My video response to the Los Angeles Department ‘Walk the Talk’ Skid Row archive project

In the collective imaginary – but also in much detrimental journalistic and scholarly ‘work’ – #SkidRow in #LosAngeles is presented only as a place of neglect and despair. Yet, as bell hooks taught us, margins are never just a place of annihilation but can become sites of embodied mundane resistance against structural, often racialised, violence. These embodiments do not speak only of being ‘resilient’, but challenge the conditions of their formations.

Some years ago, I was lucky enough to encounter the people at the Los Angeles Poverty Department. With their work cutting across performative arts and grounded #housingactivism, they provide a quintessential community resource for residents in Skid Row. One of their initiatives is called ‘Walk the Talk’, and it consists of a biannual parade of local performers – a moment of celebration for many men and women in the community.

Now an impressive multi-media archive gives all of us access to 68 performers talking about life, #homelessness, #radicalhousing, #resistance. This is genuinely one of the most powerful archives around ‘homelessness’, and everything that goes with it, which I ever had the pleasure to excavate and enjoy.

I am honoured I was invited to respond to its creation along with a number of other people. You can check the Archive and the available responses here: https://app.reduct.video/lapd/walk-the-talk/#/responses

If you want to know more about the Los Angeles Poverty Department, and in particular about the Archive project, check https://lapovertydept.org/walk-the-talk-2020-5-23/

Thanks to the wonderful John Malpede, Henriëtte Brouwers and Clancey Cornell, and to Skid Row residents and performers for having me.