A recap of the Worlds Of Homelessness event series that took place in October 2019 in Los Angeles.
Recap: Worlds Of Homelessness events
The Worlds of Homelessness event series including discussions, music performances, and film screenings took place from October 22. through 27., 2019 in Los Angeles at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, NAVEL, and SCI-Arc, and culminated with the Los Angeles Poverty Department's 10th Annual Festival for All Skid Row Artists on October 26. and 27., 2019.
The project was developed in cooperation with the Los Angeles Poverty Department, which has created art with and promoted the activism of Skid Row Artists for decades; the Thomas Mann House, the renowned and independent architecture school SCI-Arc, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin and NAVEL, a collectively driven cultural organization.
Jutta Allmendinger is President of the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and Professor of Sociology in Education and Labor Market Research at Humboldt Universität Berlin since 2007. In addition, she has served as Honorary Professor of Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin since 2012. Jutta Allmendinger studied sociology and social psychology in Mannheim and Madison, Wisconsin earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University and her habilitation degree at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich. From 1992 to 2007, she was a professor there. Her multiple honors and awards include the German Federal Cross of Merit First Class. Jutta Allmendinger serves on numerous advisory boards in Germany and abroad. She has been a member of the Goethe Institute since 2014. In 2018, she spent four months at Thomas-Mann-Haus in Los Angeles as one of the first Thomas-Mann-Fellows, appointed by the German Federal Foreign Office.
Henriëtte Brouwers is the Associate Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department since 2000. She co-directs, produces, and performs in many LAPD performances. Born in the Netherlands, Brouwers has performed, directed and taught throughout the Netherlands, France and the US. In Paris, she became a member of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed group (1979-82) and studied corporeal mime with Etiènne Décroux. In the Netherlands, she founded movement theater ACTA and performed with Shusaku & Dormu Dance Theatre, Grif Theater, Nationaal Fonds, and others. In 1993, the Theatre Project in Baltimore presented her work, “A Traveling Song.” In the same year, 7 Stages theatre invited her to perform the solo “Maya in The Decline and Fall of the Rest” by Jim Grimsley and was movement director for “Blue Monk” by Robert Earl Price for the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta. She performed her solo Malinche and La Lengua, the Tongue of Cortès in the US and the Netherlands and directed a series of devised performances based on the Mexican legend of La Llorona: The Weeping Woman. She is featured in artist Bill Viola’s renowned “The Passions” series. Henriëtte Brouwers worked with John Malpede on the creation of RFK in EKY (2004) a community-based re-enactment of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 trip to investigate poverty in Appalachia.
Thorsten Deckler is a Johannesburg based architect and co-founder (together with Anne Graupner) of 26’10 south Architects. The practice works across architecture, urban design, and knowledge management with the aim to create spaces in which people can thrive. Besides building key infrastructure and housing projects, 26’10 has conducted long-term research on informal urbanism, culminating in the InformalStudio run in partnership with the University of Johannesburg and Goethe-Institut. This material has been shared through popular media and exhibitions held locally and abroad. Thorsten is a popular speaker and has led workshops on urbanism at Washington University (St Louis, 2016) and the AZA Conference (Pretoria 2018). 26’10 has received local and international recognition and has been selected as best emerging practice in South Africa (Backstage Award Venice 2012).
Radames Eger - I am a fashion designer based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. I was born in Brazil, and for the past 15 years have lived in Europe. Following my career as a ballet dancer, I dedicated myself to the creation of an entirely new world of fashion. My goal has always been to clothe those individuals who need it the most. I create my collection for minority groups like senior citizens, the sick, and the homeless; essentially, anyone who does not fit the fashion world's classic image of beauty. I have declared the commercial fashion world a thing of the past. I conceived my three-week-long EX°ST-Tour through Germany as a vigil and exhibition of my "tent-jacket." I sought to draw attention to the issue of homelessness, and especially in winter, to raise awareness within society so that in the future, no one ever has to die on the street.
Kerem Halbrecht is an architect and a public space producer. He founded 72 Hour Urban Action that created tens of urban interventions with designers and residents in cities around Europe and the Middle East. Kerem is also an architect and co-founder at The Spaceship, a pioneering independent work-live-share space that has become a center of free expression in Tel Aviv since 2007. Recently he co-founded Just Add People, a group that develops formats for playful spatial reflection. Since 2016, Kerem is conducting research and development for the Goethe-Institut in Rotterdam, Kyoto, Los Angeles and Guadalajara for activation of citizen participation in the design and management of the built environment. Kerem has exhibited and presented around the globe, in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Harvard Graduate School of Design, UC Berkeley, MIT Media Lab, and MoMA PS1, among others.
Michele Lancione is an urban ethnographer and activist interested in issues of marginality and diversity, homelessness, and radical politics. His works have been published in top international journals in the field of Urban Geography, Housing Studies and Anthropology. His first edited volume is entitled Rethinking Life at the Margins, while his non-academic works include a collaborative documentary around forced evictions in Bucharest, Romania www.ainceputploaia.com. Michele is also one of the founders and editors of the open-source Radical Housing Journal, an Editor of City, and Corresponding Editor for Europe at IJURR. He is based at the Urban Institute and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, UK.
