At a certain point, we will dream about housing
A screening and workshop about the role collective fantasies play in the development of housing methodologies through the lens of Judit Elek's 1969 film titled The Lady from Constantinople.
What is housing today? Is it a living fantasy attached to spaces, is it a cultural fantasy, is it archetypical, is it a process? The workshop is intended to explore new possibilities for habitat-making by experimenting with de-learning our already established attitudes and creating a new blank(ish) state for re-learning or re- dreaming notions such as the principal human right to housing and indeed what really is a “better” living condition. This utopistic proposition, attempts to challenge the tools we use to criticise systems (neoliberal vs. Marxist) and our obsession with ideologies (~ vs. ~). We'd also like to think about “semi-failed” housing utopias, and our emotional attachment to the meaning of better living conditions. As part of the session, participants will be invited to watch Elek Judit’s 1969 film titled The Lady from Constantinople, which is about finding a home in socialist era Hungary, where conflicting ideological-political elements illustrate how social systems in practice conflict with fantasies of better living conditions. We would like to invite participants to consider whether the unconscious (both collective and individual) mind has a role to play in the development of housing methodologies, living spaces, and common grounds, as not firmly fixed but constantly constructed concepts, shaped by (shared) narratives and (collective) imaginations. Therefore, in our daily lives, we are surrounded by a flux of external and sometimes forced knowledge. As part of this workshop, we’d like to explore the use of dreamscapes as an alternative to existing approaches used to decode urban morphologies and systematic displacements, and to dislocate what is known as the spatial realm, to explore the possibility of creating more liveable future spaces.
Workshop resources:
Recommended Readings: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yz4rDK1ycQi1E2N3Jn_8KAXVprdCZ3PU?usp=drive_link
Bios
Shani Haberman (b. 1996 Jerusalem) lives and works in London. She graduated from University College London in 2021 with an MSc Urban Studies and previously studied Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins. She currently works for Ark Resettlement Services, an organisation that provides supported housing for ex-offenders. She oversees housing projects and the organisation's programmes to help prison leavers reintegrate into society. As part and beyond this role, she is investigating alternative approaches to the problem of being unable to compete with the open (housing) market. Previously, she curated and participated in several cultural activities, including an archival exhibition at Pushkin House, London, where she is in the process of preparing an Eastern European film programme addressing displacement and housing issues.
Károly Tendl (b. 1989, Budapest) lives and works in London. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2019 with an MA in Contemporary Art Practice: Critical Practice, and previously studied Contemporary Media Practice at the University of Westminster. He works with text, the emergence and dislocation of culture and identity, sound, new and old ideologies, dark nostalgia, speculative prose and installation. Károly fictions around the ideas of the urban and rural, planetary periphery and centre, and often around some of the shared sensibilities under oppressive regimes among the European non-homogenous working classes, the uncomfortable weight of class mobility and the dull sword of cultural capital.
