Imagining Fifty Other People

A five year project

Every July 15th Alex Serpentini asks the same 50 strangers from around the world to write something honest about their day. This compilation of anonymous stories allows audiences to track a diverse, international collection of life, thought, and experiences throughout the years.

Within this project, we’re able to experience different perspectives within the same moment of time, investigate worlds completely outside of our realm, grow alongside total strangers, and together work towards overcoming the difficulty of imagining other people.

This project is free and open to the public.
The first series (2014-2018) is now completed. Download it here.
The second series (2019-2023) is now underway.

LONA - 15 JUNE 2016
"We peek at Sarai’s phone. Her exchanges with the man she’s texting— emotionally unavailable, charming, attractive, insidious, duplicitous— are fascinating. One of us reads the exchanges, including the images—nudes of her, of him, of pieces of themselves. It might be worth stating here that I find their words to lay their hearts bare, much more so than their skin— The rhetoric of sexting is the same no matter how you slice it. Desire, obstacle, digital reflection of desire, half-appeasement of pixels, desire, frustration, looped about three times till fruition. I like it. Sarai laughs, embarrassed, but why should she?" 

MICHEAL CRICHTON - 15 JUNE 2014
“As she lost consciousness I looked into those piercing eyes that had just moments ago filled with me with fear and I saw nothing. The world she had been trying so hard to remake became temporarily complete. The eyes so filled with emotion became empty. The very humanness of the situation sucked out of her.” 

JACQUI TREEHORN - 15 JUNE 2014
"I am going to start by splitting hairs. If you consider the day to have started at midnight on 15 June I was having sex with someone other than my significant other.” 

LIN - 15 JUNE 2016  
“Lots of rain infiltrated our early hot summer season just now. And that makes the days seem crystal clear and most soothing to heart, which is unusual for June in Taiwan where it is often the burning beam of sunlight wraps up our skin at this time of year. What makes it special for this tranquil air also makes its way to my mind, my body and my psyche. And somehow I think I am more clear-headed than I was just two months ago.” 

MERRICK - 15 JUNE 2015
“I thought of Vicki, Queen and Socialite of Amman. We spent at least one day a week at her apartment watching RuPaul’s Drag Race and drinking terrible Jordanian wine together. There was Rhiannon, the Irish American DCer who runs circles around these Europeans in working group meetings at the UN. She’s one of the best experts in the world on the Syria Crisis and I’ll miss her guidance. There was Fredrico, my first and only fling in Jordan. One of the worst personalities I’ve ever dealt with and yet somehow I couldn’t stay out of bed with him. He had recently went back to Portland and more than all the others, I felt like I would never see him again.”