Artists' Books

Homes for People, Not Profit!

When we talk about housing we’re never just talking about buildings, architecture, or real estate – housing is intimately connected to the social realities of our everyday lives. It can be a source of security or precarity, a place where we build community, and hopefully, where we experience a sense of safety. If we’re privileged enough to be housed in Vancouver, we invite people into our homes, we console friends in our living rooms, we share food around crowded tables, we relish in the privacy of our refuge – we populate our homes with memory. Sometimes that all comes crashing down through eviction, unaffordability, job loss, illness, injury, and all the other challenges that come with living in an ever-gentrifying city like Vancouver.

Today we’ll highlight two artists’ books that speak to this tension: between place-making and displacement; between homes for people versus real estate for profit.

First up, Love Letters by Amie Siegel

This book assembles two collections of materials side by side in order to create a dialogue between them. The first is a collection of letters written by realtors, developers, and prospective buyers. The second is a collection of photographs of current homeowners (to whom the letters were written) – predominantly Black families living in a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood in Brooklyn. The photos show lives lived: gardens planted, stoops sat on, weddings celebrated, streets danced in, and all the other boring (but meaning-making) stuff that makes up a life. The letters tell a different story – one of profit “Top dollar paid $$$,” of persuasion “We hope you will consider our bid,” and of the relentless tide of social, racial, and economic transformation that is well underway: “Our plan is to do a ‘green’ renovation and create a zero-energy house that could become a model project for the neighbourhood!”

Siegel creates tension by juxtaposing these two collections – the photos are archives of a demographic that is actively being displaced; the letters are portraits of those doing the displacing: there are real people on both sides. But while prospective buyers “Love your house!” I wonder if they also have love for the people who used to live there? Will they make space for them to return? To stay? To raise their families there too? And what of the realtors who pledge to buy houses in “any location, any condition – ALL CASH!”

This book tells a story about a specific neighbourhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, but it also asks a broader question around how to prevent the displacement of long-term residents who are priced out by incomers with economic and racial privilege. As artists we are oftentimes on the frontlines ushering in processes of gentrification. How do we mitigate displacement? Who’s comfort and security is made important? And most importantly, why have we allowed housing to become a source of profit for some rather than a human right for all?

Title: Love Letters
Author: Amie Siegel
Call Number: S584 L68
Publisher: Spector Books
Publication Date: 2020

Next up, a specifically Vancouver-based project: Coming Soon! by Emily Carr instructor and interdisciplinary artist Diyan Achjadi.

Coming Soon! presents a collection of photographs documenting a durational print installation that took place at the perimeter of various construction sites in Vancouver between June 2018 and May 2019. The project features prints depicting temporary plywood structures, orange webbing, traffic cones, dirt and other raw materials typically found at “sites in flux.” Achjadi wheat-pasted or zip-tied her prints, leaving them intentionally exposed to the elements; As Zoë Chan writes in the book’s preface: “Unlike more conventional public art projects, [Achjadi’s] prints did not function as a permanent monument for present and future Vancouverites; instead they were a fleeting presence in the city.” The prints, like the sites that they reference, were in a near-constant cycle of installation and demolition – which is what ever-gentrifying cities feel like. Chan writes, “the pace of change in Vancouver meant that [Achjadi] was regularly experiencing the uncanny feeling of dislocation…[amid] the whirlwind market-driven cycle of buying, tearing down, building, and selling” (5).

The prints added a rare non-commercial element to the visual cultures of these construction sites, which typically offer “breathless promises of upward mobility (‘Soon you can live in this place, soon you can have this amazing future!’” (5). Of course there are people who can – who have money, or have the means to access it. But for many of us, these promises further alienate us within an “anxiety-inducing socioeconomic backdrop of rapid development, rampant inequality, and skyrocketing housing costs” (3).

But what Chan beautifully reminds us in her conclusion is that “Vancouver’s deeply entrenched neocapitalist ecosystem…contrary to appearances, is far from inevitable” (9). Achjadi shows us how “quietly disrupting the prevailing visual culture of slick promotional hype” can offer a pause, a line-in, an intervention into the glossy narratives that we’re fed about the life we ought to want, the capitalist rules of who gets what and why, and the material and human costs of gentrification.

Title: Coming Soon!
Author: Diyan Achjadi
Call Number: A345 C66
Publisher: Diyan Achjadi
Publication Date: 2020