City planners decide to pull down parts of Shanghai's old town in order to regenerate the city. Every year more than one hundred thousand families are forced to leave their homes and move into buildings on the edge of city. Under construction is a two- and three- dimentional flight across the now destroyed living areas of Shanghai which shows how random and brutal decisions can affect peoples's lives.

Wanja is a documentary about “the Block”, through the eyes of Auntie Barb and the life of Wanja, her blue heeler dog, recently deceased. The community on the Block's many and varied stories of Wanja reflect on the issues affecting this indigenous community in the heart of Sydney. Auntie Barb is an elder of Redfern's community: Wanja was an integral part of the community, known to all for her ability to sniff out the police -in uniform and undercover- “the Block's guardian angel”. Through Wanja, Aunty Barb and the community's memories of this tenacious, loyal, smart and loving dog tell of the early days on the Block when there were elders and families, good housing and a strong sense of community. The stories of Wanja tell us how the tension between the community and police escalated, why the housing has continued to deteriorate and largely been demolished, and why the strength of the community - it's elders, moved on. Aunty Barb was one of the last elders forced off the Block. In spite of this, Aunty Barb continues to call the Block her community and home.

Theory and practice of care

"Loneliness is on the rise. "Mainstream discourse hides the fact that the ‘normal’ situation of a 40-hour working week, plus daycare, plus grandma for tricky times, does not just leave room for improvement, it is downright unacceptable.”

Carolina del Olmo, where is my tribe?

In Sweden – an extreme case of Western trends within the Protestant tradition –, over 50% of the population live alone. People also die alone, forgotten by everyone, after a lifetime of pursuing the desire for personal independence, adapting to social norms, comforts, and socialisation without physical contact. The dream of an independent life, free from community bonds and patriarchal family ties, has turned out to be a nightmare of loneliness, sadness, and existential emptiness.

We need to overcome the binary oppositions that lead us to choose between two almost equally bad options. We don’t have to go back to the old, strictly patriarchal family, but we shouldn’t have to settle for metropolitan solitude either. The idea is to create and experiment with other ways of living and loving.

"According to anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, female lab rats locked in cages with only their young for company started to behave in a manner very similar to 1950s American housewives, with their obsessions and their neuroses. But when observed in the wild, mothers and their offspring showed a wide range of different behaviours in all kinds of social contexts."

                                                                                                                                                             Carolina del Olmo, Where is My Tribe ?

In the documentary The Swedish Theory of Love , a Swedish social worker investigating the growing number of people who die abandoned, completely isolated, asks: “What does it matter if I have a million in the bank if I am not happy?” But it’s not just about achieving happiness, it’s about the immense somnambulant sadness washing over a decaying civilization, where life unfolds in the midst of the epiphany of a mountain of waste. “ Did you hear that? It is the sound of your world collapsing ,” say the Zapatistas. Individual independence is the catastrophic ideal of a world that is perfectly organised and efficient but cold as ice.

“ At the end of independence there is no happiness. At the end of independence there is the emptiness of life, the insignificance of life, and utter, unimaginable boredom.”

                                                                                                                       Zygmunt Bauman, interviewed in The Swedish Theory of Love

It is not surprising to find that Zona Franca, the former commercial area of traditional industry, and 22@, the area recently zoned for logistic and technological capitalism, are part of a huge real estate operation publicised under the umbrella of Barcelona's post-industrial urban renewal. So, what economic and symbolic benefits do they generate, and for whom? What advantages do companies and institutions gain from this symbiosis? And what about the workers?