“Unhoused” gathers visual evidence of populations in Atlanta, Chicago, Kyoto, Osaka, and Monterrey (MX), enduring very local variations of a global housing crisis. This evidence is part of our ongoing research for a book on the work of inspiring groups and organizations that bring visibility and innovative approaches to successfully address unhousing issues, pumping new energy into the struggles to articulate and confront complex housing problems.

Unhousing describes both the process by which people are displaced and the kinds of situations and structures generated in response to this displacement. Unhousing is manifested in very local and culturally specific ways. In Japan, the tidy shacks that populate Osaka’s largest park look different from the sprawling favelas of Sao Paolo, or the vast squatted areas that increase the population of Mexico City at alarming rates. Encampments in Los Angeles are tolerated in an inverse relationship to the tiny cardboard shacks in Chicago, which are obliterated almost as quickly as they are built. While each local situation is different, the underlying causes are increasingly interrelated as corporate globalization extends its reach, impacting housing markets around the world in direct and indirect ways. Unhousing is not specific to cities. Rural areas have their own sets of unique concerns. This exhibition is a way to start looking at these unique situations together, to see their commonality through their differences.

CONTRIBUTORS:

• The Mad Housers have been building shelters with the unhoused of Atlanta for nearly two decades. The shelters are inserted without permission into the interstices of the city.

• The persons who make up Learning Group pay attention to local situations and what can come out of them in relation to unused materials, economic and social conditions. They will present some of their research from and activities in squatted neighborhoods of Monterrey, Mexico.

• Eigo Komai, Theaster Gates and Alicia Scott, have just begun to experiment with extremely innovative, low-cost housing for Chicago’s West Side. It often takes enormous amounts of money and wasteful construction to rehabilitate the interiors of old buildings. They propose a different strategy: secure the outside shell of a building; gut its interior; and build separate low-cost structures inside.

• We took photos of encampments of unhoused persons in Osaka and Kyoto, two large cities in Japan in the summer of 2001. We are currently developing contacts with groups working with these populations.

Additional programming will bring in other perspectives and generate discussions about the complex issues surrounding unhousing and its representation.


VIDEO PROGRAM
Co-organized by In the Field and Daniel Tucker
Wednesday, August 24, 7:30 pm
Video run time: approx. 1 hr 45 min
Followed by discussion

Chicago Premier Screening
“All for the Taking: 21st Century Urban Renewal”
By George McCollough, 2005
58 min

“All for the Taking” documents the personal struggles of residents impacted by Phildalphia’s latest urban renewal program—the $1.6 billion dollar Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI)—and of housing activists fighting eminent domain abuse at the heart of NTI. The film is a case study of how an American city struggles to redefine itself through urban renewal in the face of a growing global economy – an economy that undermines the value of labor, the local economy, and the sense of community that was once the core of urban America.

“Anita Garibaldi Occupation
By Indymedia Brazil, 2001
20 min.

In 2001, five thousand families from the Movement of Homeless Workers (MTST), undertook Brazil’s largest ever land occupation in Guarulhos, state of Sao Paulo.
Visit the following link for more information, or to contact the filmmakers:
http://www.midiaindependente.org/pt/blue/2003/05/253918.shtml

"OCAP Strikes Back"
By OCAP (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty), The Toronto Video Activist Collective (TVAC), and Jonathan Culp, 2001
22 min

This video distills a decade of anti-poverty activism into 22 minutes of interviews, anecdotes and previously unseen footage. It delves behind OCAP’s high-profile actions and discussing the tactics and principles that inspired them, and the casework that backs them up and brings communities together.
http://www.satanmacnuggit.com/Catalogue/videos/ocapstrikespage.htm

PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION
Brunchluck and presentation with Human and Housing Rights Activist, Jamie Kalven,
Author of “View from the Ground” – www.viewfromtheground.org
August 28, 2005 – Brunchluck begins at 12:00 pm, talk begins at 1:00 pm

The exhibition, screening and presentation all take place at Mess Hall. They are free and open to the public.

Mess Hall
6932 N. Glenwood Ave.
Chicago, IL | 60626
www.messhall.org