Joe is a homeless man who lives on the streets near Battery Park City in Manhattan. In the 1970s, he became a contractor and was responsible for building over fifteen buildings in Brooklyn. He was diagnosed with cancer in the 1980s after being exposed to Agent Orange while serving in the Air Force in Vietnam. After forty-seven different operations to treat the cancer, the Veteran’s Association of America ceased paying his medical bills and he went bankrupt.
Enter Michael Rakowitz, an artist who created the ParaSITE project. ParaSITES are custom built inflatable shelters designed for homeless people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building’s Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. The warm air leaving the building simultaneously inflates and heats the double membrane structure. The sites are so named because parasitism is described as a relationship in which a parasite exploits the energy of a host organism. With Rakowitz's help, Joe can now survive a bitter winter in New York.
In other words, Rakowitz proposes the appropriation of the exterior ventilation systems on existing architecture as a means for providing temporary shelter for homeless people. Since February 1998, over thirty prototypes of the paraSITE shelter have been custom built and distributed them to homeless individuals in Cambridge, Boston, New York, and Baltimore. All were built using temporary materials that were readily available on the streets, such as plastic bags and tape.
While these shelters were being used, they functioned not only as a temporary place of retreat, but also as a station of dissent and empowerment; many of the homeless users regarded their shelters as a protest device, and would even shout slogans like "We beat you Uncle Sam!" The shelters communicated a refusal to surrender, and made more visible the unacceptable circumstances of homeless life within the city. For the pedestrian, paraSITE functioned as an agitational device. The visibly parasitic relationship of these devices to the buildings, appropriating a readily available situation with readily available materials elicited immediate speculation as to the future of the city: would these things completely take over, given the enormous number of homeless in our society? Could we wake up one morning to find these encampments engulfing buildings like ivy?
Just in case homeowners and bypassers get too angry, the paraSITE units in their idle state exist as small, collapsible packages with handles for transport by hand or on one's back. The artist states that ParaSITES are not a proposal for affordable housing. Its point of departure is to present a symbolic strategy of survival for homeless existence within the city, amplifying the problematic relationship between those who have homes and those who do not have homes.
Rakowitz notes, "The issue of homelessness is of global proportions and it is foolish to think that any one proposition will address all the issues associated with this problem. There are many different types of homeless people. The mentally ill, the chemically dependent, those who are unable to afford housing, men, women, families, even those who prefer this way of life are included among the vast cross section of homeless people in every urban instance. Each group of homeless has subjective needs based on circumstance and location. My project does not make reference to handbooks of statistics. Nor should this intervention be associated with the various municipal attempts at solving the homeless issue. This is a project that was shaped by my interaction as a citizen and artist with those who live on the streets."
The artists works are now on display at the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, in Montreal, Canada. More information about his work can be found at: http://michaelrakowitz.com/
