Recycling in the streets of Barcelona

In the early evening, when the shops and offices are closing and people are returning home, highly unusual para-architectural situations occur in the street. Barcelona has one day a week for throwing out old furniture and unwanted objects, between 8 and 9 pm.

The post-it HOMEstreetHOME phenomenon occurs with the objects and rubbish left on the city’s pavements between the time when people get rid of their furniture and the time when the municipal refuse collection service picks it up. Every night, the city is decorated like a home: tables, chairs, toys, plants, books … old items of furniture fill the street with tenderness. The scenography of intimate memory comes out onto the public thoroughfare and the pavement becomes the reverse of the shop window: everything is anonymous, ephemeral and free.

The furniture dumped in the street resembles the stage sets of an old theatre where the actors are night-time pedestrians: the homeless, rag and bone men, squatters, tourists, students, immigrants... During the documentation period we saw that if we arranged the furniture found in the street according to the same function it appeared to have had in the home, these scenographies were quickly accepted and inhabited. In this way, the border separating private and public space was erased, and a place of comfort established in the street, where the users could feel “at home”.