LIVING TOGETHER

LIVING TOGETHER

 Living Together : Alternative Housing & Intentional Communities is an investigative piece using audio, photography & video to document black, brown & queer communities navigating America’s housing crisis through the use of collective dwellings, tiny homes, mobile housing and off the grid rural communes. This project unpacks the illusion of the traditional American nuclear home, replacing it with an array of domestic environments that are allowing historically marginalized communities to thrive.

Living Together : Alternative Housing & Intentional Communities is encouraging us all to take a radical look at how we can build resiliency through collective living, resource sharing and sustainable lifestyles. This concept is challenging the status quo by disrupting traditional white American values and centering the ways of the global majority. “Living Together” not only delves into the logistical needs of communal living but all the mental and emotional care that is required for us all to coexist in brave ways.

Living Together is inspired by the captivating portraits of Iving Pen, Jamal Shabaz and Roy Decarava. It is influenced by the works of Theaster Gates, by way of reimagining space and the possibilities of communal activation. Living Together is influenced by The Kitchen Table : Women of Color Press, in the act of sharing our experiences and the possibilities of our futures in print. Living Together is within the lineage of the Black Panther Party, MOVE and Tulsa. Living Together is also informed by my own lived experiences.

Meet the Team

  • Sasha Kelley

    Sasha Kelley is an Oakland based multidisciplinary artist using visual arts, publishing and social practice to explore the topics of intimacy, collective archives, collaboration with black/brown/queer communities.

  • Charmaine Davis

    Charmaine Davis is an artist, performer and filmmaker based out of Oakland . She has shared the stage with artists like Kelis, screened her short films at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

  • Lala Openi

    Lala Openi Cheung Designer & Living Bridge. Creative strategist working to shift the dominant narrative & challenge our ingrained perspectives in the ongoing conversation between self + space.

Community Collaborators

  • The People of Color Sustainable Housing Network (POCSHN) is a resource network for people of color building intentional, healthy, collective and affordable housing communities in the Bay Area and beyond.

  • EBPREC facilitates BIPOC and allied communities to cooperatively organize, finance, purchase, occupy, and steward properties, taking them permanently off the speculative market, creating community controlled assets, and empowering our communities to cooperatively lead a just transition from an extractive capitalist system into one where communities are ecologically, emotionally, spiritually, culturally, and economically restorative and regenerative

  • The EastSide Arts Alliance & Cultural Center presents free youth art classes, cultural programming, public art projects, ongoing gallery exhibitions, community town halls, and the annual Malcolm X Jazz Arts Festival. We work with numerous organizations and community groups to present hundreds of events every year.

  • Canticle Farm is an urban garden, educational center and community of intention, experimenting at the intersections of faith-based, social-justice-based, and Earth-based nonviolent activism.

    We live in eight houses around a large garden in the Fruitvale District of Oakland, California. We are working to heal and transform historical and present-day trauma across difference, especially that of race, gender, class, religion and age.

    We act as a platform for The Great Turning – the planetary shift from an industrial-growth society to a life-sustaining society – which is served by Canticle Farm through our local work and support of national and international movements for social and environmental justice.

Want to Share Your Collective Living Story?

Living Together is an opportunity for us to share our collective history of communal living. We would love to hear about your experience(s) to add to the archive. We are currently in pre-production for the project but if you leave you contact information we will circle back when we are collecting interviews.