Compiled by Linda Collins
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

FORT GREENE — “Housing is a Human Right: Stories from the Struggle for Home,� is the title of an exhibition at the Wash and Play Lotto Laundromat at 81 Lafayette Ave. in Fort Greene.

Brooklyn-based artists Michael Premo and Rachel Falcone report that the exhibit, a multimedia documentary portrait of the struggle to find homes in New York City, will run through Monday, Nov. 2.

Composed of oral narratives and photographs, along with testimonies and memories of home, woven and remixed with the help of turntablist DJ Oja Vincent, this collection of “viscerally honest, first-person narratives serve as a reminder that home is as tenuous a space in New York City as the shelter that sustains it.�

These are the voices drowning in the cracks of a country where the tired and poor masses now huddle on the corner: A woman whose dream home was foreclosed on while she battled cervical cancer. A small business owner on the verge of buying her first home spirals into debt after her successful store is displaced to make way for luxury apartments.

A slumlord quietly moves an elderly couple’s belongings, piece by piece, from their home of 20 years into a barely habitable apartment to make room for higher paying tenants.

“I saw my community being blown away,� said Premo, a resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Everyday there’d be a store that would be closed, a neighbor you wouldn’t see anymore.

“And with these changes and gentrification I started thinking about how this has happened before with the Great Migration, so-called urban renewal, and I became fascinated with the concept of home and cycles of displacement.�

So, Premo and Falcone started interviewing, recording and photographing those in the throes of displacement.

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