Lize Mogel: Can you tell me a little bit about your organizations?
Rosten Woo: CUP does community education about places and how they change. We create media projects, sponsor artists and designers who teach and work with youth, and produce exhibitions and public programs. Most of our work is developed through collaborations with community organizers, graphic designers, researchers, architects and so on.
Damaris Reyes: PHROLES (Public Housing Residents of Lower East Side) is an organization made up of public housing residents who come together to work on policy issues that affect public housing, issues at the development level with management of the developments, tenant--management relations, and broader issues of gentrification which affect the lower east side community which impact those residents who live in public housing. PHROLES does its work through a multi-faceted approach: organizing, direct service, leadership development, training and education.
LM: How did you end up collaborating?
RW: We met Damaris while we were working on another project. We had been working with students at City-as-School (an alternative high school in Manhattan) filming interviews with people who worked on public housing issues. The PHROLES folks were some of the first that we interviewed. After Damaris saw the videos we had produced with the students, she got in touch with us about working on a direct collaboration. PHTV came out of that.
DR: It made sense to contact CUP and ask them to develop something together, since they have an interest in public housing, and use media as a tool. It seemed like a good fit.
LM: And what is Public Housing Television (PHTV)?
RW: PHTV is a series of videos that we produce in collaboration with PHROLES- the idea was to create a series of advocacy videos and legal trainings that could break out of the mold of your standard educational video or public access show. We tried to bring a lot of upbeat wackiness to the material.
DR: Yes, PHROLES had been conducting training workshops throughout the [Lower East Side] neighborhood. We wanted to do something that would be more interesting, that would multiply our efforts, and that would captivate audiences.
LM: What kind of workshops were they?
DR: They were on public housing policy issues that really plague residents-- things like termination proceedings [evictions], how to get repairs, how to add somebody to your lease, etcetera. Even though these things are basic, they’re hugely important to public housing residents because if you’re not compliant with policy it can lead to evictions. We had a lot of requests to present workshops in different places, but there wasn’t enough of us at PHROLES to go around and do that.
Also, I think the workshops were boring…somebody talking at you at the front of a room, a lot of printed materials with wordy descriptions...I think what we envisioned and what actually happened with PHTV is that we wanted it to be entertaining, and intergenerational...and educate people about their rights in public housing. We wanted it to have funky graphics to attract young people, but not too funky so it could also appeal to adults and seniors. I think we did achieve that.
We made two episodes of PHTV. The first deals with the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) annual planning process. NYCHA holds an “Annual Meeting” which is the only time that public housing residents can give feedback and have direct input into the Annual Plan. So its really critical that folks get involved. Every year we do several workshops about the agency plan.
LM: The first episode is all about participation, and why people should go to the Annual Meeting.
DR: Yes—its all about the Plan and the planning process, and why its important to go to this meeting and participate.
The second episode, “The Eviction” is about termination of tenancy proceedings—NYCHA’s form of eviction. We chose this theme because, as a community organization which provides housing counseling, we have been seeing many, many, many termination of tenancy cases. Since NYCHA is a quasi-governmental agency with their own administrative proceedings, they can evict someone and their decisions are binding. Not even housing court can overturn that-- so its really serious. A lot of people were being evicted for all kinds of ridiculous things, like paying their rent late—not even not paying their rent, but only paying it late. Residents are very confused about NYCHA’s termination proceedings-- they believe that housing court trumps NYCHA but it’s really the other way around. We see this over and over again. NYCHA’s termination process in and of itself is daunting—you have to first meet with a housing manager, and then access your file, understand the charges that NYCHA is bringing you up on, and so on. So Episode 2 was really critical to put out.
LM: It seems that from NYCHA’s end, they don’t provide enough visible information to tenants that tells them these things. In a way it almost seems that NYCHA should be distributing the videos for you.
DR: Yes, well, since PHTV started running, NYCHA put information about termination of tenancy proceedings on their website.
LM: What was it like to make the episodes of PHTV together?
RW: Each PHTV episode was kind of a crazy scramble. We would spend months planning but because our schedules are all pretty tight we did all of the actual shooting in a couple of days and all the editing and post-production work in about two weeks. For Episode 1, it was this way because of the way that NYCHA works. They release the Draft Annual Plan at a slightly different time each year, and they request comments on it and hold the public hearing usually just a month after the plan is released. Once this was announced, we went into crazy production mode so we could get the episode on the air for a week or two before the hearings.
With the first episode, we filmed straight interviews with advocates and policy analysts and then improvised skits with the actors and then stitched the parts together with graphics. For the second episode we got much further with the scripting. That's where we came up with the time machine and all of that.
DR: It was kind of nerve wracking because we had to be actors—people from the neighborhood like [Raging Granny] Betty Coqui Brasell, [community activist] Armando Morales, Lisa Burriss who is now the Director of Organizing at PHROLES and who is the star of Episode 2, me, and my daughter Desny. It was filmed on the Lower East Side, in the PHROLES office, at a community garden, on the sidewalk, on the corner—it was very local.
