Event overview
with Maka Suarez, National Education University, Ecuador. Part of 'Curating Development' - Autumn Term Seminar Series 2017
In 2013 Spain’s largest movement for the right to housing, the PAH, started a series of direct actions called 'escraches', a form of public shaming of elected officials. This practice is a form of protest that emerged in the context of Latin America's structural adjustment politics, which need to be understood through a critical lens of development discourses. In my investigation I inquire how 'escrache' travels from Latin America to Europe as a counter hegemonic narrative at a time when austerity and welfare cuts in Europe are on the rise. What I am mainly interested in exploring is the way in which not only economic and political austerity politics is reproduced in Spain following the great recession of 2008, but also how different forms of protest are adopted from the Latin American context and used in novel forms of resistance in Europe. My paper analyses how escraches may be understood as a curatorial practice oriented to creatively transform street politics into a space for questioning predatory forms of indebtedness through various ‘activist objects’. I’m interested in how the material culture of political activism travelled from Argentina to Spain’s street politics in the aftermath of the housing bubble. These new modes of making politics helped the PAH think through and advocate their campaign for a citizen led change of Spain’s mortgage law. By studying escraches in the context of Spain’s housing crisis, I am particularly interested in seeing how the narrative of indebtedness and failure that many migrants faced following mortgage default and foreclosure can be contested by these political practices. In doing so seemingly ordinary objects have the potential to critically and creatively transform the morality of debt and progress sponsored by neoliberal values by collectively turning the tables on the financial system and providing new avenues to fight indebtedness and access housing.
About the Speaker
Maka Suarez received her PhD in anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London this year and she has been an activist with the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, the PAH, in Barcelona for six years. She conducted fieldwork there for two years working with Ecuadorian migrants who were losing their homes after Spain’s housing bubble burst. Ecuadorian migrants became housing activists in order to get rid of their debts and to secure appropriate housing for them and their families. Her ethnography investigates how class relations intersect with debt and migration as well as with labor, gender, and generational relations. She continues to explore the contradictions faced by people who migrate to find a better life but constantly find themselves under-employed, over-indebted, and struggling to become part of an ever-changing global middle class.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Oct 2017 | 3:00pm - 5:00pm |
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