SFRATTO / EVICTION
Laura Partin, in collaboration with Linda Greta Zsiga
This series of drawings approaches the issue of Roma persons evicted from their rented homes in Romania from 2010 until 2020. Their main sources of inspiration were photo- and video journalism, as well as articles documenting these cases. They unveil the situation of persons forced by the circumstances to live on the street or in very precarious homes and the social exclusion and vulnerability that implies, after their eviction from social housing where they had lived for more than 30 years.
The artistic project aims at challenging some stereotypes regarding Roma people and raising awareness by attracting the interest of public opinion on the marginalization in which some Roma persons find themselves in current social contexts, in Romania as well as in other countries.
One of the documented situations is the one of 76 families (about 300 persons) who had lived next to the landfill site in Pata Rât in Cluj-Napoca from 2010 until 2016, after their eviction from Coastei Street. The municipality in Cluj had created prefabricated buildings in Pata Rât for evicted families, constrained by the circumstances to live in an unhealthy environment, in spaces of restricted dimensions, way too tight for numerous families, of sometimes more than 15 members. In 2017, an assembly of associations managed to transfer 35 families from Pata Rât back into apartments in the urban area of Cluj, thanks to external funds.
A second case is the one of the families evicted from the Vulturilor street in Bucharest, who lived in tents in front of their ex-homes for several months, including the winter time – a form of protesting the injustice and the lack of protection from the authorities who ignored their requests of social housing. The families in question had the right to social housing thanks to their very low incomes and their newly evicted status, from the point when the 25 houses the 100 persons were living in were returned to their initial owners through retrocession.
When the eviction happened, these families were legally living in the buildings, by paying a very low rent to the municipality. These 25 apartments were part of properties confiscated during the communist regime and given back to their legitimate owners after the fall of communism after very long trials, in 2014. In lack of social housing infrastructure, as in many cases in Romania, the local authorities in Bucharest had temporarily granted these nationalized and abandoned buildings to Roma families.
