Facilitator:<\/strong> […] Did somebody leave and then come back again? I can see you on the balcony. You. You left on the countdown, didn\u2019t you? And now you want to come back in. […]<\/p>\n Female:<\/strong> I don’t think we should let them in, because if there\u2019s something wrong with them… […]<\/p>\n Female:<\/strong> [They can\u2019t come in] if they\u2019re going to come and drink our water. They\u2019ve got to bring some stuff. If they\u2019ve got food, they can come. \u00c8ve Chabanon, Anti-Social Social Club: Episode One, The Chamber of the Dispossessed<\/em>, 2017. Photo credit: Gyte Gavenaite.<\/p><\/div>\n Anti-Social Social Club: Episode One, The Chamber of the Dispossessed<\/em> grew out of \u00c8ve Chabanon\u2019s residency at the White House1<\/a><\/sup> in Barking and Dagenham from January to June 2017. The residency had been set up three months earlier by Create London, an organisation that self-describes as existing \u201cto explore the ways artists can contribute to the lives of people in cities2<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\n The former industrial borough of Barking and Dagenham was the site of a Ford factory that employed 40,000 people prior to closing and relocating in 2013. In 2015, a survey ranked Barking and Dagenham first on a list of the worst places to live in Great Britain: it was the area with the highest unemployment and burglary rates3<\/a><\/sup>. Added to this is the fact that the men who perpetrated the London Bridge attacks in June 2017 were from that area. In spite of all, over the past five years it has been attracting developers, because although it is a fair distance from the centre of London, it is well-connected by public transport, and in consequence of its poor reputation (or thanks to it), housing prices are still low there. This is why the noose is tightening around social housing, which is in the process of disappearing, not only in this district but throughout the country.<\/p>\n When \u00c8ve Chabanon arrived, the residency\u2019s first two artist had just left. Chad McCail had created a pantomime in collaboration with a group of local residents, and Patrick Goddard had made a video on how locals in Barking and Dagenham perceived the presence of artists in their neighbourhood. McCail\u2019s project was received positively by residents as a chance to develop artistic stills (costume making, set construction, scriptwriting, etc.) and meet new people in the context of a group activity. Goddard\u2019s, however, received some rather sharp criticism. It was accused of promoting the role of the missionary, gentrifying artist, which is precisely what he had sought to counter, but without implementing a rigorous artistic and critical strategy.<\/p>\n It was in this climate between curiosity and mistrust that \u00c8ve Chabanon started developing her ideas. During her conversations with users of the Front Room and with Christina Ford\u2014the other artist-in-residence, a longstanding local who was doing a project with a group of disadvantaged single mothers\u2014the subjects of the housing crisis and economic and social dispossession kept coming up. Even though local residents have welcomed the White House as a place that generates social connections, they also recognise it as a tool serving cultural policies that are supporting and facilitating the gentrification of their district. In the Front Room, \u00c8ve Chabanon organized a retrospective of films directed by Ken Loach, who explores social and economic violence in Great Britain. The first film to be screened along with a meal and an informal discussion was I, Daniel Blake<\/em>, which won the Palme d\u2019Or at the 2016 Cannes Festival. It tells the story of a man\u2019s descent into hell when he is unable to work and his support allowance is withdrawn. Daniel Blake, and also Cathy\u2014the protagonist of Ken Loach\u2019s legendary drama Cathy Come Home <\/em>(1966)\u2014run up against bureaucratic injustice in 1966 and 2016 respectively, when governmental choices were being made that generated poverty and the housing crisis. It is from the highly emotional discussions on that evening at the White House that the idea of the coalition of the dispossessed was given rise.<\/p>\n A few weeks later in Barking and Dagenham, \u00c8ve Chabanon participated in a discussion broadcast on BBC radio with philosopher Michael Sandel, author of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice<\/em> (1982). The subject of the discussion, \u201cWould life be better if robots did all the work?4<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0\u201c, was inspired by Barking and Dagenham\u2019s industrial past. The BBC asked those who wanted to take part in the discussion to visit its website and state their gender, postcode, religion and socioeconomic situation, with a view to assembling a diverse audience. The programme was recorded at a local school. It was preceded by a free glass of wine for participants, followed by magic tricks and then some jokes from a warm-up comedian who finally made way for Michael Sandel. He explained the structure of the discussion, then launched it with the following question: \u201cCould a robot do your job as well as you? How many say yes and how many say no?