The participants

Gessamí Sánchez Ollé, 33, Barcelona

Personal object: pillow

MACBA work selected: "Condensation Cube" by Hans Haacke

Gessamí has a PhD in Biochemistry and years of experience as a researcher at prestigious research centers, but in looking for work she only finds temporary jobs with salaries that barely exceed a thousand euros a month and for which there are many applications—those of her fellow researchers, who find themselves in similar circumstances.

To try to change this situation, Gessamí is an active member of D-Recerca, the association of PhD students and research fellows. Together with the Catalan Association Federación de Jóvenes Investigadores/Precarios at the national level, they aim to put an end to the employment instability and insecurity of Spain’s researchers with no Social Security contributions, no entitlement to unemployment benefits, no recognition of the right to sick leave, maternity leave and vacation time and salaries of a thousand euros a month—and an uncertainty that does not reflect the years devoted to obtaining specific and specialized training and experience.

To finance her studies and cover her expenses while she was in school, she worked as a conference hostess, babysitter, autopsy technician and giving private classes. After four years working in the laboratories of the University of Barcelona she was offered a position, but under “unacceptable” conditions: no pay, no insurance and no Social Security contributions. She complains that research at the university level “is not governed by professional merit” and that it is “endogamous,” plus there are no intermediate positions or research careers.

After these four years in the laboratories of the University of Barcelona and several more in an important oncology research group at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital-Research Institute, she fears that the lack of employment opportunities in Catalonia and Spain will force her to leave for countries like Sweden and the USA, where she says the differences are abysmal, both in terms of remuneration and labor rights and recognition of the profession.

As if this were not enough, with the country’s current economic situation and management, many scientific research programs have been left without funding.

While she looks for work she tries to relax with her three cats and with belly dancing and African dance, but she continues to educate herself: she is taking an online course in statistics for scientific research from Harvard University and studying for a master’s degree in research design and statistics for the health sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Noèlia Asensi, 32, Corbera de Llobregat

Personal object: Luxescena (two fluorescent tubes mounted on a mobile wooden structure) MACBA work selected: Emboscadura by Federico Guzmán

Noèlia has been a member of the Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya since she earned her degree eight years ago, but she is thinking about cancelling her membership. Although she has worked in architectural firms on both housing projects and public buildings and spaces since completing her studies, she has not been able to find work for months. But this isn’t the path she wants to follow either. In one of the professions that has been hit the hardest by the crisis—and most closely tied to the crash—and that has gone from an abundance of projects to the closing of many businesses, Noèlia argues that a radical change is needed: putting architecture at the service of the people, “a global discourse of design guided by communication and multidisciplinarity.” And this is what she is devoted to.

She is setting up various initiatives that put this maxim into practice: Street2Lab, an online urban art gallery with a map of Barcelona for finding and cataloguing the best graffiti in the city, with which she is preparing graffiti decals to sell through ecommerce; Found & co, a project for recycling furniture found on the street so that other artists can create work with it; and EnPúblic, “a creative project in public spaces for resolving concrete problems we have detected.” Given the lack of employment and in order to be able to undertake her projects, EnPúblic has just been turned into a company (general partnership) and she has registered as a freelancer. Though she knows she will have little income at the moment, she has chosen self-employment after spending months trying to find work in architecture or design.

She is both unhurried and restless, a disposition that helps her to withstand the labour uncertainty. She prepared herself to take this turn in her career: in 2012 she finished her master’s degree in design, art and public space from ELISAVA (at Pompeu Fabra University), and she is currently studying communication online with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC).

She is very close to her family (she’s an only child) and speaks with them every night over Skype. She spends every weekend at the family home in Corbera de Llobregat, giving recycling workshops or working with her partners. She misses silence and nature, but until she is able to move she is living in a small apartment in Gràcia with Ignasi and her cat.

Luxescena, the personal object she has chosen, is a symbol of this change she is calling for in the profession: “It was my first foray into an architectural concept outside what I was taught at university and in the professional firms where I have worked.” Luxescena, winner of the competition it was designed for, was EnPúblic’s first project: “It is the materialization of the personal discovery that social architecture can be made with minimal resources, with no need for commissions or bureaucracy, and the beginning of a shared personal adventure.”

Aura Jobita Gonzáles, 45, Ecuadorian, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat.

Personal object: Madonna and child with seashells (from the altars in her home) MACBA work selected: Silla Zaj by Esther Ferrer

Aura has now been unemployed for over three years and is willing to do any kind of work, no matter what the hours or however hard. She arrived in Madrid from Ecuador ten years ago seeking a better life for herself and her four children and also leaving behind a failed marriage. Her stay in Madrid only lasted three days once she discovered that the job offers that had brought her to Spain were more than shady, and she decided to come to Barcelona, even though she didn’t know anyone in the city. For the first three nights she had to sleep in a park. “I didn’t have anywhere to go.”

