2020 Recht auf Wohnen (AT)

Recht auf Wohnen is a documentary video installation about contemporary urban living, the right to housing and the hidden financial entaglements of the urban housing market. The project deals with the privatization of our cities and the resulting gentrification processes, that more and more divide cities along monetary fault lines and class differences.

Synopsis

The inhabitants of the house at Webergasse 28, at a central location in Basel‘s vibrating Kleinbasel district, have to move out. All tenants have seen their contracts cancelled so that the house can be redeveloped, the flats reduced in size but multiplied and the rent tripled. On a first screen, two tenants tell that story in interviews: Melanie, who lived there for nine years in a shared flat, and Gaby, who spent 35 years in the house, first with her partner and then with a growing family. After Basel‘s electorate voted for stronger tenant protection in June 2019, the house is one of many that are subject to mass terminations of rental contracts before the referendums are put into law.

Parallel to that, on a second screen, I investigate who is behind this transformation, locating the different legal entities that own the house, manage it, or own the owning legal entity. It is a complex system of subentities and deputies that makes it difficult to pin down any one party responsible. During my investigation I finally arrive at a pension fund called „Profond“ in Zurich. In their annual report I come across something unusual, an unexpected image amidst the bright and smiling corporate dreariness. Two photos of a refugee camp in Barsalogho in Burkina Faso where Doctors without Borders organises medical treatment and potable water. It appears that all the employees of Doctors without Borders are insured at the very pension funds that in Basel contributes to gentrification and the destruction of a healthy and diverse urban demography.

A third screen shows the deliberations of Basel‘s city parliament for introducing legislation for stronger tenant protection. Approximately one year after Basel‘s citizens introduced a right to housing into Basel‘s constitution by referendum, this is the long awaited legislation following the popular vote. By watching the members of the parliament go through the law paragraph by paragraph to vote on wordings, small changes and adaptions, this screen becomes a stark contrast to the individual stories in the first screen. In the legislation, that in the end shall offer protection to each and every single tenant, there is no room for individual histories as everything has to be generalized. Slowly, one manages to discern divisions in the parliament between those who try to make a stronger regulation and those who try, in ever so tiny steps, to dilute it.

The screens are surrounded by an octagonal space that works as the screen for a continuous 360°-projection that shows a slow travelling through the Felix Platter-Spital in Basel. The empty hospital is being transformed into new living space at the same time that the tenants in Webergasse have to move out. But rather than maximising profit the cooperative responsible for the conversion aims to create sustainable and affordable living space for people of all sections of the population and all age groups while not driving out other people in the process. The projection thus serves as an encompassing visual and spatial limitation that contains the installation to its own space but also offers a positive and already existing alternative to the current prevailing strategies of urban development.

Artist's Statement

In Switzerland, less than 40 % of households own the apartment or house they live in. This puts the majority of people in a precarious situation where they not only pay an enormous amount of money throughout the course of their lives only to have nothing of it left once they move out. It also puts them all only three months away from homelessness should one loose their job or encounter other hardships. Yet, it still seems so complete and utterly normal and accepted to pay rent throughout one‘s whole life. This is complicated further by speculation with living space in form of real estate, especially by pension funds, which use the money of the insured to speculate with land prices and urban real estate thus driving gentrification and rents of their own beneficiaries. Recht auf Wohnen aims to motivate spectators to not take that situation for granted but to think about how we can organize urban life and urban living for the benefit of all people that live in a city. Lest it be driven by entities that do not primarily care for the well-being of the city and its inhabitants.

The work encourages viewers to think about their own living situation and aims to introduce tools for research and resistance to affected persons. There are plenty of alternatives to organising our current housing market and ultimately our living together as a community. While this work does not necessarily root for one, it aims to make clear that the current situation is neither natural nor is it without alternative—a change is possible.