Housing is a Human Right: Stories from the Struggle for Home is is an ongoing multi-platform documentary portrait of the struggle for home in New York City, by Michael Premo and Rachael Falcone (www.housingasahumanright.org).  The project creates a space for people to record stories, in their own words: of home, community and their efforts to maintain or obtain housing.  The evening began with new work by Amy Starecheski, a doctoral student in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.  Amy is pursuing research on historical memory, property, and squatting in New York City.  Amy's piece was part of an extended interview with Frank Morales, long time squatter, Episcopal Priest, activist, and grass roots organizer, currently working as an organizer with Picture the Homeless our Housing Not Warehousing campaign.  

Amy began with three audio clips from an interview with Frank in the summer of 2009 at the University of Trash (podcast on the Brooklyn Historical Society website).  Amy shared some thoughts behind her methodology: that narrative is something to be co-constructed between the interviewer and interviewee, growing from both antecdote and the interpretative process which both parties engage in to  generate theory.  Her pieces with Frank spanned from his childhood to the present, each of them only several minutes long.  I work with Frank at Picture the Homeless and appreciated her ability to capture not only his theory of squatting (“squatting is housing as a human right made real”) and it's relationship to the broader movement for housing justice, but also to feel a deeper sense of him as a person through stories and his own description of the genesis of his class consciousness as a child.    One of the most evocative points that Frank raised during his interview was recounting how images of Black Pride, embodied by the Black Panther Party, were replaced by images of black, homeless men bumbling along the streets by the early 1980's.   This was not accidental and the important of images and stigma and power is also where the name Picture the Homeless comes from. More powerful that reading an interview with Frank about these same themes, was to hear the joy, the anger and the conviction in his voice as he describes his engagement with community struggles to reclaim vacant buildings and land.  By the end of Amy's interviews with Frank Morales I was in complete listening mode, in a space somehow there, but not limited to, the KGB Bar.

Michael Premo and Rachel Falcone's pieces, in collaboration with DJ Oja Soundwister from Earthdriver (www.earthdriver.org), were a revelation.  Not only the content, but the addition of “subliminal sounds” magnified the immediacy and emotional connection of the listener with the folks speaking.  Michael Premo introduced their work saying “Housing as a Human Right only becomes an emotionally tangible thing when it is deprived.” It seems that the goal of their experimentation is to have the listener experience as closely as possible, the vibe of the speaker and I would even say the state of the movement.  The Housing as a Human Right remix tapes were incredible portraits of individuals and their analysis and their feelings about housing and community.   In some cases there were interviews, but in others, statements by different people and sounds were strung together to tell a bigger story, even audio from housing protests: echoes of the state of housing today.  They evoked powerful feelings in me as a listener, as they filled the room and took me to my own past on that very same block of E 4^th St .  Years earlier, we had had our own battles with heat and hot water for weeks and even months on end in the freezing winter, where we opened vacant apartments and moved in homeless families, and where I had my own shelter drama, to be saved by neighbors on that same E 4^th St - lending me their couch, food, money and whatever I needed to get back on my own feet, and back home.  

Michael and Rachel's work “unites divergent narratives in housing struggles” and paints a real picture of homelessness, in contrast to the fragmentation of much of the current housing movement.  They have been taking these narratives to community,  recreating listening spaces in laundrymats.  Rachel talked about their efforts to find corners of the earth in which to talk with folks, to create intimate spaces.     DJ Oja spoke briefly about the remix process and the subliminal aspect of providing “textures outside of the literal” such as transportation sounds, to recreate for the listener a sense of space and place. 

The people's history, by the people for the people.   Michael distinguished their work from oral history by describing it as sharing stories and “leaving it at that”.  However, Rachel more accurately described their work as artists pushing boundaries so that everyday people can be interviewers: clearly the  poetic introduction of tone and subliminal sounds to interviews, magnifies the interviewees impact on the listener.   There is a lot more sophistication to the Housing As a Human Right project that sharing stories and leaving it at that.  Another sharp difference in approach is the objective/subjective dichotomy of the oral historian.  Amy's interviews with Frank Morales beautifully captured Frank, yet she also relates that she conducts interviews with people she'd never meet in real life, whereas Michael and Rachel are community members, documenting a community and struggle that they are a part of, and with which they identify and keeping the work in community by exhibiting in spaces like laundrymats.    They are participants in the same unfolding housing justice struggle: during an occupation of a vacant lot in El Barrio, NYC owned by Chase Manhattan Bank in July 2009 by Picture the Homeless, Michael Premo chose to take an arrest with us.

By the end of the listening party I felt honored to have heard the folks interviewed by Amy and the Housing As A Human Right project and be enlightened by their wisdom, and to relive some of my own past, as if I were sharing it with the folks interviewed.  I can't wait to hear more.

Lynn Lewis

Picture the Homeless