Occupations & Properties

A Center, Yes, but What Kind of Social?

2012-02-02T15:22:00.000-08:00

I've been worried about Tabacalera for a while now. That's the giant former royal tobacco factory that has become the biggest social center in Madrid, and probably all Spain. It was never an okupa, or occupied, squatted space, but Tabacalera is run in much the same way as many of the larger occupied social centers – CSOA's, or self-organized occupied social centers – with self-regulating workshops and activities, an assembly, and various committees to take care of the necessary tasks of running a big building.
Tabacalera however has an internal conflict for a while now, and it does not seem to be getting very much better. The center was recently closed for cleaning and repairs. The centerpiece of the weekend was a “day of reflection,” when new guidelines for managing the place were presented by the committees which had drafted them. One of the ateliers, the Templo Afro, was not happy. Their projects have been much curtailed, disciplined and interfered with by the management. I talked with a very aggrieved Templo African during the day of reflection, and shortly afterwards received a lengthy bill of particulars outlining just how the group felt they had been mistreated.
This notion of a despotic management mystifies me, since Tabacalera, like all social centers, is committed to horizontality. But it is taken as an evident fact by Templo Afro partisans. The place is run by a junta. Tabacalera of course has a contract with the state which spells out many obligations that the management – however “they” might feel about things – must discharge. There have been complaints about the behavior of Templo Afro party-goers... I know I don't have the whole story even by half.
The relation of the social centers – the crown jewels of the European political squatting movement – and the oppressed immigrant communities of the cities in which they are found is very important. These places are critical informal integrators for people of color into what are, after all, insular and nationalistic white European cultures. Of course there are all sorts of government programs, and private foundations at work, but – really. Where do people have agency? Where can they determine more or less for themselves how to do things?
Last night I returned to Seco (cs-seco.org). It's a CSA – that is, a self-organized social center, not in occupation, but legalized. It's on the very edge of Madrid center, down along a highway surrounded by immense housing blocks. I'd been there years before, at the start of my “House Magic” investigations.* But Seco isn't into art. Their walls are almost entirely bare, and a few years ago that bugged me. I stuck with the more cultural of the social centers in Madrid, and Tabacalera is the most cultural of them all. In fact, so much so that politics are more or less under the table there. But because of the problems Tabacalera is having, I decided I needed to go back to Seco and get an opinion. The folks I had met there before suggested I go on Thursday evening, the regular social hour. But this night was a special dinner, cooked by the Senegalese participants of Seco for all the volunteers, a dinner in honor of the birthday of the Prophet.
I chatted with a couple of gals before the sit-down, explaining my project – my Spanish is crummy, but compared to my last visit, I'm fluent. I talked about the problems at Tabacalera. “It's just too big,” said one. “They can't have intimacy with anybody there.” Another said it sounds like badly need a mediation. Then we sat down to a wonderful economical meal – Senegalese cous-cous with a few chunks of curried chicken hidden beneath a cabbage leaf. A man darted between diners pouring condensed milk over each plate. The chef offered me a drink of “African wine,” a juice – non-alcoholic, of course – which goes with this food and would settle the stomach. The meal was unexpected and delightful. The camaraderie between the Seco folks was lovely to see.
But that's what they do at Seco. They are committed to immigrant rights, teaching Spanish, providing legal services. “At Seco they have a program,” said the Templo Afro guy at Tabacalera. And here the culture is food, not art.
This month SQEK – the Squatting Europe Kollective – begins a research project with a meeting in Madrid. I'm going to participate in that, and through it I expect to get a lot more fine-grained in my understanding of just what's going on here within and between the numerous and diverse social centers and occupations.

Photo: Seco in 2005, before they got legal, posted at habitat.aq.upm.es/boletin/n40/i1ajfer.html.

* That's what this blog is about, in case it's been forgotten – my life running the “House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence” information project of European squats and occupations. See:

Letter from friends in Oakland

2012-02-01T00:51:00.000-08:00

A letter from some friends in Oakland regarding the Jan. 28th events:
Let us start by apologizing; that our words may be incoherent, our thoughts scattered and our tone overly emotional. Forgive us, because the ringing in our ear continues to interrupt our thinking, because our eyes are bleary and we’re weighed upon by the anxiety and trauma of our injuries and the imprisonment of the ones we love. As most of you are well-aware: after a full day and night of street battles in Oakland, we were defeated in our efforts to occupy a large building for the purposes of establishing an social center. We’re writing, in part, to correct the inaccuracies and mystifications spewed by the scum Media. But more so as to convey the intensity and the urgency of the situation in Oakland to comrades abroad. To an extent, this is an impossible task. Video footage and mere words must inevitably fail at conveying the ineffable collective experiences of the past twenty-four hours. But as always, here goes.
Yesterday was one of the most intense days of our lives. We say this without hyperbole or bravado. The terror in the streets of Miami or St. Paul, the power in the streets of Pittsburgh or Oakland’s autumn; yesterday’s affect met or superseded each of these. The events of yesterday confronted us as a series of intensely beautiful and yet terrible moments.
An abbreviated sequence:
Beautiful words are delivered at Oscar Grant Plaza, urging us to cultivate our hatred for capitalism. Hundreds leave the plaza and quickly become thousands. The police attempt to seize the sound truck, but it is rescued by the swarming crowd. We turn towards our destination and are blocked. We turn another way and are blocked once more. We flood through the Laney campus and emerge to find that we’ve been headed off again. We make the next logical move and somehow the police don’t anticipate it. We’re closer to the building, now surrounded by fences and armed swine. We tear at the fences, downing them in some spots. The police begin their first barrage of gas and smoke. The initial fright passes. Calmly, we approach from another angle.
The pigs set their line on Oak. To our left, the museum; to our right, an apartment complex. Shields and reinforced barricades to the front; we push forwards. They launch flash bangs and bean bags and gas. We respond with rocks and flares and bottles. The shields move forward. Another volley from the swine. The shields deflect most of the projectiles. We crouch, wait, then push forward all together. They come at us again and again. We hurl their shit, our shit, and whatever we can find back at them. Some of us are hit by rubber bullets, others are burned by flashbang grenades. We see cops fall under the weight of perfectly-arced stones For what feels like an eternity, we exchange throws and shield one another. Nothing has felt like this before. Lovely souls in the apartment building hand pitchers of waters from their windows to cleanse our eyes. We’ll take a moment here to express our gratitude for the unprecedented bravery and finesse with which the shield-carrying strangers carried out their task. We retreat to the plaza, carrying and being carried by one another.
We re-group, scheme, and a thousand deep, set out an hour later. Failing to get into our second option, we march onwards towards a third. The police spring their trap: attempting to kettle us in the park alongside the 19th and Broadway lot that we’d previously occupied. Terror sets in; the’ve reinforced each of their lines. They start gassing again. More projectiles, our push is repelled. The intelligence of the crowd advances quickly. Tendrils of the crowd go after the fences. In an inversion of the moment where we first occupied this lot, the fences are downed to provide an escape route. We won’t try to explain the joy of a thousand wild-ones running full speed across the lot, downing the second line of fencing and spilling out into the freedom of the street. More of the cat and mouse. In front of the YMCA, they spring another kettle. This time they’re deeper and we have no flimsy fencing to push through. Their lines are deep. A few dozen act quickly to climb a nearby gate, jumping dangerously to the hard pavement below. Past the gate, the cluster of escapees find a row of several unguarded OPD vans: you can imagine what happened next. A complicit YMCA employee throws opens the door. Countless escape into the building and out the exits. The police become aware of both escape routes and begin attacking and trampling those who try but fail to get out. Those remaining in the kettle are further brutalized and resign to their arrest.
A few hundred keep going. Vengeance time. People break into city hall. Everything that can be trashed is trashed. Files thrown everywhere, computers get it too, windows smashed out. The american flags are brought outside and ceremoniously set to fire. A march to the jail, lots of graffiti, a news van gets wrecked, jail gates damaged. The pigs respond with fury. Wantonly beating, pushing, shooting whomever crosses their path. Many who escaped earlier kettles are had by snatch squads. Downtown reveals itself to be a fucking warzone. Those who are still flee to empty houses and loving arms.
A war-machine must intrinsically be also a machine of care. As we write, hundreds of our comrades remain behind bars. Countless others are wounded and traumatized. We’ve spent the last night literally stitching one another together and assuring each other that things will be okay. We still can’t find a lot of people in the system, rumors abound, some have been released, others held on serious charges and have bail set. This care-machine is as much of what we name the Oakland Commune as the encampment or the street fighting. We still can’t count the comrades we can’t find on all our hands combined.
We move through the sunny morning and the illusion of social peace has descended back upon Oakland. And yet everywhere is the evidence of what transpired. City workers struggle to fix their pathetic fences. Boards are affixed to the windows of city hall and to nearby banks (some to hide damage, others simply to hide behind). Power washer try to clear away the charred remains of the stupid flag. One literally cannot look anywhere along broadway without seeing graffiti defaming the police or hyping our teams (anarchy, nortes, the commune, even juggalos). A discerning eye can still find the remnants of teargas canisters and flashbang residue. At the coffeeshops and delis, friends and acquaintances find one another and share updates about who has been hurt and who has been had. Our wounds already begin to heal into what will eventually be scars or ridiculous disfigurements. We hope our lovers will forgive such ugliness, or can come to look at them as little instances of unique beauty. As our adrenaline fades and we each find moments of solitude, we are each hit by the gravity of the situation.
Having failed to take a building, our search continues. We continue to find the perfect combination of trust, planning, intensity and action that can make our struggle into a permanent presence. The commune has and will continue to slip out of time, interrupting the deadliness and horror of the day to day function of society. Threads of the commune continue uninterrupted as the relationships and affinity build over the past months. An insurrectionary process is the one that emboldens these relationships and multiplies the frequency with which the commune emerges to interrupt the empty forward-thrust of capitalist history. To push this process forward, our task is to continue the ceaseless experimentation and imagination which could illuminate different strategies and pathways beyond the current limits of the struggle. Sometimes to forget, sometimes to remember.
We’ll conclude with a plea to our friends throughout the country and across borders. You must absolutely not view the events here as a sequence that is separate from your own life. Between the beautiful and spectacular moments in the Bay, you’ll discover the same alienation and exploitation that characterizes your own situation. Please do not consume the images from the Bay as you would the images of overseas rioting or as a netflix subscription. Our hell is yours, and so too is our struggle.
And so please… if you love us as we believe you do, prove it. We wish so desperately that you were with us in body, but we know most of you cannot be. Spread the commune to your own locales. Ten cities have already announced their intentions to hold solidarity demonstrations tonight. Join them, call for your own. If you aren’t plugged into enough of a social force to do so, then find your own ways of demonstrating. With your friends or even alone: smash, attack, expropriate, blockade occupy. Do anything in your power to spread the prevalence and the perversity of our interruption.
for a prolonged conflict; for a permanent presence; for the commune;
some friends in Oakland. [at from guerrillanews.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/oakland-commune-move-in-day/ See also Brandon Jourdan and Marianne Maeckelbergh's documentary at http://takethesquare.net/2012/01/23/the-oakland-commune-documentary/ ] Photo by Dave Id, at indybay.org.

