On the Relentless Destruction of Beauty: Short Housing Films + Q&A

On The Relentless Destruction of Beauty features artist studios, communized parks, and residential buildings as spaces produced through—and for—collective creativity, labor, and cohabitation. Spanning the 1960s to the present, the program traces the ways everyday acts of living and making come into conflict with capital’s logic of private property, which seeks to empty such spaces of life in the pursuit of profit. Across these four films, however, the home emerges not as a commodity to be exchanged—nor as an asset to be valued through speculation and dispossession—but as a site of ongoing creative struggle.

Post-screening Q&A with Peter Goldberg, Elijah Stevens, Emily Baez, Monique Sullivan, and Lucas Kane.

Peoples’ Park (Newsreel #33) – Newsreel, 1969, 25 min, 16mm.
In the late 1960s the University of California at Berkeley began buying up and destroying a nearby area populated by hippies, the poor, and other members of the “counter culture”. In retaliation, the community laid claim to a barren block being used as a parking lot to create a People’s Park. The National Guard was called in to occupy Berkeley and a young man was killed. This film documents the infamous struggle resulting in the destruction of the park.

Your Name is Neighbor – Peter Goldberg, Tracy Rosenthal & Elijah Stevens, 2026, 14 min.
Fed up with rising rents and toxic living conditions, two tenants in Harlem and Washington Heights organize a rent strike against their private equity landlord. Your Name is Neighbor is an intimate portrait of their struggle for home in for-profit housing. 

Jacob’s House – Lucas Kane, 2025, 21 min. 16mm
Jacob’s House is a patient exploration of what constitutes a house and how a house constitutes a way of life. Made collaboratively between two neighbors in Brooklyn NY, the film traces Jacob’s 15-year relationship to his home as he resists a developer’s brutal attempt to evict him.

The White Rose  – Bruce Conner, 1967, 7 min. 35mm
The White Rose chronicles the removal of Jay DeFeo’s nearly one-ton masterpiece, The Rose (1958-66), from her second-story San Francisco studio after she was evicted. 

*An earlier iteration of On the Relentless Destruction of Beauty appeared at La Clef in Paris in February 2025. Special thanks to Héléna Delamarre.