Goodbye home

I’m writing this post for several reasons. Several very important reasons that are influencing our lives at the moment and will influence them in the future.

This story is about our house and our future. For those who didn't know yet; we live in a small squatted house in one of conglomerate cities of Barcelona. We live here almost two years now constantly working on our house, upgrading it and making more suitable for living. House is almost 100 years old, it’s one of previous century architectural beautiful housing projects that still has a soul and piece of mind of architect inside. The type of housing that is being currently destroyed all over Barcelona and replaced with shapeless giant block houses, that swallow hundreds of living souls inside their small, serial flats of metal, concrete and glass. The same faith awaits our house…

The place where we live is going to be destroyed. The whole block of old and unique houses with blushing green gardens in the back and cozy small patios will be demolished to build one more concrete monster with ground floor exploited as shopping paradise. There is nothing really we can do to avoid it, everything is futile when the big money is involved in the project.

One might ask why we are doing this. What exactly we are doing there? And how do we manage to live our lives like this.

There are many squatted houses in Barcelona and rest of Europe, with many different people living there, with different thoughts on their minds. I’m gonna tell a story from my point of view.

I decided to live in a squat because of many reasons. First it’s a new life experience for me; second it’s easy and difficult at the same time and third is that I don’t agree with real estate speculations going on around the world. So many homeless people on the street, so many old and also new houses stand totally empty, decaying without proper care and inhabitants. The basic need for housing is taken away from people because some cannot cope with rules of the capitalist game. This is my protest against this corrupt system.

                                 

This is also my way to learn and experience new things in my life, to meet people that I would never meet otherwise, travel and live the adventure. I have a lot of free time because I didn’t find a job in Barcelona yet. But I don’t feel bad about it because I have everything I need and all the free time. I don’t feel poor coz I have money I need from occasional jobs to support my life style and sometimes I have enough even to invest in my hobbies.

Garbage bins of supermarkets in Barcelona provide me with enough food, food that is even better than I used to eat back in Latvia. I’m not ashamed to dig in the trash. Whole society should be ashamed for wasting so much fine food in the name of ridiculous quality standards and false economy! Why false? Because, what kind of economy is that which allows around 50% of all produced food in Europe to be wasted not even reaching consumer? It happens because of different reasons on different stages of production. So I feel fine searching trash bins for food, I even feel good about it. I feel like saving our planet. Once in a while I find second hand clothes, shoes, furniture and different domestic equipment. Everything we have in our house was found on the streets of Barcelona once. We gave a second life for many things: couches, mattresses, chairs, tables, freezer, toaster, DVD, stereo system, computer parts… You name it – we have it.

Livingroom

Kitchen

Front yard

First watermelon from our garden .Sweet and juicy!

I’d like to demystify to the people from ‘outside’ what squatters are doing in their squats. Some people think all squatters are junkies, rapists, lost souls, in Latvia people think that we don’t have food so we eat sand pancakes and drink our piss, some think that squatters eat other people.  Most squatters I know in Barcelona don’t do any of these things mentioned above. Most of them don’t work. Everyone does different things.  Some organize different workshops, concerts, some cook free food, make circus, grow gardens, organize expositions, parties etc., some do nothing, some do drugs. Everyone is different.


We have spent a lot of time fixing collapsed teras of our house, rebuilding toilet and finally constructing  clay sauna from recycled materials and making sauna parties for everyone. We have our organic garden that we care about. We spend time learning about different types of medical herbs that grow around in the nature and their effects on the body. We learn different skills and how to use different recycled materials to build things we need, not buying more and producing more waste. Our joy of life comes from here, from experiencing life. Once in a while we go on a couple days bike rides to some interesting destination around Catalonia.

Sauna from recycled materials

Our house might be evicted soon; some neighboring houses been already demolished following new urbanization project. Very soon we’ll start a journey to Africa and when we’ll come back it’s possible that our house won’t be here no more. We say goodbye to a place where we spent so many happy, bright and sunny days, we get on our bikes and turn the page… Future is unwritten.