Office of Speculative Neighborship
Experiment #3:
Tenant Self-Defense
How can we use our bodies to digest complex systems and learn to assert power within them?
In collaboration with Eric J Olson, the Office of Speculative Neighborship repurposed self-defense training to teach participants specific strategies for asserting tenants’ rights. Each set of offensive and defensive moves corresponded to a different landlord/tenant scenario. Participants also learned to break wooden boards naming their own worst fears of housing insecurity. These workshops propose that by practicing acting powerfully in the face of systems that seem overwhelming, we literally increase our ability to act powerfully in the future.
Below, photos of the workshop at Mt Scott Community Center, with additional facilitation assistance by Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr.
Below, an earlier workshop at the Crowne Plaza Hotel for the Schemers, Scammers and Subverters Symposium.
