Of All The People In All The World

Rice piled up in a disused factory in Hockley Birmingham UK

The exhibition Of All The People In All The World by Stan’s Cafe has been touring in various venues around the world and has landed in a disused factory in Birmingham. One person is represented by a single grain of rice. The population of the world will be represented by 112 tonnes of rice, and the population of India represented as rice grains makes for an impressive pile in one of the side rooms.

Stan’s Cafe is actually a theatre company and there are people in character walking purposefully about the factory wearing brown work jackets. There is a table with various weighing scales, and you can suggest statistics on the Web site. I think the best ones will then be weighed out in rice. I’m digging up a few sets of figures to see what happens…

Example of the kinds of comparisons in the exhibition

There is an education programme attached to the exhibition and the physical representation of people as rice grains allows comparisons of size. Comparing volumes is notoriously misleading – but the size of the piles of rice appears to bring home the huge disparities in size of various groups of us.

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