Theory on Demands #42
Radical Housing: Art, Struggle, Care
Edited by Ana Vilenica
Housing space is a crucial locus of social reproduction, as it is a place where countless acts of care that sustain our lives take place. Yet, capital has forced its way into our homes, making them a battleground. Art is embedded and intermeshed in housing struggles in multiple ways. The essays and stage scripts in this collection engage with difficult questions around battles for home, the role of the arts, and the aesthetics of struggle. What connects the contributions is that the authors think of housing struggles from both the internal and the external margins and from global and local peripheries. It is in this sights of resistance against housing precarity that radical housing is traced as it emerges, declines, and re-emerges on the way to our common future. Divided into five sections, this anthology discusses subjects such as insurgent histories and radical care in art, hands-on strategies for action, fighting art-washing with tenants’ power, politics of the past and of the future in the art of the housing struggle, the effects of financialization on artistic live-work conditions, the necessity of morning losses, as well as the irreducible plurality of housing commons, holding one another accountable, and working with dirt. Launching a proposition about radical housing art, the book deals with common challenges and failures of practicing radical housing, expressing the beauty of art that moves from the tragic to the joyful. Housing space is a crucial locus of social reproduction, as it is a place where countless acts of care that sustain our lives take place. Yet, capital has forced its way into our homes, making them a battleground. Art is embedded and intermeshed in housing struggles in multiple ways. The essays and stage scripts in this collection engage with difficult questions around battles for home, the role of the arts, and the aesthetics of struggle. What connects the contributions is that the authors think of housing struggles from both the internal and the external margins and from global and local peripheries. It is in this sights of resistance against housing precarity that radical housing is traced as it emerges, declines, and re-emerges on the way to our common future.
Order and download the book HERE