LM: What was the division of labor between PHROLES and CUP?
DR: We met with CUP a bunch
of times, exchanged emails, and phone calls, had conversations, and talked
it through. CUP took that information and made it into a script. Essentially
we identified the themes and provided some of the information…and then
we showed up to do the acting. CUP did the bulk of the work because they scripted
PHTV, filmed it, and edited it. It was made on a shoestring budget, with a
technical assistance grant from the New York Foundation. There was a lot of
in-kind support on both sides.
CUP used their skills and expertise to help us to capture our concepts and
our thought processes, and create a great product. I mean, we could have videotaped
our own workshops, it’s not that challenging…it just would have
been crap.
LM: I know that PHTV screens frequently on public access television—Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN) and BCAT to be specific. Besides this, who is the audience for PHTV, and how do you reach that audience?
DR: The audience is mostly public housing residents who have access to cable TV—that’s where its running most of the time. We will also show it at community meetings or workshops. We haven’t been able to distribute it widely because we don’t have the funding. The goal ultimately is to make several thousand copies so we can get them out there into the city, for example one to each Tenant Association president, and to different organizations that work with public housing residents—it could be used as a training tool.
RW: PHTV also has a mini-life as a [art] gallery piece.
LM: That brings up an important question-- how do you see PHTV's place in both the activist world and the art/culture world? How is it received by these different spheres or audiences?
Damon Rich: Although CUP produces
lots of video work, PHTV is really different from
the work we produce for a gallery or museum context. With PHTV, PHROLES is
our client. They pay us, and our job is to give them something that accomplishes
their goals. Because of that, the emphasis is on “news you can use”.
Of course we like to think that we bring some special spice to it, but in
large part we act as artistic and technical consultants.
On the other hand, when we make work that is meant primarily for a cultural
context, we use different strategies. Over the years, we've been able to get
more specific with our ideas of teaching in different contexts, and go into
a project with a fairly clear concept of the specific opportunities and constraints.
For example, for our project called the City Without a Ghetto, we made an
installation juxtaposing video interviews about
public housing with architects, activists, politicians, policymakers, and
businesspeople. Attempting to synthesize the clearly conflicting viewpoints
expressed in the piece would be against the point - the goal here was to represent
the contested history and present of public housing, and to provoke some broad
thinking about the worldviews and values implicated in that contest. To give
bulleted information points in a gallery setting short-circuits its potential
as a space for open-ended, interpretation-conscious reconsiderations of the
world.
But, as you know, we have shown PHTV in art shows, and have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, we're happy that people seem interested, and for sure spreading information about the political situation of public housing is on our agenda. On the other hand, putting this kind of work in an art context risks a couple things. One, it risks satisfying the art world's eternal desire to self-legitimate through feelings of relevancy and progressiveness without implicating itself in a larger social and political context. That is, if a curator puts PHTV in a show, she can prove her solidarity with the working class without much direct interaction with systems of oppression. Second, I think that exhibiting PHTV as art puts CUP's reputation as an artist in jeopardy. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of the work, but that doesn't mean I think it succeeds particularly well as an art project, for some of the reasons I've explained above. I would love to one day do more work about public housing that involves museum-goers directly rather than just exposing them to a small piece of activist television.
LM: So then how does PHTV function within CUP’s interests and mission?
RW: Our mission is to use art and design to help people understand and participate in the city's built environment politics. So, in a very direct way, this project is in the service of our mission. What I like about PHTV is that it's entertaining enough that you don't have to know much or care much about public housing to watch it. Even though it's not directly addressing this audience, I think it does a really good job of getting non-residents to care about public housing, and helping people who don't live in public housing understand more about how that part of the city works.
I think it's also really important that even though it deals with serious themes like eviction, the show is not very gloomy. It doesn’t reproduce the stereotypical crisis-image of public housing. So in this way, I think that it functions in a couple of ways - to help people understand and get involved in public housing's politics and also to help reform the public image of public housing.
DR: It’s important to dispel the stereotypes about public housing and the people who live in it for the general public…and for public housing residents themselves because they also perpetuate these stereotypes. I’m a lifelong public housing resident and I do know firsthand how perceptions of poverty in general and conditions in public housing can affect people.
RW: I think lastly, I hope it serves as one model for how artists and designers can produce and distribute work.
DR: I think is important that this collaboration with CUP has really helped to guide our thinking about using art as a means to achieve social justice. At PHROLES, we use traditional organizing and direct service-- these are good approaches, but we also need to be thinking creatively about new tools for organizing. I see art as one of those new tools.
LM: What's in the future for PHTV and for CUP and GOLES as collaborators?
DR: We’re going to make at least two more episodes. PHTV is also part of a bigger media awareness campaign to educate public housing residents.
RW: I hope that we continue to work together to produce more work in the vein of PHTV (including another season of episodes.) We also have some ideas to produce a print campaign as well as a longer documentary about public housing. . . someday!
Weblinks:
CUP- http://anothercupdevelopment.org
GOLES- www.goles.org