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Inspirations: Your House is Mine

January 28, 2005

Bullet Space - picture taken from bulletspace.org
At the And So Forth conference last weekend, Molly talked a little bit about some of the past projects that have inspired us in our work on the No RNC Poster Project, and in our reincarnation as Visual Resistance. I’d like to expand on that discussion with some background information on some of the main projects that we take immediate inspiration from — sort of our guiding lights.
First on the list has got to be Your House Is Mine. Put together in 1992 at Bullet Space, an anarchist squat in the Lower East Side, Your House is Mine had three components: a newsprint publication about housing rights and the squatters’ movement, street posters, and a metal-bound book of writing and silkscreened posters by Eric Drooker, Anton Van Dalen, Andrew Castrucci, Stash Two, Sabrina Jones, Seth Tobocman, Lee Quinones, Lady Pink, David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger & Marguerite Van Cook, Missing Foundation and many, many more.

Through sheer luck, some of us got a chance to look at the book last spring, and as an artifact, it’s a monster. It’s 19 x 25 inches, with 40 screenprints on heavyweight paper, bound with lead, and weighs 16 pounds. But what was most exciting about seeing the book was imagining these same posters covering the walls of a neighborhood in struggle.
The collective production of the publication and posters, the direct connection of the artwork to a grassroots political movement, the audacity of the squatters (and the artists), and the diversity of techniques and forms used in a common project — just about everything about Your House Is Mine amazed me.
Your House Is Mine poster by Stash Two
Your House Is Mine poster
There’s much more I could say about this project, and I may add to this post in the coming weeks, but for now I don’t want this post to get too long.
I will try to post on other inspirational projects as well, and hopefully this series could become a somewhat regular feature on the site. I also created a new category (see the right sidebar) called “Inspirations” to which other collective members can add their own posts.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from folks who know about Bullet Space or the Your House Is Mine projects, or the squatters movement more generally….. Check out the links above, and let us know what you think — about this, or about your own inspirations — in the comments.
Pictures taken from BulletSpace.org and Brooklyn Artists Alliance.

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One comment on “Inspirations: Your House is Mine”

i’ve also checked out the big lead bound copy of “your house is mine.” it is amazing! but, because there are only 150 copies in existance, its really hard to find. if any one is interested in checking one out though, there is a copy available (to be viewed) at the tamiment labor archive (located on the 10th floor of nyu’s bobst library, 70 Washington Sq. South).
Tamiment is a really cool historical resource that is available to the public (but is usually only used by nerdy researchers and historians). also, the coolest thing about tamiment that by claiming that you are only going to visit the archive you can be granted access to the entire nyu library (to look at books but not check them out).
other cool things that tamiment has include:
– lots of back issues of world war 3 illustrated
– original manuscripts of emma goldman’s mother earth
– a big huge poster from the spanish civil war
– and much much more…
http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/index.html

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