Unhoused Music, convened by Louis Moreno
Organized in collaboration with Le Guess Who? festival

. . . there is indeed a place where we have to impose and deposit all of ourselves. We know that race is inadequate, we know that gender is inadequate but just because they are inadequate does not mean there is not indeed a location for all of us.

—Cedric J. Robinson

Unhoused Music inquires into the relationship between the sound of music and a sense of place—one that is sometimes so direct that it appears almost intuitive. The connection between jazz and New Orleans, dub and Kingston, house and Chicago, and techno and Detroit, for example, seem to suggest that music is another kind of urbanism—a different way in which the city inhabits us.

But how do we square that with the proposition that if Black music is, as scholar and author Fumi Okiji says, a particular kind of dwelling, it is both a refuge for the homeless and a tradition of criticism whose radicality resides in the fact that the idea of home ownership was always a trap?

Across a sequence of three conversations and various selections of music, Unhoused Music considers the ongoing work of Black music, and how it temporally rearranges the collective desire for space, place, home and land—generating a very different sense of social ecology, urban planning, and historical time.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33103