She has done all kinds of work over the years, from caring for the elderly in nursing homes and small children in a house to working on assembly lines, delivering newspapers at night, working as a mover and so on. The jobs are nearly always temporary and poorly paid. She wants to get a forklift license“or whatever license necessary”—because she thinks that might help her find work. With relentless energy, her struggle not to become disheartened is constant and supported by strong religious faith.

Aura has not forgotten those three nights sleeping in the park. She distributes food and blankets among the homeless, primarily on weekend nights, and she tries to talk to them and show a little kindness to those on the fringes. She does this with a group of community members (who purchase the food they bring out of their own pockets) that communicate over Facebook and do not belong to any association or institution. Aura has worked with several associations but she says that it is because of this that she prefers to do it independently. She is proud to help in whatever is asked of her, even though her own situation is precarious.

For the last few months she has been renting a ground floor apartment of just a few square meters in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat after her former boyfriend and common-law partner legally demanded that she leave their shared apartment. She shares this new home with her daughters Jurleny (14, high school student) and Estefania (22, hairdresser), who joined her in Barcelona six years ago.

She doesn’t want to go back to Ecuador even though her two sons and grandchildren live there, particularly because of the instability and violence.

Her personal object, a Madonna and child surrounded by seashells with light bulbs, will leave its place on her personal altar to travel to Venice. On her bedroom shelf where she keeps religious images next to deceased family members’ photographs and objects, there will be an empty space left by this image, well loved by Aura. “When everything goes wrong, she is always there, supporting me.”

Pedro González, 48 , Cornellà de Llobregat

Personal object: framed collage of Christ with the face of his deceased brother, made by Sánchez Alonso, which hangs from the wall of his double bedroom MACBA work selected: "Morceau d'art" by Jaume Xifra

Pedro González is the only one of his three brothers not born in the house built by his parents, Andalusians who migrated for work, in Cornellà de Llobregat. He was born at the Hospital Casa de Maternitat, but he now lives with his wife and their three children aged 10, 15 and 19 in this same 50-square-meter house where his two elder brothers were born and raised. His mother ran a shop on the ground floor, and he began running errands for it when he was very young.

He has now been unemployed for over two years since the aluminium wheel company (the only one in Catalonia and world leader in its day) where he had worked for ten years shut down, putting 240 workers out of a job. The causes were the crisis in the automobile industry, the drop in car sales and offshoring. The plant has been moved to the Czech Republic and Italy in search of lower costs, and this has caused the closure of small suppliers in the area.

To join this company, which offered him better conditions—his last salary was about €48,000 per year as warehouse manager—he left his previous job, where he had spent 17 years, at a plastic injection company in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. The year he left that company, the owners sold all of the machinery over a weekend and practically in secret, leaving the workers in a surrealistic situation: they couldn’t work because the plant had been dismantled, but if they weren’t present at the factory during working hours they left themselves open to being dismissed for absenteeism.

His wife’s illness prevents her from working and leading a normal life, so he is usually the one to look after their home and prepare meals. His unemployment benefits have run out and now he only receives family support of €425. Worried about his children’s future, he is persistent in looking for work. But his age and the conditions of the few job offers he finds leave him with little hope. “I know it sounds bad, but the solution for people my age is that young people will have to go abroad, so that we will have work but making €800 a month.” He is relieved not to have taken the plunge and bought an apartment when things were going well and there was no reason to anticipate the current situation, because it would now be an agonizing burden for his family to deal with the cost of a mortgage. He runs ten kilometers every day: “Before it was a hobby; now it’s a necessity.”

Very family oriented, frugal and a man of few words, it is difficult for Pedro to let go of the object he is lending the exhibition and which occupies the wall at the head of his bed, a Christ with the face of his brother who passed away 15 years ago. He had gone to experience La Movida Madrileña with some friends. The painting’s creator, Sánchez Alonso, brother of the singer of the band La Unión, was one of them. It is one of the few objects Pedro collected from his brother’s house after burying him: “For me it’s a way to continue seeing him alive.”

Cyntia Terrade, 22, Les Planes (Barcelona)

Personal object: garden statue of Snow White MACBA work selected: "Shipwreck and Workers" by Allan Sekula (detail)

Cyntia is 22 years old and has a blank résumé.

After her mother died when she was seven, she spent her childhood and adolescence in child protection centers, a parallel and isolated world she has no fond memories of. When at 18 she finally left the last of the centers—she had been in several, “each worse than the last”—it had been a year and a half since she had set foot in the outside world or watched television. “When I left I realized that even the clothes I was wearing had gone out of style long ago.” Everything was strange to her, and even though four years have passed she is still trying to adapt to life outside. She seeks to leave these years of tension and punishment behind and get settled, get used to freedom and decide what to do with her life. “Maybe I will study a little, but I still don’t know what.”

