Nonstophome was founded by Brian Rogers and Harmony Holiday as curatorial & solidarity collective, whose work deals in archival materials, postcolonial movements, and sonic and textual countercartographies. We have chosen as our inaugural document a call for the reanimation of the Harlem House Rent Party, as well as the creation of a living archive of the evicted. Our book, "And it has these Frontiers" is forthcoming in 2009. Nonstophome will be leading workshops in listening/ sonic-perceptual geographies at the Public School in Los Angeles this summer. Additionally, this site will act as a daily media feed.
A Call for the Reanimation of the House Rent Party
Our provocation is to effect the reactivation of the House Rent Party, born of the Harlem Renaissance. Most famously described by Langston Hughes in The Simple Stories, House Rent Parties were thrown in cities by migrants from the south as a way of raising rent funds for members of the community who were continually exploited by employers, landlords, and merchants.
Has there ever a been moment that lacked a surplus working class? In an asymmetrical urban game of affordance, black workers often could not afford rent, and thus the city could not afford them. House Rent Parties became a sort of guerrilla social welfare, a space made for the recovery of space, of shelter. Dancing, drinking, eating, singing conjured micropolitical solidarity amid the inhumane forces of late capital.
With the end of Prohibition, counter-intuitively, unless you consider the coercive relationship between legality, profit, and black market economies, it became too risky to serve alcohol in private homes and the rich tradition of the House Rent Party all but dissolved. The dismissal of such a prominent yet exclusive institution did not coincide with the end of the outrageous rents and no-where-near living wages that render city life a sacrifice many make for a false sense of access/ relief/ communion/space.
A relatively passive labor force is one blatant consequence of the end of this tradition of casual yet causal innovation, and today even most leisure is a form of displacement (often sensational and homogeneous, numbing our once ripe and more vividly desperate imaginations to the dire and dear alternatives). We seek to replace yesterday's House Rent Party with the today's House Rent Party in order to remind ourselves and our communities that a large component of our power rests in what we do with our 'free time.' Leisure, a colonially vilified form of accessing the justice that is creativity. In choosing to curate our own events in our own spaces and nominate our own entertainment, we are doing more than making a statement about our desire to divorce ourselves from some of the most salient and pernicious glands of capital (those that profit from our need to socialize, cathart). We are demonstrating our own terms.
Our House Rent Parties will happen at the beginning of each month and the proceeds will go toward rents for community members, musicians, artists, afterschool programs, etcetera, which are being threatened with eviction or subdued for fear of loss of funding and resultant eviction. That said, our goal is also fun and merriment. We watch the city and marvel at the loads a body bears: and we ask: what do they receive in return for their motion?
Musicians will play on the floor at these parties, in the center of the room, and around them will develop a benevolent audial centrifuge. A people's acoustics.
The home is a venue, dreams of just futures are first improvised there, and we ask if those without the assurance of shelter are not forced into pseudo futures: without shelter, a decadence of the heart threatens the imagination: to allow precarity and contingency to rot the planks of base survival is to wage total war on present future and past, ethic, and personality, to disallow the creation of the archives of memory. Collective memory must not be annexed for the sake of efficency. Listening to music is a collectivity, sound bodies are continually passing through you: to listen or dance in a group is to summon and produce the kinetic, to resist the threat of a collective forgetfulness. We do these things for our enjoyment as well as to limit our consumption of inorganic materials. And it is through these and other sources that we are attempting to form a complicity with non-cognitive aspects of the city.
Let us further examine the word venue by way of its function as a conjugate of the French verb venir: to come: and establish the home as a venue in every sense, as place to come to and come from, and a recombinant place such that 'venue' has come to suggest, a place where events are 'held,' more at suspended. We want to remind ourselves that the home does not need to be outsourced to commercial spaces or formal 'venues,' in the name of social activity or revenue or accumulation. In order to restore the privacy and primacy of our homes we will open them for and against their own disappearance, like atoms.
