“If you are against the regime, you can’t use its jargon, or its concepts, or its ideas; you can’t try to give them a different meaning, you simply have to renounce them. Nonetheless, against power – which is Capital and the State, together – there is always something that is alive, a thing called ‘the people’, which doesn't exists, and which is what remains as politics.”

A video about the traces of slavery in the city of Barcelona, in the lead-up to the mass action known as the Catalan Way for Independence. It looks at the dark histories of the Marquis of Comillas, Güell, Delgado, Colom, and the city that names important spaces after them while the majority of the population remain oblivious as they struggle to “free themselves from Spain”. The video asks what it means to break free, what type of freedom we seek on the personal and collective level, and what we will make of our own history and particularly of “our” oppressors and murderers.

June 2013. A group of 800 people illegally occupy a former movie theatre in Barcelona in order to screen a documentary. Once they are in, they rename the building after a girl who committed suicide in 2011. It becomes ‘Cinema Patricia Heras’. Who was Patricia? Why did she kill herself? And above all, what role did Barcelona play in her death? That is precisely what this documentary and the strongly symbolic squatting action seeks to bring to light: through Patricia’s story, they reveal the dark side of Barcelona: The Dead City.

The last four years the city of Barcelona has implemented a model cornering those who are outside the triumphalist paradigm of modernity, Europeism and prosperity. The best example of this discourse is the district of 22 @. An area of the city built atop the old industrial neighborhood of Poble Nou, located on the northern edge of the city. It is in this space that we find the settlement. This is home of about 300 people of different ages and nationalities. There are sub-Saharan immigrants living here with or without papers, Romanian’s, South American’s, Maghreb’s and also Spanish. Many of them with a common history. A few years or months ago they had home and work. But with the crisis the work ended and they had to leave their homes. People went to the settlement, although many did not like the place, because its better than sleeping in the street. There is more security, there are chances of surviving with the collecting of junk and then selling it for recycling the metal, and also a sense of community. Junk has become the main income for the inhabitants living. In the settlement three bars have been opened, these supply, at reasonable prices, food for the community and a comforting coffee or beer at the end of the day. In the middle of all this struggle to keep breathing, in July 2012 things turned a little more dificult. Because of the complaint of the foundation “Maite Iglesias Baciana”, who owns the land where the settlement is and its main job is to send humanitarian aid to countries like Africa and Honduras, a police eviction was declared and scheduled for July 16 of that year. Not happy with this hypocrite behavior they also refused to negotiate with the lawyers that the Poblenou neighborhood residents had managed to find to defend the inhabitants of the settlement.

"How much more can we take? How much pain will we have to suffer before we wake up?"

Dolores Tjeada Saavedra, the Councillor for Work at Marinaleda Town Council, gives a simple and detailed account of how a grassroots social movement has managed to socialize the means of production, housing, health, education and leisure in this small town in Southern Spain. Dolores explains the many benefits of having an active trade union, with the political power of the town counciland the productive force of cooperatives in the hands of the people. Marinaleda has a population of 3000, and an unemployment rate of 0%. Anybody who wants to self-build in the town is only charged 15 euros per month, and working families only pay 12 euros a month for childcare including meals, to name just two of a long list of social benefits. A true oasis in a country dominated byunbridled capitalism and the shabbiest and most retrograde government in Spain’s short history of democracy, which has left the country with an unemployment rate of 27% – 50% in the case of youth unemployment – and three million people living in poverty.

Themeroc, the prophecy.

A former industrial warehouse in Barcelona’s Poblenou provides a place to live and work to a group of people, most of them originally from black Africa. In this video, they denounce their living and working conditions, and the segregation and attacks that they suffer. And they give us a lucid vision of the society that discriminates against them: “They ask us be to be civilized, to become civilized… I ask myself, what does it mean to be civilized? To spend money, to buy things… to consume.

A video that denounces the situation of more than 300 people who lived in the Nave del Poblenou in Barcelona, and the eviction order that was acted upon at 6am on 23 July 2012.

“We have to protect everything that the State and the catholic Church have built over the past 300 years. I don’t see any contradictions between apartheid and the Church: as Christians, we believe in the development of non-whites and we try to help them by building churches and helping them in their pastoral work. But these people prefer to stay in their own churches, and if that’s what they prefer…”