Living in psychic ellipses … mutual aid amongst evictees in central Bucharest

Abstract

Housing evictions are understudied from a psychogeographic perspective. With this paper, we use Lauren Berlant’s idea of living in ellipses and Donald W. Winnicott’s object relations theory of potential spaces to help understand the pushing out, dissociations, leaps and abridgements that categorize housing evictions. There is something impulsive, capricious and fickle about the idiosyncratic and inconsistent violence of evictions. We argue that there is a generative potential for transformation and change through mutual aid, which facilitates Berlant’s idea of falling apart without ceasing to exist. With this paper, we highlight what displacement does–its affects–amongst Roma in central Bucharest using an elliptical approach. We argue that although the consequences of evictions are appalling and horrific, there are often opportunities for new associations through mutual aid.