Against the Energy Shortage
In the video, Enginyeria Sense Fronteres and the Alliance against Energy Poverty explain why they brought the campaign to the Besòs neighbourhood, where more than 10 % of families struggle to pay for water, electricity and gas, and why it stays largely invisible. The artist explains the Monopoly wordplay he painted on the wall.
Video transcript (translated from Catalan)3 min 42 s
Today I am painting a mural against energy poverty for ESF and the APE, two organisations that help people who can't make it to the end of the month to pay their bills: they give them a grant so they have the basic rights to water, electricity and gas.
Enginyeria Sense Fronteres is a development NGO that from the start committed to securing human rights for the whole population. And although we began with projects in the global South, we soon saw that the problems we were tackling there had a counterpart here at home. In fact, our work here in the North, through policy advocacy, has been central to the organisation for many years now.
The Alliance against Energy Poverty is a social movement fighting to defend universal access to basic services — that is, for everyone to have access to water, electricity and gas. Basically what we do is put pressure on government and on the utility companies currently running these basic services. We also run collective advice sessions for families going without water, electricity and gas, so they lose the fear of explaining their situation and, above all, so they learn what their rights are and how to defend them before the authorities and those companies.
El Besòs is a neighbourhood, an outskirt of Barcelona, where all the families who migrated within Spain came to work —my own grandparents, and most people's grandparents here—. It is a badly run-down neighbourhood and it had a serious problem both of energy poverty and of unemployment, among young people and among the elderly. People now talk about more than 10 % of the population being in this situation, that is, struggling to meet their bills. And it is something that stays largely out of sight.
So with a street action like this one, with graffiti, with art in the street, we also wanted to reach the public so they realise this is a situation a great many people are in, that is often embarrassing to talk about, and that is far more common than we think.
Within a policy campaign where a big part of the work is getting our message out, I think public participation and showing what we do in the widest possible range of ways matters. And an artistic statement like the one we are making today is an alternative way of carrying our message, one that perhaps wouldn't feel at home in other settings or other contexts. And you have to see that protest doesn't have to be separate from building community and from all of us having a good time.
What I am painting is the game of Monopoly, which stands for the wordplay between the monopoly held by the three big energy companies and the game itself. The Monopoly man would be the owner or the capitalist, who doesn't give a single social grant to people who can't keep up with their water, electricity and gas bills.
Video transcript, edited for reading: repetitions and verbal fillers have been removed, the text has been punctuated and speakers are identified.
Barcelona
4.7.2016
The Energy Shortage is a reality that afects more than a 17% of the Spanish population. In response to this unbalanced scenario, the artist Kamil Escruela performed a mural with a social claim.
