Collaborators : Picture The Homeless Oral History Project, Recordings By Lynn Lewis Of Marcus Moore
“Homelessness exists not because the system is not working but because this is the way it works.” — Peter Marcuse
The Pill and Vacant Buildings are illustrated audio narratives created in collaboration with the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project, as part of a 2019 exhibition at the New Museum intended to create awareness around systemic injustice and the dehumanization resulting from the city’s commodification of housing and for-profit shelter system. As a grassroots organization of homeless or formerly homeless individuals, Picture the Homeless elevates the voices of those directly experiencing housing precarity to political power. This project seeks one more way to situate these voices and experiences ‘in the room’ with NYC’s political and socioeconomic elite.
This project was produced as part of Urban Design Forum’s Forefront Fellowship, Shelter for All. Additional exhibition components, research and a paper, Systemic Radical Change, were produced in collaboration with April de Simone, Alp Bozkurt, Johane Clermont and Nova Lucero.
