With Complex City, Bethesda-Chevy Chase students document stress of being teens

September 01, 2024

“Mom I love you So much.”

“It’s something serious people left their backpacks outside to run.”

The pair of messages were among a flurry of texts Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School students sent to their parents last month during an hours-long lockdown for a reported bomb threat. While police later deemed it not credible, the incident — including scenes of SWAT members weaving through the school — left some students in fear.

A group of students decided to capture the experience in an exhibit, displaying copies of text messages showing the fear — and, in some cases, desensitization — of students that day. In one exchange, a student is instructed by their parent to “keep texting,” to which they reply “I will” and then “I’m bored.”

The space was a late addition to a larger project about 200 B-CC anthropology and cultural studies students worked on during the past school year to examine the varied — and often complex — pressures that come with being an adolescent these days. One section focused on how gender influences how teens think they should act socially, and another displayed headlines on controversies swirling around the Montgomery County school system.

“It is our way of presenting our own experiences as teenagers — American teenagers — and bringing to light the contemporary issues we go through as a part of this demographic,” said junior Fernando Castro. “Our goal is not just to talk about it. We want to bring you with us through our experiences.”

“Complex City” was shown at B-CC in May. With classes out for the summer, the exhibit will soon be on display at American University and will be part of next year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival, said David Lopilato, who along with another teacher, Angela Young, guided students on the project.

Lopilato’s classes have chronicled the pressures that come with being a teenager for years. In 2017, his students created a pop-up museum in an empty restaurant in suburban Maryland that documented challenges — such as the college application process and being exposed to binge drinking — through murals, performances and ceramic selfie sculptures. The Museum of the Contemporary American Teenager still coordinates events, and several of its contributors are enrolled in Lopilato’s or Young’s classes.

This past school year, students wanted to challenge the notion that their teen experience is defined by anxiety due to social media — an argument they read in a book called “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt, Lopilato said — but felt that it “oversimplified teen culture.” So they started building exhibits under the theme “Complex City.”

“They treated it like a personal mission to show that there is way more to teen life than just anxiety and even among the anxiety, there’s also way more to anxiety than just the social media and cellphones,” Lopilato said.

One exhibit, “Escape the Toxicity,” was three rooms that show the stressors of being a teenager. In one, students pulled several headlines from newspapers and posts on the DC Urban Moms blog of recent events surrounding their school district and high school they felt illustrated some of the pressures around them. One of them read, “Student found with a pellet gun at Clarksburg middle school,” and another, “Student arrested at Albert Einstein HS with weapons, police say.”

On a recent tour of the project, Elana Bilbao, a 17-year-old junior at the high school, opened up a padlocked door to a second room that contained a maze made of neon string. Like the first room, it was dimly lit, but instead of newspaper headlines, there were phrases like “situationships” and “FOMO” written on the room’s paper walls in neon paint. Bilbao explained that these phrases are representative of the negative aspects of teen culture.

She then peeled back the black paper to reveal a hole leading to a third space. The sunlit room was filled with photographs — some dating back to the 1970s — of more lighthearted parts of high school, like school dances and athletics events.

“Our main thing was that you have to go through the negative to see the positive,” Bilbao said of the exhibit’s design.

The project also captures other stressors affecting teens. A collage shows the struggle of finding a sense of belonging as a biracial person. Another features a mock newsstand with papers hung up that contain interviews with students on topics like expressing your feelings as a boy or the concept of a “pick me” girl — a girl who undermines other girls to appeal to boys. Some of them made videos and podcast episodes on the themes they wanted to explore.

Madeline Cortez, a sophomore, said students were shy to unpack the experience of being in love as a teenager and her teacher had to persuade them to open up. As she listened to her classmates, she said, she realized teenagers often are portrayed as being too immature to understand love and since they lack enough education on healthy relationships, they often end up in toxic situations.

Cortez decided to focus her contribution to the project on “limerence,” which she described as a one-sided obsession with another person without actually getting to know them. She first heard the word on TikTok, and the topic stuck out because “hallway crushes” are so common in high school. “You see one person once and maybe you make eye contact with them, so the smallest amount of validation is like the most crazy endorphins,” she said.

She created a painting depicting a boy surrounded by a golden hue. Off to the right, a girl is staring at him longingly and surrounded in shades of blue. The boy doesn’t notice the girl.

“It’s like the life is being sucked out of her almost,” Cortez explained. “Like she’s losing her sense of self to how much she’s thinking about that person.”

The teens say that their goal with the art project is to help audiences better immerse themselves in the issues facing their demographic. They are hoping to recruit more teenagers from the D.C. area to contribute pieces ahead of the Folklife Festival in 2025.

“Policymakers are allowed to make their assumptions about us because we don’t vote. So it’s like, ‘How do we get our voices heard?’” Castro said. “That’s what we kind of want to do with this. We want to bring to life our experiences.”

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