"Squat" or "Occupy"? An answer from Madrid is heard in Copenhagen

2011-12-13T09:37:00.000-08:00

Made it to Copenhagen for the SQEK conference (SQuatting Europe Kollective). We all stayed in collective houses, and met at the Candy Factory (Bolsjefabrikken) thanks to our hosts' careful arrangements. (I was at Molevitten, which Google says means “shebang”!) The last days we toured squat-like artists' projects. One big question last week was, what is the relation between squatting and occupying? Miguel Martinez tried to answer for Madrid. He had arrived in Copenhagen early, and gave his paper to an academic gathering at the University of Copenhagen. Since this will doubtless interest the academic readers of this blog, I reproduce his abstract below. My notes on the conference will appear in a subsequent post. (The raw notes are posted already on the “House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence” website.)
“Cumulative Chains of Activist Exchanges: the Occupation of Squares and the Squatting of Buildings,” abstract of a paper by Miguel A. Martínez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Ángela García (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) The M15 [May 15th, 2011] movement in Spain (Taibo 2011) has responded to the financial crisis and the neoliberal policies [of the Spanish government] (López and Rodríguez 2011) with a sudden and profound social mobilisation during seven months (May-December 2011). While it is based on previous movements (alter-global 1994-2002, anti-war 2003, anti-conservative government M14 2004, and pro-housing 2006-2010), this is the first time that a precarious multitude (Mudu 2009) takes the squares, the streets and the neighbourhoods for such a long lasting period, through an innovative autonomous organisation and with a transnational scope (Tarrow 2005).
This paper focuses on the convergence experienced by the squatters' movement (Adell et al. 2004, Domínguez et al. 2010) and the M15 movement. We will describe first how and why squatters joined the M15 movement. Then we will provide evidence about the utilitarian role that already existed squatted social centres played in the M15 movement. Finally, after the camps were evicted, an explosion of new squats took place due to the initiatives of new activists of the M15 movement.
Our explanation of this process of convergence rests mainly in the 'cumulative chains of activist exchanges' since the three mentioned aspects of the process reinforced each other. The structural equivalence of the occupied camps and the squatted social centres (in terms of assemblies, self-management and social disobedience), sparked the mutual collaboration. Camps also turned into strategic ends (examples of direct democracy: Graeber 2011, Taibo 2011) of the M15 movement beyond its original function as a powerful repertoire of protest (Marcuse 2011), in a similar mood as squatted social centres tend to be performed (Pruijt 2003). Squatting gained legitimacy within the M15 movement due to the initial collaboration as well as to the increasing success of the campaign Stop Foreclosures. The M15 movement encouraged new activists to self-organise in many different groups: some of them went to work in preexisting squatted social centres while some others started to squat houses and social centres. On the one hand, this mixture slightly reduced the radical and anti-systemic discourse of squatting. On the other, the anti-speculation discourse was incorporated into an anti-crisis one where squatting was justified by the extreme needs of increasing numbers of the population.
The impressive wave of new squats opened between September and November, 2011, also took advantage of political opportunity structures (McAdam 2001, Meyer 2004): low level of repression and temporary divide (and de-legitimation) of power elites around the [eve of the national elections] (November 20th), in particular. Since January 2011 the international context of European and North African uprisings (and political and economic crisis as well) had an effect of demonstration and contamination to which internet networks contributed with instant and plural communication. This communicative environment was also developed by the M15 movement through their own cybernetic means and platforms thus allowing the new mobilised multitude to frame the continuous grievances that emerged during these seven months (repression, evictions, cuts in public services, reform of the Constitution in order to pay national debts, etc.). The camps, the popular assemblies and the squats had the virtue of getting people in touch regularly, so that the self-organisation and agency of groups had a reliable socio-spatial ground in which urban life based on collective and private consumption (Castells 1983, Nicholls 2010) was challenged by a hybrid of urban and macro-political movement.
The empirical information for this research comes from our own participant observation in most of the events of this period in the city of Madrid, but we also analysed media documents, alternative media news and messages which were spread through Internet platforms (weblogs, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube). The main source in order to [context] and contrast our data, were 21 semi-structured interviews that we [conducted with] squatters and M15 activists.
Adell, Ramón; Martínez, Miguel (eds.) ¿Dónde están las llaves? El movimiento okupa: prácticas y contextos sociales. Madrid: La Catarata.
Castells, Manuel (1983) The City and the Grassroots. A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Domínguez, Mario; Martínez, Miguel; Lorenzi, Elísabeth (2010) Okupaciones en movimiento. Derivas, estrategias y prácticas. Madrid: Tierra de Nadie.
Graeber, David (2011) Occupy and Anarchism's Gift of Democracy. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/15/occupy-anarchism-gift-democracy?newsfeed=true]
López, Isidro; Rodríguez, Emanuel (2011) The Spanish Model. New Left Review 69.
Marcuse, Peter (2011) The purpose of the Occupation Movement and the danger of fetishizing space. [http://pmarcuse.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/the-purpose-of-the-occupation-movement-and-the-danger-of-fetishizing-space/]
Mcadam Dough; Tarrow Sidney; Tilly Charles (2001) Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meyer, David S. (2004) Protest and Political Opportunities. Annual Review of Sociology 30:125–45.
Mudu, Pierpaolo (2009) Where is Hardt and Negri's Multitude? Real Networks in Open Spaces. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 8(2), 211-244.
Nicholls, Walter J. (2010) The Los Angeles School: Difference, Politics, City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35-1, 189-206.
Pruijt, Hans (2003) Is the institutionalisation of urban movements inevitable? A comparison of the opportunities for sustained squatting in New York City and Amsterdam. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27, 133-157.
Taibo, Carlos (2011) El 15-M en sesenta preguntas. Madrid: Los libros de la Catarata.
Tarrow, Sidney (2005) The New Transnational Activism. New York: Cambridge University.

"From Israel to Essex: Travellers not welcome...

2011-11-18T08:05:00.000-08:00

Traditionally nomadic communities face state-led discrimination and violent attempts to abolish their way of life."
I don't reblog hardly ever, but this exception proves the rule. A horrible story from Ireland and Israel, of people losing the homes to which they are entitled... From Al Jazeera English.
(Getty/Gallo image from Al Jazeera website. Photographer not credited.)