In the meantime she looks for work “doing anything”—as a hotel maid, cleaning woman, shop assistant or babysitter. Walking along the streets of Barcelona, when she sees a quiet place where she thinks she would be comfortable working, she leaves a copy of her résumé. But she has no academic qualifications or work experience. To have a normal life, her dream is to find a job, and although her requirements are few, with the current situation it is very complicated. “I have left a lot of résumés, but no one has ever called me.”

After leaving the last center for minors for good, she decided to move in with her father, who was renting a room in a guest house in Barcelona. There she met a friend of her father’s twice her age and fell in love, and they moved to live together in his house in Les Planes. Regarding the age difference between her and her partner, who is divorced, she says, “I can’t be with a guy my age after everything I have experienced; they seem like children to me.”

In the Collserola Mountains, surrounded by trees with her dog and cats, she finds the silence and tranquillity she needs. She has a room set up as her boudoir, where she brushes her hair before a mirror and applies creams surrounded by figurines of witches, as she vaguely remembers her mother doing.

Her day-to-day life is marked by collecting firewood for the fireplace, the small repairs required by a house built decades ago without much planning and life with her partner Miguel, who is also unemployed.

Like the personal object she has chosen, a garden statue of Snow White, Cyntia lives halfway between the real world and one of fantasy, between rural life, half isolated with her partner and animals, and this standard life she hopes to have when she finds a job, between a childhood lost in centers for minors and yearning to become a mother soon. She found the statue stored away in the house. “We also have the dwarves, but there are only six—we don’t know where one of them is.”

Mamadou Kheraba Drame, 43, Senegalese, resident in Barcelona for 15 years

Personal object: color photocopy of a representation of Osiris from an art book. MACBA work selected: Aquella noche volví a llorar con Bambi by Carlos Pazos

Kheraba exudes authority. It is palpable at the industrial warehouse occupied by hundreds of undocumented immigrants without homes, without families and without work who take shelter in this facility in Barcelona’s Poble Nou district. Hundreds of people pass through every day, most of them sub-Saharan Africans who survive by collecting scrap metal throughout the city and reselling it to large recycling companies. Many of them also sleep in the warehouse for lack of a better place. They see no way out of their prolonged precarious situation, but they struggle to survive: they have no electricity, running water or heating, but they obtain them from the public supply, collecting water from the neighbourhood fountains and lighting fires in barrels. Apart from the buying and selling of scrap metal, modest bars and restaurants have opened among the dwellings, and there is a mosque, a rehearsal space and a community centre, all of them built using materials found in the trash and with support from local residents.

Kheraba, a 43-year-old Senegalese man, spends most of his time organizing the storage space he has in the warehouse although he doesn’t sleep there. He collects not scrap metal but everything else that might have a second chance: clothing, photography equipment, computers, small furniture, toys and so on. One of the destinations for this vast store of discarded objects is trucks heading to sub-Saharan Africa where they will be of use. Kheraba speaks fluent Spanish and Catalan. He has been living in Catalonia for over 15 years since taking a trip to “get to know this part of the world under the guise of visiting family.” Barcelona was no more than a stopover on his journey between Portugal and France, but he fell in love, got married, had a son (who is now ten years old) and stayed in the city.

He is a sort of diplomat at the warehouse, and this is because he understands and can manage both cultures: the African culture with society based around family and solidarity, and the European/Catalan culture of the welfare state and a “Barcelona neta” (clean Barcelona). He tries to maintain the precarious equilibrium of an extremely fragile coexistence and to ensure the continuity of a space under constant threat of eviction, which despite not being an acceptable home is the least bad of the alternatives open to those who live there.

It has been six years since he visited his native Senegal, where he worked in theater, and is a member of an enormous extended family, with 36 siblings by eight different mothers. He is now expecting his second son, the first with his current partner, a German architect who works setting up Asian restaurant franchises in shopping malls.

His personal object, a color photocopy from an art book featuring an image of Egyptian god Osiris, presides over the altar of negritude he has in a place reserved in his storeroom at the occupied warehouse. It hangs above a shelf crowded with images and figures of dolls and virgins, all of them black. “If the MACBA is the white temple of art, Osiris is the black god of this temple,” he says, while asking how the museum acquires works. “Perhaps one day we will see some pieces made by the artists living in the warehouse at the MACBA.”

