Dieneke Jansen Photo: supplied
This week RNZ reported New Zealand is on track to have more renters than homeowners, with fewer than half the population likely to own a house in the next 25 years. Home-ownership peaked here in the 1990s at 74%.
We’re in a housing crisis, most people agree. With strong awareness of the inequalities that it brings.
Yet, when it comes to talking about solutions to something so complex yet so personal, people struggle - reaching for phrases like ‘this housing thing’.
This Housing Thing is the title of a moving image work by artist Dieneke Jansen, who has long dedicated her art and activism to housing. It’s currently screening at galleries The Physics Room in Ōtautahi Christchurch and Enjoy in Pōneke Wellington until the end of August.
A lecturer at AUT in Tāmaki Makaurau, Jansen’s interest is in housing as “a condition” and a human right. It should be a measure, she says, of our society’s values, rather than valued first as a commodity. As part of her research she has visited many large-scale housing projects here and overseas.
Still from 'This Housing Thing' Dieneke Jansen 2021 Photo: supplied
In This Housing Thing Jansen explores the issues by looking at the personal. Working with family photographs and documents, the film explores her family’s history with property.
For her there’s squatting in Amsterdam, scungy tenancies, and ownership of a home in Grey Lynn. For her parents, owning a home in New Zealand was an expectation. Then back to her grandparents in Holland, where Jansen was a child, and the large social housing projects that were built after the second world war.
Art can be excellent at opening out the complexities of a subject through personal questions. In This Housing Thing Jansen presents a lot of questions for herself and us. They suggest why we might find it hard to talk about housing.
Questions like: when is home ownership not an inherited privilege? How can I be so interested in de-centring home ownership when I own a house? And, how do you live your idealism outside your bubble?
Who’s Who: Knowing your Neighbour project at Te Mātāwai, Grey's Ave, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Photo: supplied
Jansen has also been working on another different housing-based art project this year. Who’s Who: Knowing your Neighbour has been running at Te Mātāwai in Auckland’s CBD. Opened in 2023, Te Mātāwai is the largest, single site supported social housing complex in the country.
The social photography project has been developed by residents with support from Kāinga Ora and Jansen at AUT. Residents have been invited to introduce themselves over a cup of tea, with one of the resident-instigators taking photographic portraits. Participants are able to choose their favourite image and how it will be displayed. With participants’ permission, the selected portraits are displayed on the ground floor exterior windows for the wider community to view at 139 Greys Ave.
This Housing Thing is part of the moving image exhibition Homing Instinct currently on at The Physics Room until 1 September and Enjoy Contemporary Art Space until 31 August.
