Disobey and eat dirt offers a stimulating look at the unavoidable parallels between housing and food. These two basic needs frame consumerism and commodification in a new capitalist system – a post-neoliberal, pre-robot-oriented future. This video seeks to subvert the ‘emptiness’ which haunts an unused, undeveloped area on a crowded street by creating an assemblage of disturbing ASMR mukbang clips produced by youtube influencers and vloggers, overlayed onto footage of a vacant lot in the Plateau-Mont-Royal neighbourhood. In the struggle to grasp economic concepts and superfluous notions of a complex system where fictitious capital guides ordinary humans’ quests to success, I ask : Who is meant to understand the housing crisis?
1. Understanding the Analogy
Understanding real estate financial systems is obscure and complex. Even a seemingly simple task, like buying a home for example, can be overwhelming and inaccessible to those with little knowledge of economics or finance. In today's self-care fueled era, food becomes something to greedily hoard and indulge in, without acknowledging the disparities of the food market, similarly to our relationship to housing. Sustainable processes and adjustments to housing and food systems have become a modus operandi for corporations to serve the contemporary climate-concerned consumer. Gunnar Rundgren stated in 2015 in an essay on sustainable food production and consumption that “governments and the food industry are the choice of architects who determine what we eat; consumer choice plays a marginal role” (Rundgren, pg. 107, 2015). By employing the word ‘architect’, Gunnar is echoing the unavoidable juxtaposition of housing and food as two systems of operation controlled by money and profit-seeking companies.
2. Contents & Justification
As mentioned previously, the video uses mukbang clips overlayed onto footage of a vacant lot in the Plateau-Mont-Royal neighbourhood, contrasting images of greed and fulfilment with emptiness and vacancy. The overdubbed audio clip is provided from a video published by one of the world’s leading investment firms, Blackstone. This audio clip presents the firm’s self-proclaimed mission to change the world of rental housing by building high-quality units for an elite class. A quick scroll through the group’s wikipedia page illustrates that Blackstone’s yearly income ranges within hundreds of billions of dollars. Just like the youtube vloggers' gluttonous videos , Blackstone gobbles up property to make more money on the potential value of land through inflation, renovation and clout. Private equity firms, fast food chains, real estate tycoons are all players in a profit-oriented game where middle to lower-income individuals are manipulated to think that the former always knows best.
3. Mobilize for Change
Included in the video are clips from a rally in Oakland, California, organized by the Moms4Housing movement. This final clip shows the positive end of the spectrum, where political action and uprising is used to evoke change in the system. Coming together to fight for the right to housing as a community will create change, new thoughts will be expressed and people will be forced to listen. The end of the video is a playful clip of how to act against the overwhelming haunting of the vacant site. Strip back the view that housing is a commodified consumptive asset pumped with value and all that is left is the ubiquitous need to to have shelter and food. Interacting informally with vacant spaces is a step in the right direction: the balancing act between changing, challenging and choosing the system we want to live in.
4. Works Cited
- Huang, M., and Rust, R.T.. “Sustainability and Consumption.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing
- Science, vol. 39, 21 Apr. 2010, pp. 40–54.
- Locke, John. Essay Two : Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil
- Government - V : Of Property, in: Two treatises of govern- ment. NuVision Publications, 2014, pp. 115–12.
- Morton, Timothy. "Hauntology and Non-Places."Ecology Without Nature, 28 May
- 2011, ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/05/hauntology-and-non-places.html.
- Rundgren, Gunnar. Food: From Commodity to Commons. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental
- Ethics, vol. 29, 2016, pp.103–121.
- “The Blackstone Group.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Apr. 2020,
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blackstone_Group#Operations.
