“Dislocations” illustrates how post-socialist politics resulted in the dispossession from their housing rights of the impoverished people from Cluj-Napoca, including ethnic Roma. Before 1990 they belonged to working class and in the context of the formation of capitalism in Romania were affected by a process of precarization both in the world of labor and housing. Ionica, Leontina, Babi, Sandu, Ligia, Katalin and Gelu help us mapping how their successive dislocations happened in time and space between 1996-2016 in the city of Cluj, ending into their settlement on Cantonului street without number. Embodied in their personal histories, the national politics of housing marked by privatization, commodification, financialization and the dramatic reduction of the social housing stock was re-enforced by the local policies of allocating public housing. As a result of the latter the municipality selected the categories of people envisioned to deserve living
in the city while pushing impoverished ethnic Roma into housing conditions characterized by insecurity and severe material deprivation. The area where they are tolerated till the land will not gain real estate value is part of Pata Rat, a territory nearby the city’s landfill that nowadays hosts approximately 1500 persons subjected to ghettoization. The film was produced within the Social housing NOW! campaign of Foundation Desire in the summer of 2016 (desire-ro.eu/?page_id=2219). It is an instruments of raising awareness about the suffering of people evicted for several times during their lifetime and about the accountability of public administration in what regards their dispossession from their right to adequate housing. The campaign was supported by the Human Rights Initiative program of the Open Society Foundations.