SQEK Conference in Copenhagen, December 4-6, 2011

2011-11-10T08:19:00.000-08:00

This post concerns the The Squatting Europe Collective (SQEK) 3rd Conference, and includes 1) a text on free spaces of Copenhagen sent by our hosts, and 2) the agenda of the conference itself.
1st – Some spaces of autonomy in contemporary Copenhagen, written by Our Hosts
"Spaces of autonomy, or as many call them free spaces are abundant throughout the city of Copenhagen, the most notorious being Freetown Christiania which was a former military site which was squatted in 1971. Throughout the 1980s and early 90s autonomous movements were strong, visible and active throughout the entire city, most notably in the former working class neighborhood of Nørrebro. But since the 1992 police shooting during the anti-European Union protests, the autonomous movement has dis-integrated for the most part (Mikkelsen, Flemming, et al. 2001).
"With the violent demolition of the notorious Ungdomshuset (Youth House) at Jagtvej 69 in 2007, the commune had controlled or gotten rid of many vibrant spaces of autonomy throughout Nørrebro. The commune ceded a new house to the radical youth in Nord-Vest effectively evicting their activities to the periphery of the inner city. Although the new Ungdomshuset remains a vibrant space for radical culture, such as underground music, performances, workshops and discussions, it does not compare to the former historically laden inner-Nørrebro location, where the likes of Rosa Luxembourg spoke.
"One free space which survived the neoliberal governement of the past decade, is Folkets Hus (People’s House) along Folkets Park located at Stengade 50. This is a self-managed free space since it was squatted in 1971. As a meeting space for support parties, a weekly people's kitchen, cafe and bike workshop, it persists as an outlet and service for radical culture and the local neighborhood.
"Nonethless, the demolition of Ungdomshuset 69 left a void in Nørrebro for radical, alternative and underground culture. Within this context, a collective of politically minded artists, craftsmen and students appropriated (with permission from the owner) a former Candy Factory built by Arne Jacobsen at Glentevej in Nørrebro. By hosting workshops, concerts, exhibits and fostering the emerging pirate party/TAZ movement , the space became a vibrant institution. Today, Bolsjefabrikken has relocated to the site of a former plumbing factory in the same neighborhood at Lærkevej 11, where three buildings house various workshops, cinema, kitchen, gallery, and cafe.
"The second Bolsjefabrikken is located along the railway tracks on the edge of the Østerbro neighborhood. These buildings are owned by the commune, and were ceded for self-management at a symbolic rent of 250 DKK per month. The space has been self-managed since the 2009 KlimaForum, when it became a space for housing over 2,000 climate justice activists.
"Within the context of contemporary spaces of autonomy, we hope that the discussions, experiences and insights derived during this conference will help keep the movement globally connected and locally active.
"We hope you enjoy the third Squatting in Europe Conference with us in Copenhagen!
Best, Ask, Malte, Tina H, Tina S"

(some) Free Spaces in Copenhagen

1. Folkets Hus (People’s House)
Stengade 50
2200 Copenhagen Nørrebro
info : www.folketshus.dk/

2. Bolsjefabrikken
Lærkevej 11
2400 Copenhagen Nord-Vest
info: www.bolsjefabrikken.com
contact: info@bolsjefabrikken.com

3. Bolsjefabrikken Ragnhildgade
Ragnhildgade 1, bygning 3
2100 København Østerbro
contact : webmaster@bolsjefabrikken.com

3. Ungdomshuset
Dortheavej 61
2400 Copenhagen Nord-Vest
info: http://www.ungeren.dk/
contact : dortheavej61@gmail.com

4. K22 :: Kollektiv 22
Nørrebrogade 22.2
2200 Copenhagen Nørrebro
(black gate next to King of Kebab. Doorbell : Lett, Steiger, Voetmann)
contact : Tina +45 527 500 70

5. Freetown Christiania.
Christianshavn, Copenhagen Inner City
Info : Experience it, to believe it.

2nd – The Squatting Europe Collective (SQEK) 3rd Conference is set for December 4-6, 2011 at Folkets Hus, Copenhagen, Stengade 50, Nørrebro. Here is the program so far:
Sunday December 4, 2011 is the morning session, 10.oo – 12.oo, an internal SQEK Meeting to talk business and have breakfast. Then begin the public sessions...
12.oo – 13.oo
Lunch at Folkets Hus
Presentations
13.oo – 14.oo
Miguel :: “Squatting and the 15M movement / #spanishrevolution”
14.oo – 15.oo
Femke :: “Cracking the participation creed: The squat-mosque as an inspiration for intercultural self-organization”
15.oo – 15.3o
Break!
Presentations
15.3o – 16.3o
Armin :: “Between Intervention and Radical ‘Free Spaces’: Squatter Movements at the Beginning of the Neoliberal City”
16.3o – 17.3o
Joost :: “Defining what is open: Squatting as the problematic practice of recommodifying urban space in negotiation
towards audiences and the self”
17.3o – 18.3o
Anna :: “Evict Us and We Multiply! Protest Camps and the Politics of Eviction"
Food!
19.oo
Dinner1 [for SQEK participants] at K22 ::: Nørrebrogade 22.2 :: doorbell : Lett/Steiger