\u201d Various people took the floor, directed by the philosopher\u2019s questions, which were variously condescending or demagogic. Then at a certain point, Sandel made the following suggestion:<\/p>\n \u201cThere are two different ways of losing a job: to a robot or to a person willing to do that job for less\u2014whether that\u2019s a person who lives overseas in a place with low wages or whether it\u2019s a recent immigrant. If you lost your job, which would make you angrier? Losing your job to a robot or losing your job to a person willing to do that job at a lower wage?\u201d<\/p>\n The discussion brought out class tensions, which are so pervasive in England, and revived the polemics of Brexit, which was won by the segments of society least heeded by MPs (in Barking and Dagenham, 62.4% voted in favour of Brexit). Sandel\u2019s questions cynically manipulated the idea of a democratic public that wants everyone to have the right to be included and heard, regardless of their cultural, social or economic affiliations. Or according to the definition offered by political theorist and feminist Iris Marion Young, \u201ca democratic public should provide mechanisms for the effective recognition and representation of the distinct voices and perspectives of those of its constituent groups that are oppressed or disadvantaged5<\/a><\/sup>\u201d. Although so-called oppressed or dispossessed people were in fact represented in the discussion\u2014often singled out as those who admit preferring to lose their job to a robot rather than to lower-paid workers\u2014they were openly pointed out by the BBC, which is known for not representing the working class in Great Britain, aside from depicting it in a contemptuous light. Directly inspired by this unsettling experience, Anti-Social Social Club: Episode One, The Chamber of the Dispossessed<\/em> emulated the pitfalls of a democratic discussion and demonstrated how easily the expression of difference can be censured, regardless of the form it assumes or where it is directed.<\/p>\n \u00c8ve Chabanon, Anti-Social Social Club: Episode One, The Chamber of the Dispossessed<\/em>, 2017. Photo credit: Gyte Gavenaite.<\/p><\/div>\n In her essay City Life and Difference<\/em> (1990), Iris Marion Young makes reference to Michael Sandel and the way he contrasts liberalism with communitarianism, which he conceives as an alternative to the former. In her view, the communitarian ideal, by aiming to unite people around shared experiences and values, \u201cdenies and represses social difference6<\/a><\/sup> Young instead advocates:<\/p>\n \u201can ideal of city life as a vision of social relations affirming group difference. As a normative ideal, city life instantiates social relations of difference without exclusion. […] If city politics is to be democratic and not dominated by the point of view of one group, it must be a politics that takes account of and provides voice for the different groups that dwell together in the city without forming a community7<\/a><\/sup>\u201d.<\/p>\n The specificity of the discussion organized by the BBC was that it assembled an audience intended to be diverse, while rejecting difference. What was most memorable was how the opinions of the dispossessed were presented to middle-class listeners (who make up the vast majority of the BBC\u2019s audience) in such a way as to make them seem like nonsensical justifiers of events as pathetic as Brexit. This resulted in a discussion that was provocative, populist and classist, in which every voice ended up being crushed and amalgamated into Michael Sandel\u2019s rhetoric. Conversely, Anti-Social Social Club<\/em> endeavoured to construct what theorist and feminist Nancy Fraser calls \u201csubaltern counterpublics\u201d. The objective, Fraser explains, is to represent marginalized interests in the public sphere and \u201chelp expand discursive space8<\/a><\/sup>\u201d. By negotiating the use of the council chamber in Barking and Dagenham\u2019s town hall for an event, and by venturing into the ambiguous territory between belonging and exclusion, \u00c8ve Chabanon symbolically propelled a small portion of the population, including its most invisibilised members, into the political sphere.<\/p>\n \u00c8ve Chabanon, Anti-Social Social Club: Episode One, The Chamber of the Dispossessed<\/em>, 2017. Photo credit: Gyte Gavenaite.<\/p><\/div>\n Anti-Social Social Club: Episode One, The Chamber of the Dispossessed<\/em> remains a one-and-a-half-hour performance involving around forty people. As such, it was more of a framework and a metaphor than an actual coalition of the dispossessed. A metaphor that, let us not forget, borrowed the codes of the democratic public and deliberately replicated its pitfalls. Through this exercise of fictionalised appropriation, Anti-Social Social Club<\/em> echoed the third proposition of the tripartite production of space conceived by philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space<\/em> (1991 [1974]). In it, Lefebvre makes a distinction between: 1. representations of space; 2. spatial practice; 3. representational spaces; that is to say perceived space, conceived space and experienced space. We will only stop for a moment on the most relevant of the three, namely representational spaces. According to the author, these express:<\/p>\n \u201ccomplex symbolisms […], linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art […]. This is the dominated\u2014and hence passively experienced\u2014space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.9<\/a><\/sup>\u201d.