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Oakwood Beach

Oakwood Beach Information

Address

4100 S Lake Shore Dr., Chicago, IL 60653

Neighborhood

BronzevilleSouth Side

Description

Oakwood Beach was home to House of Kapwa. This installation has been moved to a permanent location. Please check back for more information about this relocation.

The House of Kapwa is an interactive and ceremonial outdoor public sculpture installation honoring Rest, collective care, ecological grief, and the Filipino indigenous virtue-ethic of Kapwa: shared interconnectedness, or ‘unity-of-self-and-other.’ The House of Kapwa is a space that invites us to sense the relationship between how we care for ourselves, how we care for each other, and how we care for the Earth.

The opening at the top of the structure signifies our connection with our ancestors and the Divine when we engage in the practice of Rest. We are kapwa through time and space; we invite the wisdom of our ancestors to guide us as we nurture our Earth home for our future descendants.

The House features an exterior natural loom that invites visitors to weave plant material and flowers into the structure itself. This symbolizes how we as humans are entangled with our ecology and the more-than-human world and demonstrates the need for the collective to protect spaces of care and Rest, especially for those who have endured disproportionate levels of ecological, social, political, and colonial violence.

How will we move mountains to protect our Earth’s future if we do not pause to process the mountains of our unprocessed ecological and spiritual grief? This is a site for us to be held in Rest. A site that calls us into reverence and gratitude as we honor our losses. A site for belonging as we remember we are kapwa. 

Hours

The House of Kapwa site closed on November 5, 2023.

Photo: Fenell Doremus, Kindling Group
The City is the Site