For the past month, Bianca Giaever, an artist and filmmaker, has been roaming New York City, wearing a firetruck red jumpsuit and an enormous sandwich board that reads “FREE HELP.”
Giaever is actually offering what’s advertised. If you need help, she will help you — for free.
Her business card, which she hands out freely, often to people who approach her or strike up a conversation, lists her contact information, along with examples of her services: child care, emotional support, physical labor, relationship advice, organization, cleaning.
“ANYTHING! (Except sex!),” it reads.
Bianca Giaever’s business card.
Giaever considers the five-week project a piece of performance art. She is filming the proceedings and plans to turn them into a feature-length documentary.
“It’s been an amazing window into a bunch of different worlds and a bunch of different people’s lives in New York City, through what they need help with,” she said in an interview from her home in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. “Sometimes it’s absolutely dire and sometimes it’s ridiculous and absurd and frivolous.”
So far she has helped an undocumented man from Ivory Coast connect with a non-governmental organization that might assist him with finding a job; helped a writer overcome writer’s block by mapping out the world of a science fiction story; helped some teenagers learn a TikTok dance; and even helped someone open a bottle of wine.
Bianca Giaever pictured with Ora DeKornfeld who is helping to film the project.
Photo by Ryan Kailath / Gothamist
“I’ve gotten that request multiple times actually,” Giaever said. “So that’s become part of my toolkit.”
Giaever began the project in Union Square, the traditional home to many New York characters, including chess players, FREE HUGS groups, and more.
Some of her simpler projects have taken place in the park itself, such as offering relationship advice or watching a mother’s kids for a few minutes while the mother took a quiet moment for herself.
Giaever often starts her day in Union Square. Her art has taken her to every borough except Staten Island and at least one project in New Jersey, where she helped an 81-year-old man deal with a storage unit he could no longer afford.
She started taking requests on a first-come, first-served basis, but after 17 days filled with home improvement tasks and cleaning projects, she began to prioritize more interesting requests, like reading lines during a play rehearsal or helping someone register to vote.
David Livingston and Bianca Giaever.
Photo by Ryan Kailath / Gothamist
She’s not sure where the idea for her efforts originated, though she said she has long thought about doing an art project dedicated to helping.
“I can be pretty selfish,” Giaever said. “I’m naturally not that helpful, I think I need an excuse or a reason. And I feel like I am seeing the world differently now, cosplaying my most generous self.”
“The hardest thing is when people need help with housing, or something so overwhelming that I would maybe need a social work degree to know how to do that,” she continued. “I’m not a professional. But I think just listening to people’s problems has been a little bit helpful, or trying to figure out how I can make someone’s day a little better.”
The storage unit presented one such challenge, Giaever said. There were more belongings in it than she could possibly go through and help sort, so she supported the man with his decision to get rid of all the contents.
“That was really hard and there was no easy answer,” she said. “I still feel a little guilty. It’s not clear in every situation that I helped. But I’m trying to do no harm, first of all.”
She said she’s been surprised by the number of people who want help making content on social media. Along with the dancing teenagers, she helped a woman film herself performing a seance for TikTok get her psychic tarot sorceress business off the ground.
“A lot of it has become about the way people want to be on social media, talking to them about what kind of content they want and how to perform their social media identity,” Giaever said. “People want to be influencers. I didn’t anticipate that being a big request.”
Her own social media presence is light. So far, she has only a single Instagram post about the project, as well as occasional Instagram Stories highlighting moments from her days: starring as a dummy in a chiropractor’s video; helping with a football practice; being elbow-deep in a pile of trash while helping retrieve someone’s lost $150 finger skateboard.
Though much of the assistance she’s been asked for is more prosaic than profound, Giaever said she’s glad she’s in a position to provide it.
“I don’t know what NGO exists out there that would be helping with these mundane details,” she said. “But this is the stuff of life.”