about topics, like expressing your feelings as a boy or the concept of a “pick me” girl – a girl who undermines other girls to please boys. Some of them produced videos and podcast episodes on the themes they wanted to explore.

Madeline Cortez, a sophomore, said students were shy to unpack the experience of being in love as a teenager, her teacher had to persuade them to open up. As she listened to her classmates, she said she realizes that teenagers are often pushed aside because they are too immature to understand love and because they lack education about healthy relationships, they often end up in toxic situations.

Cortez decided to concentrate it contribution to the project on “limerence”, which she describes as a one-sided obsession with another person without really knowing them. She heard the word for the first time On TikTok, the topic came up because “hallway crushes” are so common in high school. “You see a person once and maybe make eye contact with them, so the smallest amount of validation is like the craziest endorphins,” she said.

She created a painting depicting a boy surrounded by a golden hue. On the right, a girl looks at him longingly and surrounded by shades of blue. The boy doesn't notice the girl.

“It's like the life is almost being sucked out of her,” Cortez explained, “like she's losing her sense of self because of how much she thinks about this person.”

The teens say their goal with this art project is to better help the public. delve into the issues facing their demographic. They hope to recruit more Washington-area teens to contribute works before the Folklife Festival in 2025.

“Policymakers are allowed to make assumptions about us because we don't vote. So we ask ourselves: “How can we make our voices heard?” » Castro said. “That’s what we want to do with this. We want to bring our experiences to life.