Alejandro Roldán, 60, l'Hospitalet de Llobregat

Personal object: electric razor that belonged to his father MACBA work selected: Retrato de un gudari llamado Odiseo by Jorge Oteiza

Alejandro, A metalworker and trade unionist born in Granada, barely has any personal possessions. Under threat of eviction from the apartment he shares with Cristina, he has to select a minimum of personal effects that can be transported with his own hands in case they are evicted.

The threat of eviction was precisely what brought Cristina and Alejandro together. They met at the Plataforma d’Afectats per la Hipoteca (PAH, Platform of People Affected by Mortgages) in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, which the two of them now run with the help of other volunteers. He is the spokesman and soul of a self-managed organization seeking to help everyone threatened with ending up on the street, whether by foreclosure or eviction. Almost every week there is news modifying an ambit that is constantly evolving: they must be well informed of changes to legislation, judicial decisions and the citizens’ movement, which are creating positive precedents unimaginable a few years ago—and every small advance takes place amidst the precariousness.

The PAH of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat also manages a food bank, because the needy situation of the huge number of people affected by the evictions has reached the point that they don’t have food: “There are people starving, literally.”

Alejandro forgets about his health problems while working to defend the rights of citizens disregarded by banks and other powers. Four years ago, a workplace accident left him unable to work, but his disability is not recognized, so he is not receiving any assistance for the accident and is officially unemployed.

His life has been marked by social and political struggle since the anti-Franco underground. His father kicked him out of the house at 18 after discovering a clandestine political publication. From then until now he has had three marriages and a number of jobs in different companies, always involved with the workers’ struggle. His memory is relentless, as is his demand for integrity and honesty in others, especially those in political office, and in himself. And both things bring him problems and more than a few enemies, a price he is willing to pay in exchange for having a clean conscience, he says.
Alejandro only allows himself to relax the severity of his discourse to share news he is excited about: “They’ve just told me we’ve managed to stop an eviction!” Immediately afterward he raises his guard again.

The electric shaver Alejandro has chosen for the Venice Biennale is practically his only personal possession. His father had used it since his five sons gave it to him for Father’s Day over 30 years ago. When he passed away, Alejandro kept it for himself “a little bit covertly.” He has never wanted to clean it thoroughly; he likes the idea that when he shaves every morning his hair mingles with his father’s.

Joan Andreu Parra, 42, Badalona

Personal object: photographs by Humberto Rivas, received as a wedding gift MACBA work selected: "Compostatge de nou pintures, compostatge de sis pintures i compostage d'una pintura amb marc i vidre" by Perejaume

Joan Andreu Parra has been adding to the unemployment figures since January 9th 2013, when he decided to take advantage of the compensated voluntary resignation proposed as one of the measures for eliminating 1,200 jobs at the institution where he had worked since he was 18. This institution was first called Caixa Sabadell and then Unnim when three small Catalan savings banks joined together in an attempt to survive the crisis in the sector, and it is currently BBVA, the institution that bought Unnim for one euro with the assurance that if unfavorable data undetected by its auditors emerged, the state would assume the costs.

He made the decision after thinking it over a lot and with the approval of his wife, with whom he has two sons, aged eight and ten. Her job as a teacher in a public school is a guarantee of stability in the midst of a tumultuous and bleak job landscape even with the budget cuts and one of the reasons he decided to move on to a new phase of his life: “I have only had one job interview in my life and it was 20 years ago. I haven’t ever looked for job offers either...” The bank where he spent his entire career, first as a cashier in different branches and afterwards within the marketing and branding department, was affecting him on a personal level: “I didn’t feel comfortable. Working in the financial sector was damaging me.” Even though he worked in marketing, he could not disassociate himself from the running of the bank, with bonuses for targets that led the sales representatives to sell unsuitable financial products to their clients.

Joan Andreu has decided to take some time to rethink his career, and between coaching sessions, counseling for repositioning himself in the labor market and self-help books and videos, he is trying to turn this adverse situation around:
“I want to get to know myself better.”

He is considering the possibility of going into business for himself, but always with an ethical grounding: he is thinking about a social cooperative, or a business with ethical management of work and benefits. He is contacting others who have already launched some of these initiatives. The possibility of looking for a job similar to the one he just left behind after 24 years is not something he is considering.

In the meantime, he takes the opportunity to spend time with his sons: they no longer go to the school cafeteria but instead he cooks and they eat together. He recognizes that the compensation has given him peace of mind to think hard about what he wants to do with his life and his time.

The series of photographs by Humberto Rivas he has provided for the exhibition is very dear to Joan Andreu, being a keepsake from his wedding and his friendship with the photographer, now deceased, whom he met through the financial institution’s corporate magazine. Besides being a reminder of their friendship, “from an aesthetic point of view, the photographs clearly have the ‘Humberto touch’: they are in black and white, with a sober composition and their own discourse.”