(Video) Meet Lucia, Meet Raúl

Today I’d like to introduce you to two of our first candidates for The 51percent Diaries series: Lucia and Raúl.  Just to give you a quick reminder, the 51Percent Diaries is a documentary series that we’re making together with volunteers who fall into the category of being both young and unemployed here in Barcelona.  To start off, we’re doing 5 videos of 5 minutes each.  Each video will be a profile of one participant with a personal and particular unemployment story to tell, produced and realized together with them.  The project will participate at the Screen of Barcelona Festival (a sub-section of LOOP) in mid-May.  We’ll give you more information about this event when the time approaches and hope you’ll be able join us there.

The first phase of the 51percent Diaries project, which Lucia and Raúl have just completed, was to do a week of self-documentation that captures their lives in their current situation.  They were given a short brief and some springboard ideas and sent off to document this in any combination of ways they liked: writing, filming, voice recording, drawing, animation… A week later, both returned with some excellent material… extensive photos, videos and journals that are both very personal yet also reflective of the general situation; that give an insight into their own daily lives and give a unique angle to issues that millions of young people are facing in Spain today… Now we’re structuring their gathered material into a script and will be filming the remaining footage needed to make their stories beautiful and coherent videos that will be reflective of their individual voices and visions… I’m already very excited about the results.

A third participant, Andrea, is currently in the self-documentation phase of the project, and right now we’re on the lookout for two more participants.  Maybe you can help out and recommend this to someone who you think might enjoy taking part? To get some variety, a profile that would be desirable would be: someone who is about to emigrate, someone who comes from a scientific or engineering background rather than an arts/humanities field, someone who recently had to move back in with their parents, young unemployed parents or a young, unemployed person with an entrepreneurial spirit…  If you know of anyone with this profile who might be interested get in touch.  Otherwise, please help us spread the word.  Or if you’d like to participate yourself, please e-mail us at 51percentBCN@gmail.com. -LS

Lucia, 27 years old

I feel like I’m living in a very chaotic historical moment, where the only words that count are markets, finance, money and all their synonyms. I feel very angry about all the injustice. We’re halfway through the year, I feel at a standstill, as if time isn’t moving forward. I’m waiting for a call about a job; a beautiful project about peace. It’s a job a for few months only, nothing permanent, but for me that means being able to recover energies and to stop sending CVs.” 

“Siento vivir en un momento historico muy caótico, a donde las únicas palabras que cuentan son mercados, finanzas, dinero y todos sus sinónimos. Siento mucha rabia para las injusticias. Ya estamos a mitad del año, me siento parada, como si el tiempo no avanzara. Estoy esperando que me llamen de un trabajo, un proyecto guapísimo sobre la paz. Es un trabajo de unos meses nada de fijo, pero para mi significa poder recuperar energías y parar de enviar curriculum.”

Raúl, 25 years old

“I think people my age who have a ‘regular’ legal status and are unemployed is because they don’t want to work in something they don’t like or they just do not want to work. I know enough people working illegally to be able to say that it’s a lie that there is no work and that it’s perhaps just a lack of imagination or a lack of will.”

Creo que las demás personas de mi edad en estado “regular” que no tienen trabajo es porque no quieren trabajar en algo que no les gusta, o porque simplemente no quieren trabajar. Conozco mucha gente trabajando sin papeles como para decir que es mentira de que no hay trabajo, y que eso tal vez es solo una cuestión falta de imaginación o de voluntad.