Course 7: Housing: making the impossible possible
Course leaders: STEALTH.unlimited (Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen)
12 – 16 July, 2016

Course Description:
In today’s society, when it comes to resolving our housing situation, we are pretty much left on our own. You may consider it “normal” to believe that the only reality to get to an apartment is to inherit it, or that you will “simply” get a credit, counting on that well-paid and stable job waiting for you out there. Reality is more harsh and your chances are pretty slim – or simply do not come in time. So how about joining forces with those in similar situation and taking that roof above head beyond the impossible?

In this course we will use experiences and knowledge developed through Smarter Building initiative, started up in Belgrade in 2013, and City in the Making, started in Rotterdam in 2014. During five days, we will work with the course participants on five topics that challenge the profit driven housing model, currently the only one offered to us in this part of Europe. To do so we will be discussing, thinking and imaginings ways to develop an alternative that: goes beyond individual ownership – towards cooperative ways of organizing; beyond credit enslavement - towards solidary finance; beyond your-own-front door way of living – towards shared spaces; beyond energy poverty – towards energy independence; beyond exclusivity – towards a future for most of us. It is a substantial challenge – but then, what’s better than defeating what still seems impossible?


Biography
STEALTH.unlimited is the practice of Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen, equally based in the context of contemporary art and culture, as well as architecture. Through intensive collaboration with individuals, organisations and institutions, STEALTH connect urban research, visual arts, spatial interventions and spatial activism. They are co-initiators of Who Builds the City platform in Belgrade and City in the Making association in Rotterdam.

STEALTH’s curatorial interventions are a base for projects that, since 2004, mobilise thinking on shared collective future(s) in a/o Archiphoenix at the Dutch Pavilion at the Architecture Biennial in Venice, the Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial, IMPAKT festival Matrix City in Utrecht, the fiction-based project Once Upon a Future for the Evento biannual in Bordeaux, the exhibition A Life in Common with Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto.

Their spatial interventions, since 2006, include a 600 m2 interactive art installation at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, a public arts commission for a schoolyard in Knivsta, Sweden, hands-on community exploration in public space with Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, a cultural development node out of recycled materials in a slum-neighbourhood of Medellín, Colombia, with El Puente_lab.

For more than fifteen years STEALTH investigate the urban developments in Western Balkans, starting from their Wild City research on the massive unplanned transformation of the city of Belgrade since the 1990s. From 2009 to 2013, STEALTH run four editions of the Cities Log research that investigated the roles of different players in the development of cities in the region.

Since 2011 STEALTH are contributing to practice based research at the Royal Institute of Arts in Stockholm. In this context, in 2013, they co-organised the conference Commoning the City. STEALTH gave about 130 lectures and contributed to numerous books and publications. They have been teaching internationally.