Back in 2014 I worked on an exhibition which dealt with labour rights. We wanted to include material from a project which took place in Argentina in 1968 by the ‘Group of Avant-Garde Artists’ who had declared their intention to go beyond the institutions of culture and rethink the role of art within revolutionary processes. Photographers, union members, sociologists, economists, students, artists and filmmakers came together to create a collective response to the US-backed dictator General Onganía’s repressive rule and destructive economic policies. Their Tucumán Arde (Tucumán Burns) project set out to document and publicise the deplorable social conditions in Tucumán, a province located in the north of the country. Waves of privatisation and centralisation had led to the closure of the local sugar mills and a dire social crisis. In alliance with the trade unions, the group tried to establish an information campaign to counter the propaganda disseminated through the state-sanctioned media. When we approached Graciela Carnevale (the only remaining member of the original collective to retain an interest in the archive), for permission to exhibit some of the surviving materials she had reservations. She told us that she was worried that the materials would be presented as ‘dead objects’ and asked that we find curatorial strategies that would ‘reactivate’ the archive for the contemporary moment. With the help of students from Liverpool John Moores University we came up with a solution she was happy with. But this question of how to bring documents to life in the context of ongoing social struggles – and, more specifically, the role that creative approaches might play in this process of activation – stayed with me.
In the events section of this website, we have included an entry on Martha Rosler’s artwork, If You Lived Here… which was first realised in 1989 in New York City. It comprised a series of exhibitions and public forums focusing on homelessness and gentrification. The white cube gallery was packed full of photos, graphs, newspaper articles, leaflets, children’s drawings documentary videos and artworks which gave insights into variegated lived experiences of neoliberal urbanism. Rosler wanted to use these materials to perform a kind of excavation; to reveal and critique what the geographer Cindi Katz called ‘the social and political-economic relations sedimented into space’ (2001: 721). The artist later asserted that it was her interrogation of power relations within a very particular place, rather than pursuing a more abstract ‘critique in general’, that made If You Lived Here… so distasteful to the art world of the time.
But the project was not limited to the display of objects. It also addressed a need to forge connections. Just as in the displays, distinct areas of concern and struggle were drawn into close proximity through the contributions in the associated public forums of groups variously battling to enhance the visibility of the specific challenges facing people living with AIDS (ACT UP), secure adequate accommodation for precarious families living in the Brooklyn Arms Hotel (Parents on the Move) or offer practical assistance for artists interested in developing collectively owned studio co- ops (ArtistSpace). Meanwhile a temporary office was set up in the exhibition space itself by Homeward Bound Community Services, a self-organised collective of predominantly male and African American members who had inhabited City Hall Park for six months in 1988 to protest political indifference to homelessness.
The geographer (and Leither) Neil Smith later noted that although a number of groups and struggles were formed around the intersecting issues relating to homelessness, squatting and housing at this time, in New York at least, they rarely came together in city-wide movements (2002: 442). It was in this fractured context that Rosler’s brand of radical hospitality aimed to produce and consolidate a community of interest, with documents and artworks acting as a kind of catalyst.
The project then travelled to different places, accruing more material wherever it went before it was all boxed up and stored in a facility in Brooklyn. In 2008 Rosler was asked to exhibit what was now ‘the archive’ again, kicking off a surge in interest no doubt connected to the housing crises associated with the financial crash and the ongoing ‘globalisation of gentrification’. Each fresh iteration comprised a mix of items from the original exhibitions alongside new materials relating to the current location. In keeping with the aims of the first, the rule is that local groups and organisers have to be involved – when we presented the project in Scotland we worked with Living Rent, Glasgow Women’s Library and the Glasgow Housing Struggles Archive. Though we were constrained by the pandemic era’s rules around social distancing, it was through If You Lived Here… that many members of the GHSA collective started working together.
This process of using archive materials to put the past in relation to the present helps to visually narrate the complex histories of housing crises, resistance and struggle. It helps us to learn from each other and to identify important similarities and differences across time and place. In the case of the Glasgow version in 2021, it helped us to think about how neoliberal urbanism plays out in contexts other than the ‘hothouse’ conditions of cities like New York and London. For example, the inclusion of documentation from Shona Macnaughton’s performance artwork Progressive focused on the state-led regeneration of Glasgow’s East End and how artists have been implicated in this process. Above all, as an evolving social document, If You Lived Here… help us to place ourselves in these longer (often hidden) histories, putting our own lived experience into active relation with those of others’ captured – but not rendered lifeless – in photos, drawings, newspaper articles or documentary videos.
It’s important that the GHSA includes cultural contributions to housing struggles. Exhibitions, performances, workshops, theatre and books have all played a part whether documenting or analysing social realities and interventions, or by utilising creative strategies to promote engagement. My hope is that we not only capture this creative involvement, but also that we can continue to experiment with supporting the use of creative strategies to activate and use the archive’s contents. Because, despite becoming something of a buzzword in the contemporary art field, its ‘archival turn’ is rarely addressed in terms of direct engagements with social movements.
Kirsten Lloyd