Monday, December 5, 2011
Presentations
1o.oo – 11.oo
Thomas :: “Squatters are urban planners! Innovative effects of squatting on public policies”
11.oo – 12.oo
Hans :: “Squatting as Balanced Empowerment”
12.oo - 13.oo
Lunch at Folkets Hus
Presentations
13.oo – 14.oo
Alan :: “Circulating Movement Information in the Sphere of Art"
14.oo - 15.oo
Edward: “Theory and practice - activism and the academy”
15.oo – 15.3o
Break!
Presentations
15.3o – 16.3o
Elisabeth :: "Self-research and squat practice"
16.3o – 17.3o
Amantine :: “Gender and squatting: debates about anti-sexism, patriarchy and heteronormativity in Germany"
Food!
18.oo
Dinner at the Bolsjefabrikken (Candy Factory)
Lærkevej 11, Nørrebro
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Presentations
1o.oo - 12.oo
Internal SQEK Meeting [closed to general public]
Food!
12.oo – 13.oo
Lunch at Folkets Hus
13.oo – 18.oo
Bike Tour and visits of Spaces of Autonomy in Copenhagen
13.3o – 15.oo
Bolsjefabrikken (Candy Factory)
Lærkevej 11, Nørrebro
15.oo – 16.oo
Ungdomshuset
Dortheavej 61, Nord-Vest
16.oo – 17.oo
Bolsjefabrikken Ragnhildgade
Ragnhildgade, Østerbro
Food!
18.oo
Dinner in Freetown Christiania

("Occupy Everywhere" image by William Banzai)

On the Global “Occupy”

2011-10-26T12:55:00.000-07:00

This blog has long been concerned with information and issues around occupation. The movement of squatted social centers has been about providing social, political and cultural space in cities where the processes of hyper-capitalism have foreclosed or constrained such possibilities. These occupations have been for the most part tiny islands in the immense oceans of normative life, captained by ultra-left pirate bands. Only now has a global movement bloomed which demands that same kind of space, which occupies it, and resolutely, slowly, determinedly discusses what to do about the systemic failure of the capitalist system to provide for the social welfare.
Visiting in New York before the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests began, I biked by the site in the morning and was amazed at the extraordinary police presence for what I assumed would be a small demonstration. Now I see the cops were right. Like small boys whose defensiveness is in proportion to their guilt, they knew what was up. The encampment developed beautifully, roiled by traditional protest marches which set off chanting slogans – but even these worked in well as the marchers returning were greeted with cries of “Welcome home!” The form of OWS developed like the encampments of the 15 May movement (15M) I'd seen in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid – with designated areas to handle all the various necessities, as in a social center. The massive general assemblies of the 15M ran smoothly. All this I assumed was the outcome of decades of experience with big-building occupations by many activists in 15M.
What precisely the 15M owes to the squatting movement is a question which will be addressed by Miguel Martínez at the early December meeting of the SQEK in Amsterdam. But the question of what the Occupy movement owes to squatters is only one of many as the U.S. movement is historicized. The Smithsonian and New-York Historical Society are already scrambling together collections of OWS artifacts. Are other cities' historical societies doing the same? On my travels I saw Occupy encampments in the downtowns of Chicago and Minneapolis this fall, and some time spent on the web can turn up the online evidence of the dozens more around the USA. These are all significant local events in a movement writers for “Dissent” have compared to the populist risings of the 1930s.
Since my return to Madrid, I've been following the U.S. on the web, just as I did with the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt. That was easily the most exciting webcast of 2011. The international character of the Occupy movement, like the anti-WTO organizing of the '90s and '00s, follows the dust storms of international capital. While the entire scope of this global revolutionary period is too much to wrap one's head around, a September collection of “journalisms” on the 16 Beaver Group website begins to try, comparing U.S., Greece, and Egypt protests and their processes. The U.S. correspondent writes that, like me, “I have to follow from home via this Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/#!/OccupyWallStNYC.” The Twitter feed is tactical, but it also turns up all sorts of great stuff that's been written about the movement, like the Lowndes and Warren text cited above. S/he also watches the OWS live on http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution, and recommends the live feed of the assembly process.
As web television, the national OWS so far has been a bit of a bore, or to be fair, widely dispersed in eventless streams and various shorts. There is no CNN for this revolution. Still, I liked the Ed David short film “Where Do We Go from Here?”, posted at http://occupywallst.org/ for the one-month anniversary of the NYC occupation. In it, a young woman explains in rejoinder to the mainstream pundits' complaint that OWS has no program, “I have no idea – and that's what's really exciting, not knowing what's going to happen.”
So far as analysis goes, Marxists are weighing in heavily on this movement. After a visit to Occupy London, “Lenin” (Richard Seymour, in the blog “Lenin's Tomb”) points out the “political indeterminacy of the movement thus far,” but concludes that, given their so-far enunciated principles, that “it's a reformism radicalising in the direction of an anti-systemic stance.” For him, “This isn't a revolutionary situation, but merely a punctuating moment in the temporal flow of class struggle.” The identification with Egypt, which Seymour says has been mocked in the English press, emphasizes the internationalism of the movement, and, like OWS, “it identifies the political class rule of the 1% as the key problem; the colonization of the representative state by big capital.”
Brian Holmes writes from Chicago where, true to form, the police are brutalizing the demonstrators (10/17), “Some kid from nowhere who hadn’t made it, a young drunk who wasn’t proud, he told us not to repeat with the people’s mic because he wasn’t clever. But he knew exactly what he wanted to say. It was `dead end, no chance, doors closed, please try somewhere else': what happens when there’s no place for you in the system. It’s strange to feel myself, over fifty years old, with accomplishments and self-discipline and a name that others recognize, reverberated in the speech of this honest kid. What it means to me: dead end for practical idealism, no chance for real cooperation, doors closed to care and solidarity, try somewhere else for your humanity. There’s no place for people like me in this system, that’s how I feel, stripped bare by the crisis like all the rest. It’s because the 1% have blocked all vision of anything beyond what they can grab, and that’s practically everything, the whole cookie.”
While he is leading a seminar at Mess Hall on “Three Crises: 30s–70s–Today,” this egghead captures the populist affect of the movement of encampment on the streets. His story poignantly reminded me of experiences I had as a hitchhiker on the road in the 1970s, another “public space” systematically foreclosed by police (and fear-mongering Hollywood movies) during those years. Holmes' ever-useful blog also reposts the Occupy TVNY video interview of war correspondent Chris Hedges in Times Square, comparing peoples' revolutions in East Germany, former Yugoslavia, Egypt, etc. to what is now happening in the USA. Hedges ends the interview in tears of gratitude...
Slavoj Zizek, in his recent visit to OWS, neatly sideswiped the red-baiting U.S. Media. He said through the “human microphone” – “We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless Capitalists. In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize Capitalism, don’t allow yourself to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over.”
On this, Marxists and anarchists are agreed. Crimethinc, in their recent letter to the occupiers, write that “Capitalism is not a static way of life but a dynamic process that consumes everything, transforming the world into profit and wreckage. Now that everything has been fed into the fire, the system is collapsing, leaving even its former beneficiaries out in the cold.” And Mike Davis, nothing if not Marxist, embraces direct action strategy in his 10/21 article, writing of the necessity of bodies in space: “Activist self-organization — the crystallization of political will from free discussion — still thrives best in actual urban fora.” Online social media still only preach to the choir – (here I disagree; Facebook also makes converts, and the computer is by far the best revolutionary TV). His prescriptions for evading co-option by normative politics (i.e., the Democratic party) include the following: “continue to democratize and productively occupy public space (i.e. reclaim the Commons). The veteran Bronx activist-historian Mark Naison has proposed a bold plan for converting the derelict and abandoned spaces of New York into survival resources (gardens, campsites, playgrounds) for the unsheltered and unemployed. The Occupy protestors across the country now know what it’s like to be homeless and banned from sleeping in parks or under a tent. All the more reason to break the locks and scale the fences that separate unused space from urgent human needs.” This has always seemed like common sense to me, and it is sweet to read the Great Pessimist advocate for it.
Adam Trowbridge on the Basekamp list comments on Seymour's text, that “The demand to be allowed to exist, together, in space, in real time, all day and night, is incredibly radical and this is perhaps why the media, especially the talking heads, cannot understand what is happening. No one has to explain to the existing homeless that there is something political happening in their lives every day and night. Occupy sites have gone beyond the idea of demanding of power that they be 'allowed', they have simply chosen to begin existing in real space and time, together. I think this goes beyond 'civil disobedience,' although that becomes a necessary part when existing outside a rented or purchased space has been mainly outlawed. We are left with a choice to continue as a customer of a series of private spaces or occupy a site illegally.” Exactly.

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Miguel Martínez' website
http://www.miguelangelmartinez.net/?The-Struggle-for-Social-Autonomy&lang=en

minutes of the Squatting Europe Kollective meetings are at:
https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/91603/squatting-europe-kollective/

"The Smithsonian and New-York Historical Society Race to Preserve Occupy Wall Street's Art and Artifacts"
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/38922/the-smithsonian-and-new-york-historical-society-race-to-preserve-occupy-wall-streets-art-and-artifacts/

“Occupy Wall Street: A Twenty-First Century Populist Movement?” by Joe Lowndes and Dorian Warren
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=551

“Journalisms -- The Occupation of Wall Street -- Fragments On, From, Inside, Before, Through” (9/11)
http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms09.23.11.htm

