Rob Crosse at Auto Italia
February is LGBTQ+ History Month, and with every celebratory or remembrance event that takes place in the calendar, there is always a tug-of-war between looking back and looking forward. Arguably, at a time where basic rights cannot be assumed a 'given', it is tempting to keep pushing forward and work out solutions to the issues presenting themselves.
Berlin-based artist Rob Crosse's current exhibition at Auto Italia is a gentle, respectful, mindful experience of looking back, reminiscing and mourning, whilst also promoting ideas for what a progressive future might look like. Here, queering the institution, the gallery, and the housing system is done in a trifold manner. We live in a fast-paced world, but the slowness of Crosse's 24-minute film, Growing Wild, (which lends its name to the exhibition) reminds us to slow down and invest time in listening to each other, especially those with lived experience, knowledge, and ways of living that are different to our own.
The subject matter of the film is residents of Lebensort Vielfalt am Sudkreuz in Berlin, one of the first and largest multi-generational TLGBQIA+ housing projects in Europe. It was only established in 2023, so doesn't self-mythologise in any long and utopian history; instead, it is a case study in what is possible in the 2020s, a decade where permanence is out of style and out of pocket. When precarity reigns supreme, what role do alternative modes of living play, and how can we retrace our steps to find strength in community?
Growing Wild bears a simple premise; the viewer quietly follows the daily lives of several residents, in different chapters of their respective lives. It is not so much a 'fly on the wall' style; notably, great swathes of shots are missing as we follow people undertaking simple quotidian activities such as watering their plants, shaving their faces, and feeding their children. This provides a level of anonymity and privacy despite the domestic setting. The inter-generational element also makes the film powerful; the AIDS crisis is not the elephant in the room, but instead we hear one resident talking about having a positive test result in 1985, saying (translated from German), "I told myself: I wanted to live". Again simplicity permeates the film, and in this one short sentence we are reminded that the desire to live is often the first step in building community and actively participating in the struggle for a better life for oneself and one's peers.
I happened to be reading Charlie Porter's exquisite novel, Nova Scotia House, when I visited the exhibition, and I felt a serendipity that genuinely moved me. At the heart of both Porter's novel and Crosse's film lies a driving force of knowing that a life lived with love will not be found by solely, uncritically following the paths of the myriad institutions that prevail in our lives. This is not to get confused with the condoning of breaking the law; instead we are shown the power of living in ways that are intuitive to us, in environmental, spiritual, and economic ways.
"Michael had met an architect in America who was thinking about the lives us queers lived, how our queerness was spatial, that we didn't want to live in a fucking home made for straight people. We needed a different way of being. We need a different way of being. It was a different use of a space, different priorities, what mattered was sharing, community." (Porter, 142)
Approximately 1 in 5 LGBTQ+ people will experience homelessness in their lifetime, according to statistics from Crisis. An understanding that this is a systemic issue for people based on their identity is not far-fetched, and with this volume of lived experience of homelessness in the community, alternative living and accommodation models as illustrated by both Crosse and Porter highlight a need for more care and less mindless growth, beyond landlordism, gentrification, and consumerism. The tenderness that welcomes the viewer far exceeds expectations of how an exhibition can make an individual feel, while also queering the perspective of what 'ambition' itself can look like. When so many in our communities are facing destitution and homelessness, why are we pushing forward with so-called progress when we need to reconsider the fundamentals? It is no small feat for an exhibition to bring these questions to the fore, and hopefully encourage its audience to engage with their own communities in large and small ways, in order to live a tender live that is shaped by love and mutual respect.