The LA Playmakers were founded in 2014 by Joseph Warren and Stan Watson. They all were members of the Praise and Worship Team at Skid Row’s Central City Church of the Nazarene. The accomplished professional musicians have played with a number of well-known jazz and pop music figures. They embody the creative spirit that persists in the Skid Row Community. The LA Playmakers will open the event series Worlds of Homelessness and close the Festival for All Skid Row Artists.
Founded in 1985 by director-performer-activist John Malpede and based in Skid Row, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a non-profit arts organization, the first performance group in the nation made up principally of homeless people, and the first arts program of any kind for homeless people in Los Angeles. LAPD creates performances and multidisciplinary artworks that connect the experience of people living in poverty to the social forces that shape their lives and communities. LAPD’s works express the realities, hopes, dreams, and rights of people who live and work in L.A.’s Skid Row. John Malpede and Henriëtte Brouwers are co-recipients of the 2018 City of Santa Monica Visual Artist Fellowship.
John Malpede directs, performs, and engineers multi-event projects that have theatrical, installation, public art, and education components. In 1985, he founded Los Angeles Poverty Development (LAPD), a performance group comprised primarily of homeless and formerly homeless people who make art, live, and work on Skid Row. He has produced projects working with communities throughout the US, as well as in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Bolivia. His 2004 work RFK in EKY sought to recreate Robert Kennedy’s 1968 “war on poverty” tour in the course of a four-day, 200-mile series of events focused on historic and current issues and social policy. As a 2008-2009 fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Malpede developed Bright Futures in response to the worldwide financial crisis. In 2013, John Malpede received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. In 2014, the Queens Museum of Art in New York City mounted the first retrospective gallery exhibition on the work of the LAPD, which traveled to the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena in 2016.
Barbara Schönig, Prof. Dr.-Ing., studied Urban Planning, German Literature and History of Arts in Berlin and Columbus, Ohio. In her Ph.D., she focused on Metropolitan Planning and Civil Society in the United States. Before becoming a professor for Urban Planning at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in 2012, she taught at Technical University Berlin and Technical University Darmstadt. She is Director of the Institute for European Urban Studies and the Vice Dean of the Department for Architecture and Urbanism at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Her research focuses on critical studies of planning and its role within processes and practices of space production. Fields of research include interdisciplinary housing research, social housing, participation in urban development as well as processes of spatial restructuring of urban, suburban, and rural areas.
Hilary Silver is Chair and Professor of Sociology, International Affairs, and Public Policy at the George Washington University, and Professor Emerita of Urban Studies and Sociology at Brown University where she rose through the ranks since receiving her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She was Editor of the urban sociological journal, City & Community, and a consultant to the World Bank, ILO, United Nations, and other international organizations on issues of social exclusion, poverty, and inequality around the world. She was twice a Fulbright Scholar in Germany and among the first fellows of the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Bremen. She has visited at the Humboldt Universität and Freie Universität, and WZB in Germany among many other think tanks and universities and has received support from DAAD. Her film "Direction Home" (2015) follows seven Rhode Islanders experiencing homelessness over seven years until they all have secured housing.
Licko Turle was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960. He is an actor, director, and professor with a master's, doctorate and postdoctoral degrees in Theater. He is a visiting professor in the Graduate Program of the Theater School of the Federal University of Bahia. In 1986, with Augusto Boal, he created the Theater Center of the Oppressed in Brazil; and created in 1999, with Amir Haddad, the Tá Na Rua Institute for Arts, Education, and Citizenship. He is the author of three books on Theater of the Oppressed and four on Street Theater. He has worked in Asia, Europe, Africa, North, Central, and South America and all Brazilian states. He has investigative interest in ethnic-racial areas, street dwellers, Popular Theater, Political Theater, Street Theater, and social movements. He coordinates the events International Conference "Theater of the Oppressed and University"; National Meeting of the Brazilian Street Theater Network, and Black Forum of Performing Arts. His current shows as director and co-director in Bahia are: "Essay for Democracy" and "Black Skin, White Masks." He accompanies the MSTB - Homeless Movement of Bahia, the Articulation of the Old Center of Salvador, the School of Theater in the MST-Perus, São Paulo, SP and the Theater Movement of the Periphery of São Paulo. He currently lives in Salvador, Bahia, where he wants to install the project "Escola de Teatro Negro."
Ana believes in conscious and creative design at multiple scales as a method of intervention able to contribute equality in the building of the city. Graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1992, Ana based her architectural practice in Medellin, Colombia. With over two decades of practice, the focus of her work has been the design of collective housing with more than 2000 units being built, public space and public buildings obtaining several national awards at the Colombian Biennale. Since 2017 she is a consultant for Comfama, the biggest non-profit private family compensation corporation entity in Antioquia, where she leads several designs for urban and rural housing throughout the 125 towns of the region. Her main strategy is the design of intermediate spaces, these are the spaces that bond the private and the public and are capable of hosting the customs of collective and individual daily life, allowing the building of sustainable communities.
Catherine Wagley is an art critic and journalist based in Los Angeles. She is a contributing editor for the art journal Momus and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA). She served as an art critic for the LA Weekly from 2011-2017, and contributes to artnet News, ARTNews, Hyperallergic, the LA Times and The LAnd, among other publications. She is a recent recipient of the Rabkin Prize for art journalism. Her current work often focuses on issues of obscurity: how do we pull stories from the margins of different art worlds without forcing them to fit the mainstream narratives we already know how to tell? Additionally, her reporting in Los Angeles frequently explores the relationships between the art world, gentrification, and urban geography.
