The bank’s house
The bank’s house – 2014
Installation stickers, Barcelona
The bursting of the housing bubble and the onset of the financial and real estate crisis have resulted, in Spain, in the biggest proliferation of foreclosures and evictions than any Western European countries. Spanish banks found themselves in the midst of a deep crisis and many of them were bailed out by the ECB between 2008 and 2012.
In this context, the SAREB was created following the guidelines of the ECB. These are, firstly, to have an entity, a “bad bank”, with the capacity to receive financial aid and, secondly, to transfer the real estate assets of the institutions in difficulty to this company. All of this makes it possible to reduce their risks and to liquidate in an orderly manner the ‘toxic’ assets accumulated as a result of their bad credit decisions. These assets include the different products linked to the real estate sector, basically debt to developers that are difficult to collect, land (in some cases already urbanized), vacant housing developments (in some cases not yet completed) and homes acquired through foreclosure.
One of these banks used a child’s drawing of a house to promote the availability of its real estate portfolio. To reply to this advertising message, first I have selected a series of protest messages from associations against evictions and graffiti that were found in the streets at that time. Then I produced a stickers kit, which was free and open to use for everybody to change the semantic meaning of bank’s message.
