This photograph by Asunción Molinos Gordo shows an abandoned bench in an open field. The green bench, worn and rusted by the passage of time, bears the name of a long-disappeared Spanish financial institution, the Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad del Círculo Católico de Obreros de Burgos [Catholic Workers' Circle of Burgos Savings Bank and Pawnbrokers]. (Banco, the piece's Spanish title, can mean both 'bank' and 'bench') The inscription, in which the full name of the institution is shortened for advertising purposes to 'Caja Ahorros Círculo Católico', is also a sign of belonging; one of the many activities indirectly sponsored by the bank becomes that of providing rest to weary passers-by. Today, not only are we increasingly conscious of the monetising potential of rest and leisure, which has become part of the service economy, but the money we put away, supposedly to enjoy in our life outside work, has passed into the hands of private or privatised speculators. Far from being immaterial, the service economy is still heavily dependent on labour, industrial production and the infrastructures it enables and requires. An abandoned bench, like many other elements of the urban environment, is not only a product of financial capital, but one of the many objects derived from the iron industry. The artisanal nature of the financial system, within which poverty and hunger are not anomalies of hyperabundance, but congenital traits, formed one of the lines of research of Asunción Molinos Gordo's 2014 solo exhibition 'Hambre, un objeto hecho por el hombre' [Hunger, a Man-Made Object] of which this photograph was part, along with many other pieces designed as economic objects capable of condensing multiple relationships and situations in which accumulation produces scarcity, and vice versa.

Although savings banks and regular banks appear to offer the same banking services, they are organisationally and ethically different. While the former emerged as limited companies with a social and foundational purpose, banks are profit-driven corporations. The severe economic and social crisis that hit Spain in 2008 as a result of the property bubble and the global financial crisis, caused many of the country's savings banks to go out of business or be taken over by private institutions. The Caja de Ahorros Círculo Católico is now a foundation, whose primary function is to maintain and disseminate the institution's assets. The enormous capital investments made by financial institutions in questionable financial products, later referred to as 'toxic assets', caused the collapse of the Spanish banking system and the Spanish economy. The government decided to bail out private companies with public capital to save the banking system from going under, leading to massive public borrowing. In order to pay the resulting debts, the Spanish state instituted cutbacks in social, health and educational spending. Sky-rocketing unemployment and the growing normalisation of political corruption within the system were accompanied by a progressive fall in household incomes, with a consequent increase in poverty, evictions and difficulty in affording food. In 2014, 22.5% of the population were at risk of poverty — in other words, 11 million people out of a population of 46 million were living below the poverty line. Spain had the second-highest rate of child poverty in the European Union. In Austerity, another of the pieces in the Hunger, a Man-Made Object exhibition, Asunción Molinos Gordo showed the food banks, in which the supposed solidarity of the banking institutions — following the bail-out by the state — is shown to be sustained by the unpaid work of volunteers who distribute food to those most in need.

The property bubble, together with speculation and urban corruption, caused housing prices to increase by 180%, in a country where state policies positively encourage home ownership and the consequent mortgage indebtedness. As it became increasingly impossible for many individuals and families to continue paying off their mortgages, financial institutions began to push for foreclosures on a mass scale, driving people out of their homes. At the same time, Spain is a country that has millions of empty homes, as a result of excess house-building — a supposed sign of development — and the unaffordable prices imposed by the market. The abandonment of many thousands of half-built homes, buildings and housing developments as a result of the crisis, after years of property speculation and euphoria, generated a host of urban wastelands across Spain. In Manifesto of the Third Landscape, Gilles Clément coins a term for these residual spaces that remain outside urban planning, where urban and financial exploitation gives way to abandonment and a kind of self-management of space. However, the 'Third Space' tends to refer to habitats that are produced by the relinquishment of a place by planned human action; it is also an undefined space that expands due to the existence of abandoned urban elements in different environments, such as the bench featured in his image by Asunción Molinos Gordo.

Sonia Fernández Pan