Well, I was surprised because I saw in a kitchen, through a huge window
overlooking the garden,
an elderly couple that were, excuse me, butt naked.
I was just walking around and I thought:
'What the hell is this!?'
I would venture to say that every Spanish person has had a similar experience
when visiting some northern European countries for the first time.
I vividly remember mine,
flushing red with embarrassment at the sight of families having dinner.
Some years after, I moved to Norway and Iceland
and I started taking pride in keeping all my blinds open all the time, just like them.
It's exhibitionism.
They let others see all that's happening in their homes.
I guess it also happens because people don't peek
but we find it so curious...
Cue in, the blinds.
Depending on your country of origin,
you’ll picture a different device when you hear this word.
If you’re from Spain and other southern European countries
like Portugal, Italy, and France, you’re thinking of this.
And I’m particularly obsessed with my neighbours’.
The broken ones, these ones that have never been used...
But if you are born in the rest of Europe, chances are you’re not thinking of the same thing,
maybe you haven’t even used one of them before.
And then I think one day we were like,
'What’s this little thing on the wall here?'
It's like...
I don't know...
It’s like a belt and then you, like, pull it
and all of a sudden it came down
but it made such a noise it was like [loud noise], it was crazy.
It was at least two years before we realised definitely.
But why, what is so special about these blinds?
And why do we use them so much?
Madrid, the capital of Spain,
has an average of 2,700 sun hours per year, and even more further south.
In turn, winters can be quite cold,
so houses in the Middle Ages had to be very well insulated.
This meant thick walls, small windows and darkness in the house.
On top of that,
glass wouldn’t be mass-produced cheaply until the 15th Century.
Because from the Renaissance onwards,
people want to display their social and cultural progress, etc.
And this is shown to the outside.
From that moment, windows facing the outside need glass,
and that glass does not protect you from the sun,
this is why the blinds came.
At the beginning, they were just pieces of hard fabric
placed on the balconies to protect from the heat.
Naturally then other techniques appeared consisting of small boards that could be rolled up.
In 1923, the first blind patent can be found here in the municipality of Sax.
It should have been called 'Sajeña', but to make the name more commercial,
it was called 'Alicantina' or 'Levantina'
It is made of a series of wooden slats joined with staples until they form the blind.
Also in Sax, we have one of the first patents of an interior shutter with an embedded box.
Behold the renowned 'Persiana'.
It consists of a series of PVC slats mounted in a chain
that are rolled up in a box which is inset in the façade of the building.
The functions of a rolling shutter are
to regulate the passage of light,
to protect from severe weather both cold and warmth,
to protect the intimacy of the house,
and it gives people peace of mind
that people won't break into your home through the window opening.
Windows are what architects call a 'thermal bridge',
which is an area of the building that conducts heat more easily than the others.
So, blinds are devised to cover those weak points to isolate houses.
There's a problem though.
Ultimately, the box is an element that breaks [the building envelope]
and a very negative spot in the house.
One of the worst of the façade
through which cold sneaks in, moisture can seep in...
You are generating a problem to solve the same problem...
Why are we doing it then?
Why are we covering almost every possible window of our buildings with blinds?
Intimacy.
That’s the key word.
Because in Spain, blinds let us modulate the temperature of the house during the day,
but it is when the sun goes down, that their role becomes really interesting to me.
I had this feud with my family...
They kept lowering the shutters
and I kept raising them.
I couldn't understand!
Well, and my grandmother... Don't get me started!
5 o'clock in the afternoon, it's still light outside and you are sitting on the sofa,
and she comes in and closes all the shutters.
Completely closed!
So that 'they' don't know whatever we're doing at home.
'What do they need to see?' my grandma always says.
'What do they want to see?'.
I get even claustrophobic with shutters,
and I don't understand them.
At my parent's place, everything is sealed...
And I wonder, 'But why? Let the light come in'.
The noise that it makes is quite powerful.
You hear in the evening all the shutters going down and you are like,
'End of the day, that’s it, no more,
I don’t want any more noise to enter into this flat
or light. You're like, goodbye everybody'.
So where does this come from?
One of the theories points to Arab culture.
For centuries, the majority of the Iberian Peninsula
was a part of the Islamic empire called Al-Andalus.
This left a huge influence in the posterior Christian kingdoms
that formed what we nowadays call Spain.
The traditional Al-Andalus house was rather austere on the outside.
Tall and closed walls didn’t reveal the cosiness of its interior.
Windows were often covered in lattices protruding from the walls
to watch the street without being seen.
We have inherited our houses from the Latin culture, haven't we?
From the Roman domus that were directed towards the inner courtyard,
and the Arab culture that also orients the house towards the inside.
There's a very strong protective perimeter and life was oriented inwards.
But it seems to me it's a 'bad' remnant because nobody lives in those houses anymore.
It seems that this discretion and wariness of others has stayed with us
and seeped into our Catholic rooted culture.
Our society comes from a dictatorship,
in which your life was in danger
if you didn't comply with the dictates of the moment.
In a way, it marked us. You take care of appearances so that the neighbour doesn’t denounce you,
and we have dragged this on.
I believe it's a consequence of where we are coming from.
From a dictatorship, from a Christian dictatorship.
Catholic ethics implies a concern for 'what the others will think',
for demonstrating an irreproachable conduct in accordance with what is socially expected from you.
And blinds disconnect your home from the outside.
In Catholic societies, we have had a remedy which is the confession.
To confess is to show in private and in secret my own mistakes called 'my sins'.
But that remains in a secret well, it won’t be shared to anyone.
In Protestant communities there is no such thing.
Protestants have a sort of communal confession.
Therefore, it doesn't seem that they want to hide what they do
because they can discuss it in public.
And hence they don't need to conceal their inner life because they have nothing to hide.
For me, they can look.
I don't care, you know?
I have nothing to hide.
You know, I wake up and on the other side of the street, I see my neighbour.
'Hi neighbour, I'm awake!'
And then we do like this with the thumbs.
And to have your window open, for me, it is 'gezellig'.
Because you see life and they can see me and it's good.
'Gezellig' is...
for starters, 'cosy', but it also defines a space where you feel comfortable.
People can be 'gezellig', a party can be 'gezellig'.
Gezelligheid is a Dutch word which, depending on the context,
can be translated as 'conviviality', 'cosiness', 'fun'.
It is often used to describe a social and relaxed situation.
Spanish has the words for cosiness and fun,
but I don’t think there’s a word that joins those concepts
with conviviality to explain a social situation.
Language gives us a frame to think into,
and untranslatable words remind us that even in this globalised world,
there are concepts, gestures and ways of living ingrained in other cultures
that might take us some work to understand.
A month of obsessively documenting my neighbours’ blinds went by
when one morning my girlfriend warned me.
Hey, you won’t believe it, they just fixed the blinds!
I began to record and realised that, for the first time,
I could see into their home and they could see into ours.
Suddenly, I felt the same embarrassment I had felt as a young adult
roaming the streets of Amsterdam.
I had been judging my neighbours
for being shut down but I hadn’t thought of them
having to see a random guy pointing a camera at them every day.
It suddenly dawned on me that giving away my privacy
didn’t mean I could ask for others’ privacy in return.