"We Declare": Spaces of Housing
“We Declare”: Spaces of Housing, a project with and through Gallery Gachet addresses the sites and institutions where decisions and declarations regarding housing are made (ranging from local communities, to the provincial capital, and up to the United Nations).
The situation-specific project brings these spaces of symbolic and real power into the gallery through large-scale photo-based images mounted on the walls.
By collapsing the scale of these spaces and bringing them into a new relation, “We Declare” points to the difference between what Henri Lefebvre called the representation of space and the spaces of representation.
If space is produced by social interactions, the installation “We Declare” creates visible alliances between the collectively organized community space at the Gallery Gachet, the context of the neigbourhood, and the desire to push the coherencies of artistic and political practices.
A beginning point of this exhibition is the crisis in access to housing that Vancouver is facing at this moment (as well as the coming crisis that the Olympics will bring), but the question of the potential of a socially attuned artistic practice in a city that is both “cultured” and globalized is also a beginning point. Yet, “We Declare” aims to approach these issues and potentials by understanding that the situation of Vancouver is specific in the way that this crisis has developed and grown —— as well as part of a global urban tendency that continually pushes property rights over the right to stable housing.