Filling a Void

I got to Bullet Space just as the door opened for the closing reception of Land Valuations, an exhibition about the ever-growing archive of New York’s housing crisis. Organizer Ali Jaffery was still busy setting up the projector for the two work-in-progress films to be screened. I turned my attention to the displays, pausing to read Matthew Lee’s reportage in the Inner City Press about a 1990 mass police raid to evict people living in a long-abandoned building in the South Bronx and skim through flyers made by the artist Seth Tobocman that depicted Bedouin people refusing to leave their land in Negev even in the face of settler colonialism.

The room quickly filled up, and the lights went out. In Lucas Kane’s Jacob’s House (2024), the eponymous tenant of a Clinton Hills apartment is harassed by the building’s new owner, who hopes to evict him through a war of attrition. Heating and power to the unit are cut, a collapsed ceiling is left unaddressed. As the situation deteriorates, Jacob, a Rastafarian painter, takes to spiritual practices such as rubbing limes around the baseboards to cleanse the evil plaguing his home of fifteen years. (Kane later put together a fundraiser for Jacob after he was forced to relocate.)

Jaffery’s Hostile Architecture (2024) comprises a series of vignettes centered primarily on The Gym, a mutual aid hub that initially operated out of a Bushwick storefront but after being locked out by the landlord moved to the sidewalk out front. Assistance found through official pathways, if it even materializes, is often a poor substitute for the more robust gains made through neighborhood organizing. This approach doesn’t endear the hub to the authorities: In a handful of scenes, police shut down The Gym for seemingly no other reason than to perpetuate pain.

Themes of personal and collective struggle link the films. The pairing was coincidental, Jaffery later told me. “I had no idea Lucas was doing something so similar. It was a real zeitgeist.” The feeling is expressed by a volunteer who speaks with Jaffrey in Hostile Architecture, asserting that “you can’t stop the inevitable.” Resistance and solidarity will fill the void left by state inattention and austerity—or so we hope.