set up the exhibit on Monday and it was a long, long day but full of joy. So, you must come down and visit us. More stories of homelessness again told. One person denied access to shelters due to a disability.... Recently hospitalized they were discharged back to the streets with no follow up care. What is health if you are denied full access to it?
What is it to be homeless, underhoused, living perhaps with failing health, with a disability and unable to access adequate healthcare? To hope either for a home or support for the places you yourself choose? What is it for a society to wish for the end of homelessness without including the perspectives of those who live it? These are only some of the questions that I find preoccupying me as I work with people who are living these lives right now. What I have learned is that there is not one solution, one perfect home that can be built. I have learned that some people will always choose the streets for some parts of their lives. I have learned that when people are despairing a small piece of some/any thing given freely can mean solace.
And I have learned there are people on the streets who are visionaries and their visions are being ignored.
These exhibits, a day in the life and asleep in toronto, offer a perspective and try to offer some way of imagining through our inadequate representational and symbolic systems. Bringing these systems together we hope maybe the complexity of homelessness is more readily revealed.
