Picture The Homeless Tent City
Not An Alternative
(US 2009, 15:54 mins)
Video from the tent city that was installed in East Harlem on July 23rd 2009. Not An Alternative teamed up with Picture The Homeless, Reclaim NYC and others to stage an intervention on the urban landscape. The collaboration involved the production and installation of a homeless tent city in a vacant bank-owned lot in East Harlem.
As a diversion, folks dressed up as a film production crew shooting a music video. This was the cover story for the deployment of the tent city. More than 100 homeless people and allies occupied the lot for the duration of the day. The action resulted in 10 arrests by nightfall. Bio: Not An Alternative is a 12 year old NY-based collective and non-profit organization that works at the intersection of art, activism and pedagogy. It has a mission to affect popular understandings of events, symbols, institutions, and history. Through engaged critical research and design, the group curates and produces interventions on material and immaterial space, bringing together tools from art, architecture, exhibition design, and political organizing.