Film Screening: "Survival Without Rent" 
and "Viva Loisaida!"

Join us for a screening night of Survival Without Rent (2025, Katie Heiserman and Elana Meyers) and Viva Loisaida! (1978, Marlis Momber), followed by a conversation with filmmakers and co-directors Heiserman and Meyers, moderated by Justin Mugits. 

is a visceral collage of unearthed archival media showing how artists and activists transformed abandoned buildings into a radical enclave. The film traces the history of the squatters' movement from the 1970s, when a financial crisis in New York triggered a wave of building abandonment, to the mid-1990s, when the Giuliani Administration launched an attack on lower Manhattan's squats. Survival Without Rent also explores broader topics of government disinvestment, anticapitalist critique, extralegal activism, and the intersection of community arts and urban resistance movements.

Survival Without Rent has its New York City premiere as part of DOC NYC at the IFC Center in November 2025. 

Viva Loisaida! is a 1978 documentary directed by Marlis Momber, who immigrated from Berlin to New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1960s and photographed the Puerto Rican community in which she lived throughout the 1970s. Viva Loisaida! incorporates footage like street scenes, murals, and poetry readings to “capture the ambiance of Loisaida in the late 1970s” (CENTRO, Marlis Momber Lower East Side Photograph Collection). 

These films are screened by permission of the filmmakers and the Estate of Marlis Momber.

Space is limited. Please RSVP to reserve your spot.

Physical space of the Interference Archive is ADA compliant.

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This panel discussion is part of a series of public programs around the exhibition Through Padlocks, Behind Barricades: Margaret Morton's Glass House and the Squats of the Lower East Side.

explores the squatter movement on New York’s Lower East Side (Loisaida) in the 1990s. It features Margaret Morton’s photographs of life in Glass House, an abandoned glass factory at the corner of Avenue D and East 10th Street. Several dozen squatters made the building their home for sixteen months, until police evicted them in the winter of 1994. The exhibition presents Morton’s in-depth portrait of one squat, with an array of printed materials exploring the debates that arose over squatters’ rights.

On view at Interference Archive from October 17, 2025 through January 5, 2026.

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