“If You Lived Here Still…” An archive project by Martha Rosler

If You Lived Here Still…
An archive project by Martha Rosler
29 October 2010 – 30 January 2011

La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
La Rambla, 99
Barcelona 08002
Spain
www.bcn.cat/virreinacentredelaimatge

In 1989 artist Martha Rosler organized her project ‘If You Lived Here…’ at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City. ‘If You Lived Here…’ was a seminal project on housing, homelessness and the systems and conditions underlying them such as gentrification, bureaucratic complicity or non-compliance and increasing privatisation of the public sector. It took a radical approach toward art and institutions of that time, in a mode that might be called cross-disciplinary and “participatory.” The archive project by Martha Rosler at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona, initiated by Anton Vidokle and first presented at e-flux in New York and Casco in Utrecht, provides an opportunity to revisit Rosler’s undertaking and interrogate its legacy. Besides the archival materials that present the organisational and research processes behind the project, more research documents that Rosler has assembled or solicited others to contribute over the last 20 years are installed for close reading at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. These also include new materials gathered in Barcelona.

For the presentation at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona the archive is complemented with local references to several collectives engaged in work with the housing crisis. On this occasion the emphasis is put on different forms of cultural activism merging in the context of the archive compiled by Martha Rosler. For such a purpose La Virreina Lab organizes two consecutive panels on 28 October and 29 October. Representatives of collectives and local organizations will debate the dimensions of the current housing crisis from a cultural perspective. The first panel will focus on the challenges involved in the new strategies for social representation and the second will open the floor to a wide range of voices involved in the debates about the housing crisis in the specific context of the city of Barcelona.

Open forum on
Cultural Activism and Housing Crisis
La Virreina Lab
28 October-29 October, 2010.

28 October, 19.30 h.
Participants: Martha Rosler, Anton Vidokle, Leonidas Martín and Carles Guerra (moderator)

29 October, 19.00 h.
Participants: Martha Rosler. Repensar Bon Pastor, Espai polític EXIT, Issaac Marrero and Javier Rodrigo (moderator)