The Liberatory Living Room Performance Closes
Echo Park Lake Exhibition with Call for Solidarity

Los Angeles, CA — On Friday, March 21, 2025, at 7:00 p.m., the Skid Row History Museum & Archive will host “The Liberatory Living Room: Belongings Precede Belonging,” a performance marking the finale of the Tents and Tenants: After Echo Park Lake exhibition.

Organized by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, with support from the Mellon Foundation, this event invites the public to witness the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective’s exploration of how an encampment at Echo Park Lake became a radical commons—a microcosm of resistance against Los Angeles’ “policed-propertied order.”

The exhibition, running February 1–March 30, 2025, at the museum—a project of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)—documents the 2021 Echo Park Lake encampment, where unhoused organizers, abandoned by the city during the COVID-19 pandemic, forged a community and uprising.

That community, however, faced a militarized eviction in March 2021, a pivotal moment exposing state violence against the unhoused.

The After Echo Park Lake Research Collective’s 2022 report, (Dis)Placement: The Fight for Housing and Community after Echo Park Lake, challenged city claims that displaced residents were housed, revealing that only 17 of 183 individuals found long-term housing, with many left in permanent displaceability.

Critics argue this reflects a “housing ruse”—a misuse of public funds to criminalize poverty rather than provide real solutions, despite expanded federal and state relief resources.

“The Liberatory Living Room” performance, featuring members of the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective, will delve into the “politics and poetics” of the encampment, emphasizing how belongings—tents, makeshift infrastructure—preceded belonging, creating a shared space of solidarity.

The event builds on the exhibition’s mission to preserve this history, offering lessons for future social movements. It contrasts sharply with the city’s narrative, as posts on X highlight ongoing public frustration: many argue the 2021 eviction prioritized gentrification over human needs, with police harassment and closed facilities like showers and bathrooms exacerbating unhoused suffering.

The UCLA Luskin Institute, under Director Ananya Roy, has long studied racial banishment and housing injustice, partnering with movement scholars and unhoused comrades to challenge systems of inequality. The exhibition, open Thursdays through Saturdays from 2–5 p.m., also includes earlier programs like the February 21 panel, “Tenants in the Streets,” amplifying voices from Skid Row and beyond.

The Los Angeles Poverty Department, founded in 1985 by Skid Row residents, curates the museum as a space for art, history, and activism, fostering performances like LAPD’s Festival for All Skid Row Artists and Walk the Talk parade.

Yet, the establishment narrative—city officials’ claims of housing success—faces scrutiny. Reports from the Luskin Institute and sentiment on X suggest the eviction prioritized property interests over people, with gentrification driving the removal of Echo Park’s unhoused community.

While the city touted the sweep as a public safety measure, evidence shows it deepened poverty and displacement, contradicting promises of stable housing. The exhibition and performance aim to counter this, archiving the encampment’s radical vision of a “collective future” free from carceral containment.

“The Liberatory Living Room” invites housed and unhoused attendees alike to engage with this history, asking: What does Los Angeles look like from its most precarious residents’ vantage point?

The performance, rooted in the poetics of survival, underscores the encampment’s infrastructure—gardens, kitchens, jobs programs—as acts of resistance. It challenges viewers to imagine a city where housing justice, not banishment, prevails, drawing on the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective’s ongoing work since 2023.

Support for LAPD’s museum and programs, including this exhibition, relies on public donations, ensuring Skid Row’s stories endure. As Los Angeles grapples with homelessness—exacerbated by economic hardship and systemic neglect—these events offer a clarion call for solidarity, urging a reimagining of urban space beyond police and property.

Challenging Displacement: Echo Park’s Story Takes Center Stage in L.A. (March 4, 2025)

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About Los Angeles Poverty Department
Founded in 1985, Los Angeles Poverty Department is made up of people who make art and live and work in Skid Row. LAPD creates performances and multidisciplinary artworks that connect the experience of people living in poverty to the social forces that shape their lives and communities. LAPD’s works express the realities, hopes, dreams and rights of people who live and work in L.A.’s Skid Row.

LAPD’s Skid Row History Museum & Archive is curated by L. A. Poverty Department. The space operates as an archive-, exhibition-, performance- and meeting space and collects, preserves, and disseminates the history of the Skid Row neighborhood.

Support the work of the LAPD! Your donation helps us to continue our group devised performances, our annual Festival for All Skid Row Artists, our biennial Walk the Talk parade and the Skid Row History Museum and Archive — for creating social change.