The Living School

The Living School was originally developed as part of a residency at the South London Gallery in 2014 and summer 2016 by artist Brandon LaBelle in collaboration with friends and colleagues active in questions of housing politics and related urban struggles. The project was part of the ongoing outreach activities organized by the Gallery specifically addressing local residents living in nearby housing estates. Resulting in a number of public seminars and events, including four one-day sessions held between February – June 2016, the Living School brought together artists and academics, researchers and activists, to share and work through a number of questions focused on the living conditions and future visions of the contemporary neoliberal city (exemplified in London’s mounting dissolution of social housing at that time). The aim was to create an experimental framework for shared discussions and embodied knowledge practices that could support critical housing work. This included a situated approach in which each session was held in particular institutional and community settings across the city as well as reflecting on histories of communal living. As housing is deeply personal, and embedded within what constitutes family and community, while also being subject to prevailing ideologies and market dynamics, it is positioned as fundamental to the making of life worlds.

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Outline of The Living School sessions:
Session 1: Expulsion (held at Peckham Liberal Club) February 2016
The evicted, the dislodged, exiting and then entering – where? with whom? – to come up again, against the odds, in the ruins, a disintegrating fabric, and the narratives of loss, expelled hopes, exiting and entering, again: Shall we mobilize the idea? Shall we search for a new country? Shall we gather – to rewrite the script, the future, the project, with the tragedies, movements and knowledges of displacement? A homeless thought, island to island.

With contributions by: 
Jane Rendell, professor, Bartlett School of Architecture
zURBS, artist collective
Irit Rogoff, professor, Goldsmiths College / freethought

Session 2: Poverty (held at the Ivy House Pub) March 2016
Without, and threadbare, under and under, a stressed pocket, a lost education, the conditions of despair, empty, to steal and to give, to search, this margin so central: to pool resources, to ask for help, to occupy what is left, to gather the pieces, to search for possibilities, with and through others, what might become a strategy of the weak: resilience, love, commoning.

With contributions by: 
Andrew Conio, artist, lecturer University of Kent
Andrea Luka Zimmerman, artist, Fugitive Images
Liz Allen, archivist, Toynbee Hall

Session 3: Self-Built (held at the Limehouse Town Hall) May 2016
Gathering of gleaned materials, twist, then knot – will it stand? The politics of space, and this territorial dispute, in the gaps, cut, then thread, the needs and necessities, glass or metal, the thread, and the exchange of know-how, knowing and sharing, squatting, the construction and the making of this thing, a shelter, an assemblage: forced entry, and the self-organized protocols by which resistances and hopes are sheltered.

With contributions by: 
Chris Jones, activist, 56a Archive
RUSS, urban solutions initiative
Elyssa Livergant, artist, Limehouse Town Hall

Session 4: Shared Space (held at Open School East in collaboration with the Anti-University) June 2016
Us, them, this, that and the living side by side, within this sudden opening, pressed and pressing: shall we dance? To generate this sudden opportunity. To celebrate the fragile formation, and the hands that hold, then let go, into the overlays of meanings of site and those that remember, the passions and the constitution of community – and what of hospitality? The welcome, and those who arrive: listen, and pass from hand to hand, the frictions and enthusiasm of being amongst others, and the creative spaces between.

With contributions by: 
Aria Spinelli, researcher, Radical Intention
Jonathan Hoskins, researcher
Brandon LaBelle, artist-in-residence, South London Gallery