Evicting the ghost. Architectures of Survival / Evicting the ghost. Architectures of survival

Text: studioBASAR (Alex Axinte and Cristi Borcan)

Walking down the street in the fall of 2006, I passed a compact volume of furniture wrapped in blue foil. I had seen such makeshift structures by families forcibly evicted to the street, but I had recorded them mechanically and, as we had become accustomed, to the point of indifference, to other anomalies of Romanian public space, they too had become practically invisible.

As we stood in the narrow space between the package on the sidewalk and the facade of the house, we could almost hear the sound of voices, spoons and plates: we were next to a family having lunch inside the blue package. I realized that the structure was actually a dwelling, and its occupants were not homeless people in the classic sense of the word, but homeless families living on the sidewalk and in possession of dishes, furniture, and houseplants.