Everyone has a story: Aesthetic experiences of storytelling in The Strangers Project

The Strangers Project in New York City invites ‘strangers’ to stop by and handwrite their story. Over 65,000 anonymous stories that capture a fragment of someone’s life have been collected and displayed on site and online in the past fourteen years. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s notion of the ‘narratable self’, Walter Benjamin’s figure of the ‘storyteller’, and other philosophical inspirations, this chapter engages various aspects of this ongoing experiential and experimental project with regards to how relationships to selfhood, otherness, and one’s own life story may be negotiated in writing and reading, as well as by navigating an expanding archive of autobiographical memory. Following Cavarero, the transformational potential of storytelling lies in offering the other a narration that speaks to what they may see and experience as fundamentally incomplete in their own quest for identity as ‘unity’. In dialogue with the founder of the project, I aim to uncover some of the complex ethical and aesthetic processes that lie within what it might mean to domesticate strange(r)ness and estrangement both within and outside oneself through the performative practices of writing, reading, and communal sharing. In this effort I pay special attention to the pictorial aspects of handwritten life stories—that is, the ‘second story’ that emerges from the marks and traces left on the page—as gateways to sensing and making sense beyond our habitual (academic) modalities.