MORTGAGED LIVES - Journal of Aesthetics & Protest

218 Pages·2015·6.96 MB·English

Ada Colau and Adrià Alemany
MORTGAGED
LIVES
From the housing bubble
to the right to housing
HOW DID WE GET HERE : THE DNA OF THE HOUSING BUBBLE
MORTGAGED
LIVES
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MORTGAGED LIVES
This work is subject to the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
Creative Commons 3.0 licence. It permits the reproduction, distribution
and public communication where the authors are cited and for no com-
mercial use. Commercial use of the original work or the generation of
derivative works is not permitted.
Text: Ada Colau and Adriá Alemany
Prologues: Gerard Pisarello and José Coy
Translation: Michelle Teran, Jessica Fuquay
Copy Edit: Marc Herbst, Yaiza María Hernández Velázquez, Kate Boden
The translation of this work was carried out with support by the Canada Council
for the Arts and the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme
Design and layout: Michelle Teran
Cover design: Fré Sonneveld
Publisher of English translation:
Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press Los Angeles/Leipzig/London
www.joaap.org
HOW DID WE GET HERE : THE DNA OF THE HOUSING BUBBLE
Ada Colau and Adriá Alemany
MORTGAGED
LIVES
From the housing bubble
to the right to housing
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MORTGAGED LIVES
6
HOW DID WE GET HERE : THE DNA OF THE HOUSING BUBBLE
Dedicated to our son Luca who, with only eleven months of
life, has followed the frenetic rhythm of the assemblies, the
demonstrations, evictions and the long heated debates without
ever losing his smile. Dedicated to all the fathers and mothers,
grandfathers and grandmothers that try to teach their children
and grandchildren about the values of social justice. Dedicated
to Ernest Marco, Lucía Martín, Lucía Delgado and Guillem
Domingo who, since 2009, when the PAH was nothing more
than a small idea, have never stopped believing in it nor stopped
working until it became a reality. Dedicated to all the PAHs and
all the people who selfessly give their time and the very best of
themselves in the defense of the right to housing.
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MORTGAGED LIVES
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HOW DID WE GET HERE : THE DNA OF THE HOUSING BUBBLE
Preface
It’s a pleasure presenting the English translation of Vidas Hipotecas by
Ada Colau and Adriá Alemany, an analysis and accounting of the housing
crisis and right to housing movement in Spain. Throughout the book,
you will fnd the term dación en pago. I’ve left it untranslated because it is
a term so specifc to Spain that it is difcult to translate.
Dación en pago means literally “to give” (dar >dación) “as payment” (en
pago). Dación en pago therefore means a repossession procedure whereby
the owner gives back their house keys to the bank and in exchange the
bank fully discharges their mortgage debt, allowing the former owner to
start again with no debt. In Spain, as described by Ada Colau and Adriá
Alemany in this book, when a bank repossesses a home, the former
owner not only loses their home but is required to continue paying
the outstanding debt. It is very difcult to start over. This idiosyncratic
feature of Spanish mortgage law distinguishes it from neighbouring
countries within the EU and other parts of the world. The fght for
dación en pago is one of the key points over which the battle lines for the
right to housing are being laid down by the Plataforma de Afectados por la
Hipoteca (PAH).
As a Canadian artist living in Berlin, I have been following both the
15-M movement and housing crisis in Spain, since 2011. In April 2013, I
traveled to Madrid with a quite undefned plan; I would spend a couple
of months attending and flming PAH assemblies and conduct a few
interviews. On April 2nd, the day after my arrival, I descended the stairs
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MORTGAGED LIVES
of Seco (a squatted cultural centre in Puente de Vallecas district) and
experienced my frst clamorous and chaotic PAH assembly. Inspired
by their varied and exquisitely intelligent tactics, I continued attend-
ing meetings, and delayed my departure from the city. I formed deeper
alliances, fnally joining the Grupo de Impacto Psicosocial de la Comisión de
la Verdad, PAH Madrid (Psychosocial Impact Group of the Truth Com-
mission, PAH Madrid) a multidisciplinary team of professionals and
researchers in various felds–social work, psychology and political
science– that investigates the psychosocial impacts of eviction. This
research analyzes the social rupture of homelessness and its psychological
impacts on present and future generations.
I starting reading Ada and Adriá’s book Mortgaged Lives around the
same time as my frst visit to Seco. Ada and Adriá’s words performed a
narration to what I was seeing and hearing, it provided context to the
questions, conversations and commentaries that occurred during these
PAH meetings. After fnishing the book, I decided to translate Mortgaged
Lives into English. What you have in front of you is the results of my
work.
I was inspired by the book’s approach, a frst-person account which
situates itself as a manifesto and how-to manual for a citizens’ move-
ment in order to develop the necessary tools and strategies to deal with
a society in crisis. I felt it could also serve as a useful resource for a
non-Spanish speaking audience. The translation was carried out with the
assistance of Jessica Fuquay, an art student from the United States who
came to Berlin to spend a summer as my intern but ended up traveling
with me to Madrid. During the sweltering month of July, we worked
through the bulk of the translation.
Approaching this project as an artist and not a professional translator,
I have become mindful of the role of translator as being an ethical one
and how the translation process is an intimate act. Translation is never
an unmediated fow of words from one language to another. Each time
a text is translated into another language a new perspective is reached
from which the original thought can be viewed. Ideas are therefore
developed through repetition. Deeply sensitive to this, I have tried to
be as true to the original text as possible while still acknowledging my
intermediary role within the translation process.
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