work in progress

2008-12-02T12:45:00.001-08:00

Last summer we lived together in a shared apartment in the centre of Barcelona. We were between 4 and five people living there most of the time, and some of them moved away during the time we stayed there. The apartment was already furnished and had a lot of the belongings of its first owner, a lady of advanced age. We didn't use or didn't want to use a lot of her stuff, so we stored them in the smallest room of the apartment. In September the contract ended and the owner didn't want to renew it, so the estate agency hired by her forced us to return all the objects and furniture in the same place as it was once described in the inventory of the flat, otherwise they wouldn´t return the deposit we paid. The original contract started in 2001 and was renewed five years later by one of us. None of us lived there when the first contract started, so we started to reconstruct the house in its original setting by interpreting the inventory list we got.

While we got involved in this situation, we got really fascinated by the inventory list. The estate agency had described every single piece that was in the house: bottles of liquor (half full), napkins, up to an image of the “actual” pope. The inventory sometimes even describe the exact places where the objects should be found, like “ the air conditioner remote control is on top of …” and on the other hand we could notice that the person who wrote it once in a while got tired of describing because he rushed through it. Before we left the house, we decided to film it.

Finally they told us that they wouldn´t return our deposit, because two chairs were broken.

Inventario piso C/Banys Nous 15 3º2ª, Barcelona

work in progress