<\/p>\n Queer theorist and cultural geographer Jen Jack Gieseking stresses the tendency of representational spaces to:<\/p>\n \u201cdissolve the social relations of abstract space and generate new, heterogeneous relations that accentuate difference and shatter the integrity of the individual body, the social body \u2026 and the corpus of knowledge10<\/a><\/sup>\u201d.A single episode of a future series for the time being, Anti-Social Social Club: Episode One, The Chamber of the Dispossessed<\/em> invited us to experience indignancy by means of entertainment, and to prefer the promises of difference without exclusion, as proposed by Iris Marion Young. As for the participants, they became the skilful defenders of this proposition, promulgating the idea that a public made up of representatives of multiple groups can divert the trajectory and composition of political space.<\/p>\n Translation by Matthew Cunningham<\/strong><\/p>\n Cover:<\/strong> \u00c8ve Chabanon, Anti-Social Social Club: Episode One, The Chamber of the Dispossessed<\/em>, 2017. Photo credit: Gyte Gavenaite.<\/p>\n Bibliographical References<\/strong><\/p>\n Fraser, N, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy<\/em>, Durham, Duke University Press, 1990 An hour-and-a-half coalition The evening began with exercises: voice warm-ups, saying the words \u201canti\u201d, \u201csocial\u201d and \u201cclub\u201d in unison, camera tests. This is ostensibly a matter of testing the sound and cameras for documentary purposes, but in reality these exercises served to probe the group\u2019s ability to see itself as a collective, to synchronise and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101027,"featured_media":11830,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1847],"tags":[1853],"corpus":[],"post_types":[1206],"associate_editors":[759],"authors":[1589],"class_list":["post-11245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","tag-deprivation-of-freedom-of-speech","post_types-investigation-2-en","associate_editors-fondation-galeries-lafayette-en","authors-anna-colin-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11245"},{"taxonomy":"corpus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/corpus?post=11245"},{"taxonomy":"post_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_types?post=11245"},{"taxonomy":"associate_editors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/associate_editors?post=11245"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=11245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMale:<\/strong> Can I?
\nFacilitator:<\/strong> Well, can he? What do we think, people of the Chamber of the Dispossessed? It\u2019s not only him. He\u2019s found some other people. So he left us, admittedly before the zombie apocalypse, but it is now the zombie apocalypse. And he\u2019s found some other people who aren\u2019t zombies who want to come in here with us. Who are these people? What are they like?
\nMale:<\/strong> Funnily enough, they\u2019re exactly the same number and exactly the same gender and they look exactly like you, each one of you.
\nFacilitator:<\/strong> Wow. Okay. So, it\u2019s up to you. Should we let them in?<\/p>\n
\nFacilitator:<\/strong> Nice. You\u2019ve got something. Say again.
\nFemale:<\/strong> There might be something wrong with him\u2026
\nFacilitator:<\/strong> If they look exactly like us.
\nFemale:<\/strong> They might be suspicious, because they might be a different version of us.<\/p>\n
\nFacilitator:<\/strong> Okay. So, we\u2019re going to check to see if they\u2019ve got food?
\nFemale:<\/strong> Yes. If they\u2019re going to rely on us, we don\u2019t want them.
\nFacilitator:<\/strong> Okay. Wow, okay. Any other ideas? So, we need to make sure\u2026? Yes.
\nFemale:<\/strong> Suppose it\u2019s crazy out there and they have nowhere else go. Are we just going to say, \u201cNo, we can\u2019t let them in\u201d? You know?
\nFacilitator:<\/strong> Good question.
\nFemale:<\/strong> Can you do that to them, if they look just like us?
\nFacilitator:<\/strong> Yes. Does that make it harder, that they look just like us?<\/p>\n![\"\u00c8ve](\"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/cGyte_Gavenaite_7D5B5155.jpg\")
<\/a>Art and gentrification<\/h2>\n
Publics and democracy<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Difference without exclusion<\/h2>\n
<\/a>
\nGieseking, J J and Mangold, W (eds), The People, Place, and Space Reader<\/em>, New York, Routledge, 2014
\nLefebvre, H, The Production of Space<\/em> (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith), Oxford, Blackwell, 1991.
\nMichael Sandel, Le Lib\u00e9ralisme et les limites de la justice<\/em>, Paris, La D\u00e9couverte, 1999
\nYoung, I M, Justice and the Politics of Difference<\/em>, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1990<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"