If You Lived Here

The beauty of space, transparency as well as modern design and architecture classics in the graphics by Josephin Ritschel are the privilege of a few. This environment stands in obvious contrast to the housing and living realities of many people who are affected by housing shortages, gentrification, rising rents and homelessness.

This publication If You Lived Here makes reference to the exhibition project of the same name by Martha Rosler at the Dia Art Foundation in New York (1989). Based on the slogans of current real estate billboards at that time. Rosler‘s dialogic and participative show addressed urban and sociopolitical questions about housing as a public act of community and the distribution of space as a fundamental question of power.

The design is derived from the exhibition and book series Wohnungsfrage (2015) by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin and the publishing house Spector Books. With If You Lived Here, Gloria Glitzer refers to the topicality and necessity of continuing to deal with the issue of accessible living space. The scaffolding becomes the offer and reality check of a spatial vision to be renegotiated.

— Juliane Schickedanz 

If You Lived Here

Josephin Ritschel

Gloria Glitzer

210 x 280mm, 34pp
8 color Risography book with offset printed cover + UV varnish, french flaps, bound & assembled by hand
Edition of 200
Text by Juliane Schickedanz, copy-editing by Florian Grunke-Horton