Seminar: The Sixth Housing Estate, South London Gallery. 6 December 2014

The Sixth Housing Estate: Every wall has two sides
Seminar on neighbors & strangers

http://www.southlondongallery.org/page/brandon-labelle-the-sixth-housing-estate-every-wall-has-two-sides

with presentations by:
Les Back
Ari Henry
Brandon LaBelle
Andrea Luka Zimmerman

Saturday, December 6th, 2014 - 14:00h
South London Gallery
65-67 Peckham Road
London

**with additional contributions by: Frans Jacobi, Richard Launder, Isik Knutsdotter, David Roberts, and Nicky Hirst, Tom Keller, Susan Lynch, Members of the Coin St Youth Club and the Coin St Housing Co-ops.


Public housing expresses a primary perspective, that of the right to an adequate domestic life. Yet it also gives expression to a notion of community and neighborliness, putting us side by side in a model of being together. The individual home is not only one's own, but an articulation of shared space. The threat to public housing disavows the right to a secure home as well as the belief in community as a public good. In contrast, housing may crucially appear as a form of commonwealth, and the sharing between neighbors a form of social encounter.


Developed as part of Brandon LaBelle's ongoing research project, The Sixth Housing Estate, initiated in the summer of 2014 at the South London Gallery, this public seminar asks how might the public good of community model itself against the political and economic backdrop of privatization? Is it possible to probe the tensions and discrepancies between public and private life, to pry open new spaces for informal, intimate and surprising exchanges that pass between walls? Can we envision a creative arena for fostering models for more inclusive experiences of sharing and well-being, ones that may also undo or amplify the urgencies of contemporary life?


The seminar considers these questions of housing, and of shared space, with a focus on "neighbors and strangers". This may lead us toward a sense for the emotional landscapes shaped through what Édouard Glissant terms the "opacity" of worldliness, and the affective labors by which we search for social bonds.


The seminar is the second in a series of public events and interactions developed by Brandon LaBelle in collaboration with the South London Gallery.
http://brandonlabelle.net/sixth_housing_estate.html

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Les Back is a professor of sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of the The Art of Listening (2007), Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture (2003 with Vron Ware), and The Changing Face of Football: Racism, Identity and Multicuture in the English Game (2001) with T Crabbe and J. Solomos. In addition, he has edited three volumes: The Auditory Cultures Reader (2003 with Michael Bull), Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (2000 with John Solomos), and Invisible Europeans?: Black people in the ‘New Europe’ (1993 with Anoop Nayak).

Ari Henry is Co-founder of People's Republic of Southwark, and a local resident.

Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer living in Berlin. His work addresses the relation of the public and the private, sociality and figures of the outcast. Also a prolific writer, he is the author of Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012) Acoustic Territories (2010) and Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (2006).

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a filmmaker, artist and cultural activist. She won the 2014 Artangel Open award for her collaborative project Cycle with Adrian Jackson (of Cardboard Citizens). Her feature essay film Taskafa: Stories of the Street (2013), a film about resistance and co-existence and voiced by John Berger, from his novel King, is told through the lives of the street dogs of Istanbul. She is co-founder of the artists' collective Fugitive Images (responsible for the photographic installation i am here and the artists' book-work Estate: Arts, Politics and Social Housing in Britain). Her forthcoming feature essay film Estate tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate in Hackney, London, and the utopian promise of social housing it offered, with an unruly celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity.