Photographer Jordi Baron, through his family profession as an antique dealer, has a unique and privileged access to a very private world: he has access to the interior of many homes in Barcelona.

When the author arrives at these flats, the inhabitants have recently died, the relatives have divided part of the inheritance, and it is then when they want to sell all the rest that is left in the house. Other times, if there are family disagreements or if they are well-to-do families, the flats can remain closed for a long time, sometimes for years, with all the memory inside, but that does not mean that they are abandoned, but closed, dormant, until the day comes when the owners decide to sell everything.

Jordi Baron’s photographs deal with the whole process of emptying flats and houses, mainly located in the Eixample and the old quarter of Barcelona, where their heirs have been selling everything: first the contents and then the continent.

Each of these flats, many of which were huge, were then divided into three or four flats in order to be used, in most cases, for tourist rentals. It is thus the photo-finish of a bourgeois memory that has lasted some 120 years, and the birth of a new phenomenon that many cities are suffering from: Gentrification. An unstoppable drama that is driving out residents because of rising house prices.

The author, who works as an interior archaeologist, has been photographically documenting all these flats in the city of Barcelona for some 20 years with the aim of rescuing them moments before their disappearance. Ephemeral and often desolate landscapes, personal memories on the ground, clothes, books, documents… and it is in these moments of change, of movement, that these photographs are taken. Without much time, with natural light, while the workers and transporters are busy dismantling beds, lamps, dragging and packing furniture that surely had not been moved from its place for more than 80 years.