The Living School is a mobile event series organised by Brandon LaBelle within the South London Gallery’s programme of artist residencies. It focuses on the issues of housing, common property, and the precarious subject. Given the tremendous unsettling of secure housing in London and elsewhere, questions about the right to public housing are pressing. Such questions equally force additional questions as to the politics of access, the constitution of community life, property as public good, as well as the power of the weak and strategies of resistance and renewal. The Living School is an open gathering for sharing and developing dialogue, and for advancing a critical, creative and embodied engagement with this current situation. 

Organised as four public sessions which take place in different locations across London (February–June 2016), the School will integrate invited presentations, interventions, and collective work, and is structured through methods of improvisation, experimental pedagogy, and self-organised criticality, in which particular topics, such as expulsion, poverty, and self-building, are considered. In particular, The Living School searches for ways to actualise an imaginative response – an emergency dwelling – for wondering aloud as to the future of public living.

The second session of The Living School, a mobile project on questions of housing, common property, and living together, will be held at the Ivy House Pub, London, on Saturday, March 12th, 12:30 – 17:30hrs. 

The session will focus on the theme of Poverty, and will include presentations by Andrew Conio and Liz Allen. Responding to issues of neo-liberal economics, Conio will bring forward a critical discussion on the question of money and liquidity, and how conditions of indebtedness are central to current debates. Grounding such discussions, Liz Allen, archivist at Toynbee Hall, will present an historical overview of the Hall, and the Settlement House Movement, and how institutions dedicated to responding to the conditions of the poor are dealing with current situations. Concluding the session, Andrea Luka Zimmerman (Fugitive Images) will screen the film Dark Days (Marc Singer, 2000), reflecting upon issues related to social housing and homelessness, and her own experience at the Haggerston Estate. It is the aim of the session to reflect upon poverty not only as a scene of being without, but equally as the basis for forms of resistance and expressions of weak-strength. 

http://southlondongallery.org/page/brandon-labelle-the-living-school

The Ivy House

40 Stuart Road, London SE15 3BE

http://www.ivyhousenunhead.com