PHASE ONE: Young Artists Explore the Housing Crisis
Housing Matters is a collaborative media project created by community engaged artists Patti Fraser and Corin Browne. Convened in 2012, with a community of 10 young artists, youth mentors, professional film makers, planners, activists and academics, the group created a suite of films responding to the lack of affordable, adequate and safe housing
in the Lower Mainland. The first collection of films were finished in March 2013 and have screened locally and internationally. PHASE TWO: The 19th Birthday Party
In the fall of 2013, Artistic Directors Corin Browne and Patti Fraser shifted the focus of the Housing Matters Media project to begin to address the concerns of a constituency of young people who comprise 40% of British Columbia’s homeless youth. In partnership with the Vancouver Foundation’s Youth and Homelessness Initiative, the project instigated another community engaged media production project. In this phase of the project we collaborated with a group of talented young people, who had experienced government care or homelessness in a series of three weekend media production intensives. In addition to the Artistic Directors, Jamillah Toure, Chak Estable and d. lee williams,three filmmakers from the original Housing Matters Media Project contributed their mentorship to helping the participants produce a series of six short digital video narratives in their voice and from their perspective. These narratives become the digital centre pieces and offerings at an installation conceived as a dinner table. PHASE THREE: HomeMaking
We are currently in funding development for phase three of this project
We will invite communities of youth to participate in a series of creative events with older adults from the community who have experience in building, homemaking arts, and design. Our goals include the creation of networked systems of mentorship between youth and older adults in the community through building together a small environmentally sustainable mobile house in a public site. The building of this house will be performed as an art event and as an invitation for public engagement. This installation will become a mobile media screening performance venue where work created by youth from other phases of the Housing Matters Media Project and other affiliated projects on solutions to the housing crises will be screened or performed. This project will place creative practice as the central activity in the program of work because we recognize the import of arts as central to innovation, inclusion, and problem solving. We are inviting support for experimentation and incubation of exciting models of practice involving youth and older adults in capacity building, learning new skills, and networking are going to be highly valued models of practice in the coming age of resiliency. This project will be seen as a demonstration of our capacity as communities to engage in creative potentials; and a sign of hope and resiliency, which this city’s youth desperately need. Like the first community gardens, we now need to address the growing need to create structures that are commonly built and commonly conceived, built by many hands, and with the best sustainable practices available to us.
