The dignity we miss. Joaquín Fernández Cacho

It was minutes before eight o'clock in the morning. I was walking somewhat distracted towards my work, when behind the windows of a bank teller I saw a young black man kneeling on the floor. He had gathered his meager belongings. With his hand he was cleaning the floor from the crumbs of a frugal breakfast and the dirt of his night shelter. With his hollow hand he swept the floor slowly, carefully and painstakingly. This is how I had seen as a child that many men and women, blackened by the sun, picked up the last grains from the heap after a hard day's threshing. In the management of that young man, probably an undocumented immigrant (I refuse to describe him as illegal), there was and there is more dignity than in all the managers and board members of all the banks, banks and companies -public and private- that have been cleaned to the point of ruin and bankruptcy through ignorance, lack of professionalism or greed. This is not a fictional story.

It happened this way in Zaragoza this October 31. I saw it.

(Letters to the Editor, Diario El País, November 4, 2014)

Editor's note. Tono Areán

Dear reader, almost from the very beginning of this experiment full of surprises that Dosparedesy1puente has become, Alicia Chillida spoke to me about the relevance, almost necessary she told me enthusiastically, of making known the work of a "homeless" artist from Barcelona's Born neighborhood by the name of Housseinou Gasama. Alicia had collected a considerable amount of the artist's work and proposed to show it on these walls.

All the works exhibited here are accompanied by a book. I would say that the book is the substance, what will remain, and what is exhibited is the circumstance, the ephemeral. But one and the other are interdependent and complementary reading.

I did not want this book to become a mere catalog of the pieces exhibited in the space, something illustrative that would serve as a reminder of the exhibition. Its pages seemed, however, a good support to tell, in the weakest possible way, how the artist was seen. Trying to explain who made those little boards full of architecture and color and under what conditions he carried out his work.

Alicia knew other "collectors" of Housseinou's work so we contacted them to try to gather information that could give us an idea of the artist and his work. Being written, this information would give the book a "literary" substratum, which we considered appropriate: the artist's track has been lost and everything written oozes admiration, affection and some nostalgia.

The book begins with a text by Alicia that reflects, through Housseinou Gasama and his work, on ways of inhabiting, the precariousness of today's world and the injustices it generates. It gives an account of the artist's work, his situation and temporal scope, and frames the motives and intentions of the project.

Below is the model letter that was sent to collectors in the fall of 2016, along with their responses. This forms the testimonial "bulk" of the book, which ends with a catalog (the photos are by Ferran Freixa) of what is exhibited in the space (Alicia Chillida's collection with a gift from Daniela Tilkin) and some furtive snapshots, which reveal the artist and his place of production. To close, once again the written word: a brief epilogue by the person who has been the driving force behind what is shown here.

Good reading, health and good luck.

L'artista del barri. Alicia Chillida

If each era is capable of generating a way of inhabiting, an architecture that responds to the social need of the moment, this work would be today a paradigm of the precariousness that invades us. Housseinou draws, above all, that which he lacks and seems to wish to invoke: the essential domestic sphere broken down in an obsessive grammar. He reproduces houses, beds, tables, chairs, balconies or doors... in infinite variations, with a very personal sense of geometry resulting in an altered perspective. The desire to inhabit and live with dignity is the cry of these paradoxical, impossible figures, which follow cycles and metamorphoses towards an infinite repetition of the motif.

Housseinou Gassama does not hesitate to say that her mother is from Senegal. Today his home is the street and his work is extraordinary. He has been living in Barcelona for at least three years -the period of the works reproduced in this exhibition-. He uses as a base a thin wooden board - leftovers from wine boxes supplied by a store in the Santa Maria del Mar neighborhood - and the most basic utensils: ruler, bevel and colored pencil, often adding at the end a brass plate engraved with the number 4, as well as his signature with Arabic characters on the back. The vanishing point of his axonometric perspectives seems to be projected onto the physical reality of his daily life. Thus, the recessing of the gate of an empty lot, that urban "infraleve" in Caputxes street, serves as his "home" and "studio".

With the help of a large suitcase/storage room, he occasionally moves from place to place, either to Via Laietana, in search of greater demand, or to one of the parallel streets, where he obtains more intimacy, where he takes refuge during the summer, to avoid the excessive heat. Adapted to the idiosyncrasies of the city, the feina is for him a very serious thing. Invariably, whatever the season of the year or his changing mood, we see him squatting, often listening to music with headphones, and always surrounded by his images. Some passers-by observe him at his daily work, which he carries out with great concentration, interrupted by the occasional sale of a piece.

There is no credit! wields radical, when even a regular customer tries to buy a work and has no cash. Housseinou lives to work and subsist on what he gets in exchange for his sales. On one occasion he was offered to exhibit his work in a gallery in the city, but he has his own laws, he did not show the slightest interest, since he has no ambition beyond the exchange he establishes with his clients.

We citizens are witnesses to the situation of a large number of African immigrants who, like Housseinou, have been arriving uninterruptedly to the Spanish coasts for more than twenty years; and we are witnessing both the inability of government bodies and their security forces to manage these stories and their protagonists, as well as some gestures of solidarity from civil society.

For almost five years now, no one in Barcelona has seen Housseinou again. Habi, her friend from the neighboring restaurant, tells us that she went to live in Almeria, with an uncle of hers. Lately, the artist had intervened his meager living space with pink and yellow paint; pasted on the wall were a hut with a bird and also postcards of landscapes, cities, luxury cars, motorcycles... and keys, lots of keys. Housseinou had projected his desire on those walls and suddenly, his habitat had been tinged with a comfort as imaginary as it was necessary.

(Excerpts from the catalog, ed. Dosparedesy1puente Ediciones, Madrid, 2017).