Black Box

We have created a housing device that reflects on the living condition of the temporary/alegal worker along with a lifestyle that has been disguised behind the concept of entrepreneur and adventurer, within a neoliberal and atomized labor system. In an ironic reflection on housing as a market product, we try to build a fake, which is not so far from reality, where we have turned the shanty into a marketable consumer good through the same sales and circulation platforms that They are behind the exploitation of the precarious migrant. On this occasion, the work is bid on the buying and selling platform Ebay, providing conceptual circularity to the project.

In addition to the creation of this «house-package» that is accompanied by an assembly manual with a strong ironic charge, the work has a series of elements that customize this contradictorily inhabitable space. Seven watercolors and a table made with the signage of the entrance to Spain as part of the European Union are part of the sale and staging of this device. In addition, it is accompanied by some counter-advertising banners that have been produced with texts that derive from Mike Davis’ phrase «housing is a verb», combining it with different verbs associated with the reality that we have tackled. The activation of this set has a continuity in time through its circulation in the public space.
Because this project, more than a housing response, has been thought of as an instrument of interpellation on the precarious living conditions of these groups and their reproductive elements, with the package as an element with a strong symbolic charge that in some way dominates the iconography of the migrant.
This mirror centred on the package opens up cracks and fissures from which to establish dialogues between realities that are not directly connected, but which stem from the same logics of power that define a story. The imaginary of the package they carry and inhabit becomes a constant in the reality of migrants who travel on a journey of expulsion and subjugation that drives them to live in a condition of transience and permanent nomadism. Their content is their continent to the point of inhabiting it in a symbolically perverse production.

*For this project, the art historian Fidel Villar Barquín (ESP), in charge of the research, the visual artist Fernando Ossandón Zubieta (CL), who has created the watercolours that are part of the project, and Sergio Cabrera (ESP) as a collaborator, have worked with Todo por la Praxis.