LOS ANGELES (CN) – Inside the gleaming dark gold shipping container in LA’s Grand Park, the three art students giggled uneasily. They sat in a room carpeted from floor to ceiling in charcoal gray, facing a screen that showed two Iraqi men, Muhammad and Rami, sitting on lime-green plastic chairs in a similarly enclosed space.
It was a warm and sunny Thursday at the Harsham refugee camp in Erbil, Iraq, and bright and balmy outside the shipping container in an area of downtown Los Angeles between the Performing Arts Center and City Hall. All that separated the three students – Lulu, Liam and Helena – and the two men was a flickering screen and 7,450 miles. As the students settled into their seats and oriented themselves to the jarring effect of distance in proximity, 19-year-old Muhammad, dressed in a white shirt and black pants, asked the young students about their favorite sports.
Lulu, a blond-haired girl wearing a black beret and a chain around her neck, said she liked soccer. Liam said he did too. There were smiles all round as the teenagers talked about their favorite teams from Spain's top division, La Liga.
“Barcelona,” Liam said.
“Real Madrid,” Lulu chimed in.
After a few minutes, the students said they had to leave to hurry back to class. On their way out of the 12-square-meter container, they passed a message on the gold-colored door stenciled in bold black type: "This Gold Container Equipped with Immersive Audiovisual Technology is a portal. When you enter, you come face-to-face with someone in a distant portal and can converse as if in the same room.”
The gold containers are the creation of Brooklyn-based artist, former law school student and Washington Post reporter Amar Bakshi. He wandered bleary-eyed around the installation last week, at regular intervals giving interviews to broadcasters, including the local Fox affiliate and CNN.
Dressed in a loose cream top and black jeans, Bakshi sat at a pink picnic table close to his installation on Thursday morning during a break. He scanned his smartphone and registered shock as he learned the United States had just dropped the most powerful conventional weapon in its arsenal, the MOAB or “mother of all bombs," on a cave complex used by Islamic State militants in Afghanistan.
As news of the U.S. action filtered through, Fazeel Chauhan, 53, an analyst from Pomona, and his friend Karen Dinehart emerged from the darkness of the gold container into the mid-morning sun.
They had just been talking to three young men at the Harsham camp who were in a portal that had been converted from a disused pumping station. Some 1,500 Iraqi families who fled Mosul live at the camp.
Pakistani-born Chauhan gestured to two bulletin boards in the park where people had left post-it notes. One of them struck a chord. The writer noted that if people talked more often it could lead to world peace.
“I know with Trump it seems impossible because he just dropped the biggest bomb like it's nothing,” Chauhan said. “If American people in general had more interactions with Muslim people or they knew about Islam, then they would not be easily manipulated by ideas like Muslims are trying to implement Sharia law or hate their women, or they're violent, or they're terrorists.”