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.

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.

A video based on an advertisement for GuardianSpain, the Spanish branch of Israeli company Guardian Homeland Security, which specializes in training security professionals to act – not against an external enemy but against the threat of citizens in their own countries. Israel thus shares its extensive proven experience in citizen control, particularly in urban contexts. Its Spanish clients include: Mossos d’Esquadra, Guardia Civil, Ertzaintza, the Interior Ministry, etc. The courses cost between 3.500 and 4.000€, and are paid for by our taxes.

Life in an Immigration Detention Centre is not life at all, it is waiting. Waiting and fear. Fear of deportation, fear of losing your direction while your life is limited to the four walls of the cell, fear of a future that could surely not be worse. The testimonies of former inmates of the Immigrant Detention Centre (CIE) at Zona Franca, Barcelona, offer us a glimpse of the reality of these illegal, covert prisons.