A full presentation of "A Real-Time Property Structure of Investment Funds in Barcelona" can be found here.
The story is well known. In 1971, Haans Haacke is preparing an individual exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. One of the central artworks of this show will be “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System as of May 1, 1971”. Haacke had spent long hours during the previous years in New York’s Office of Public Records compiling the materials for this piece. Through close examination of the documents, the artist traces the property structure of one of the largest landlords of New York, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings. 142 photographs of buildings, more than 70 companies, thousands of transactions among them, Haacke’s tryptic painstakingly draws the invisible network behind the slumlord’s business. It is an odd exercise in drawing, to be sure. To a certain extent, it is a drawing after nature, but a kind of nature that lies in bureaucratic documents and contractual relations. As with other drawings of his time, he has erased all traces of an expressive gesture. Nothing, in principle, is left to the imagination, it is an exercise in realism that makes visible something that remained concealed to the public eye. Its only possible expression is diagrammatic, but in this case, the diagram is as true to its object as if it was a photograph.
Six weeks before the exhibition, Guggenheim director Thomas Messer, finding the piece “inadequate” refuses to continue with the show. Haacke refuses to withdraw the artwork, the show is cancelled, and "Shapolsky et al." goes down in history as an icon of institutional critique.
Now, the context is completely different. We are in Barcelona, in 2021, a city that is undergoing a severe housing crisis. In 2012, when the global economy plunged and Spain’s real state bubble burst, thousands of families could not afford their mortgages. Banks across Spain got rid of their “risky assets” by selling them in big packages to international investment funds. Combined with poor regulation in rental contracts and the absence of public housing, we will see the emergence of a rent bubble that resulted in the eviction of many long-time neighbours. Between the two crises, the property structure in cities such as Barcelona and Madrid had changed. Its strong reliance on home ownership was substituted by a rent-oriented model.
We are fascinated by Haacke’s pulsion to draw something that is largely invisible, something that only exists in records but influences the daily lives of thousands of people. Inspired in his exercise, we present the materials of a research with which we wish to draw an equally invisible social system that has developed in the past decade in Barcelona. This social system embodies a new structure of property that privileges rent over home ownership. One of its prime exponents is Blackstone, an investment fund that, in a few years, has acquired thousands of properties in the city. Rather than a full drawing, what we present here is a sketch with materials that we have compiled in public records, specialized publications, financial reports and activist databases. It is still unclear to us if it is at all possible to draw such an institution, starting with the fact that the locality of a city, despite being a unity of experience for those that inhabit it, is hardly representative for this kind of network.
Researchers: Xavier Nueno and Julia Nueno