A conversation about the complex interfaces of contemporary art and the global housing crisis with Los Angeles-based artist and organiser Dont Rhine, curator and lecturer Kirsten Lloyd, and Emma Saunders, National Organiser with Living Rent. Artists, art workers and culture have long flourished where housing is affordable and the cost of living low. As economic hardship intensifies and cultural life seems increasingly instrumentalised by developers, this session asks what’s at stake amidst unchecked gentrification and how resistance might be imagined.
Dont Rhine is a Los Angeles–based artist, organiser and popular educator. He is a member of the international sound art collective, Ultra-red, which he co-founded in 1994. He began his political education in ACT UP Los Angeles and then the needle exchange, Clean Needles Now, presently Community Health Project Los Angeles, founded in 1992. Since 2015, he has been a founding organizer of the L.A. Tenants Union. In 2023 Ultra-red will publish the first issue of their own journal on militant sound inquiry through Rab-Rab Press in Helsinki. ultrared.org
Emma Saunders is a community organiser and geographer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She was a founding member of Living Rent, Scotland’s tenants’ union, and is currently the national organiser for the union, supporting members to build local branches and national campaigns to fight for genuinely affordable, quality and secure housing. Emma was previously a labour organiser in France supporting precarious workers to organise in their workplace, wrote a PhD on international labour solidarity and took part in a collective fighting against slum clearances notably involving visual and performance artists. livingrent.org
About Decades: Marking the Scottish Contemporary Art Network’s first ten years of activity by looking to the next ten years, DECADES is SCAN’s new programme of free conversational events. Matching friends, collaborators and alumni in Scotland with the thinkers, activists and organisers who inspire them, each 90-minute event will centre an issue prescient to the lives of artists, art workers and the wider public.
We know that the past few years have seen our contemporary art community work harder than ever in navigating the compound challenges of COVID-19, Brexit and an unfolding cost of living crisis. DECADES marks a conscientious pivot for SCAN, making a space away from the present tense to envisage futures with expertise summoned from across disciplines, experiences and borders.
DECADES is an invitation to think laterally about the world we want to build and what tools we’ll need to do so. With topics expected to include the future of arts education, artists and the housing crisis, new visions for civic space and institutional power, each event will ask what conditions are needed to make a liveable world for all and a thriving environment for contemporary art in Scotland.