Parador Retiro

The shelter is a warehouse divided into two by a partition of metal cupboards. On one side, the dormitory, and on the other, a cafeteria where the residents sit around talking or watching television. The space is panoptical, the inner transparency contrasting with the windowless outer brick wall of the building, This absence of communication between the inside and outside is certainly intended to protect the intimacy of the residents, homeless people, drug addicts, ex-prisoners, even though this intimacy is refused them on the inside. More to the point, it hides from society an unbearable concentration of hopeless poverty and distress. Besides, why go outside when the despair is the same, though a little more dispersed? (Yann Lardeau)