Lenin (aka Richard Seymour), “Visiting Occupy London” (10/17)
from http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/10/visiting-occupy-london.html –
reposted to Basekamp discussion list, from whence Adam Trowbridge's comment

Brian Holmes, “Meanwhile, Back in Chicago”
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/meanwhile-back-in-chicago/

transcript of Slavoj Zizek on Wall Street
http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=4415#more-4415

Dear Occupiers: A Letter from Anarchists (10/7)
http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/

Mike Davis, "No More Bubble-Gum"
http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/11725867619/no-more-bubble-gum

Basekamp – “Occupy Everything” (only the one event posted here with links)
http://basekamp.com/about/events/occupy-everything

image: “Fight The Vampire Squid” by Molly Crabapple (scientists inform us that these creatures are unfairly maligned; still a cool image!)

Welcome to the Hotel Ocupa

2011-10-20T04:04:00.000-07:00

Back in Madrid after a month in the USA, I find the indignados of the 15M movement have just taken a building nearby. The Hotel Madrid, at 10 calle Carretas is a long-abandoned former Best Western hotel. Now it is swarming with folks coming around to see what is up. The hotel is steps away from the Puerta del Sol, the center of Madrid and site of the original encampment of May 15th, 2011 that launched the Spanish movement which is the big sister of Occupy Wall Street.
I inquired of course of the man at the lobby desk: “What's going on?”, and presented my hand-carried copy of the “Occupied Wall Street Journal.” He threw it on the rack with the others! The hotel he told me, might serve the many evicted former homeowners who could not maintain their mortgages and found themselves suddenly on the street. (That's been a key issue of the neighborhood assembly of Lavapiés, the district that hosts the immense Tabacalera CSA. That body has conducted a number of eviction defenses.) But that wasn't certain yet. He directed me around the corner, to the assembly in Plaza Jacinto Benavente, which was even then discussing plans for the hotel occupation.
I wandered through the teeming halls. Most already had signs indicating their functions. A small boy with dirty blonde hair controlled the heavy glass door of one large empty room. “This is a studio!” he told me. I just want to look outside, kid – a broad open window overlooking the busy street below. I mean really busy, busy in a way that artists and activists haven't had access to. The hotel gang had already set up an info table on the street to collect signatures on a petition of support.
Back in the lobby I met AJ (Adrian), a sculptor who'd spent years working in the states, at a studio near D.C. He complained about an article in the “Occupied WSJ” that implied that the 15M movement had rioted. “We never did that!” he insisted. It was always the police who attacked.
AJ said when they took the hotel last week the owner sent around some thugs to get them out. But a few heavies were not enough to do that job, and now the case is before a judge. The owner is bankrupt, however, and AJ says the place was a mess they had to work hard to clean up. Big holes in the ceilings upstairs mark where thieves stripped out copper from plumbing and electrical systems. I asked why no graffiti? There was some from before, but the occupiers repainted the walls. There is a theater downstairs, AJ said, a historic site which should be used, “open for the people, even if it doesn't make money.”
I went to the communications office to check out AJ's story. A couple guys sitting around dozing, like some old time copy room in “The Front Page.” One young man with long blonde hair strode by, but told me he couldn't fact check AJ's story. He'd only arrived a few hours before, and was working on computer security. “That's my contribution here.” AJ too had plans to move on, to “walk north,” even as cold weather is coming on. He told me he saw the whole thing – the 15M movement, Occupy Wall Street – as the beginning of the real necessary transition. He was hipped on the Venus Project, a “feasible plan of action” for a “peaceful and sustainable global civilization” based on resource economies. (In fact thevenusproject.com site has a message to OWS.) “I might not live to see it, that kid might not live to see it,” AJ said, as the door-boy ran by, “but that's what's gotta happen.”
On my way out, a heavyset man in the concierge's position nodded to me. Bring on the thugs! While the “desk clerk” seemed unsure of the fate of the Hotel Madrid, a painted sign over the door announces that it is a CSO, an occupied social center. So far it seems to be that, as the indignadoes of 15M show that they are after a lot more than a few changes in the laws.

article on Hotel Madrid, with pictures
http://www.rojoynegro.info/galeria/agitacion/hotel-madrid-casa-del-pueblo

"occupy and assemble"

2011-10-05T18:12:00.000-07:00

Publisher Gerald Raunig was at the Creative Time Summit in New York last month -- the final talk of the conference adjourned to march down to Wall Street. Now comes this issue of "Transversal" on the subject... Hot off the um, presses. Even as organized labor and its resources come into the struggle of the Wall Street occupiers, it is important to remember: This action was emulating Madrid, which in turn was emulating Tunisia. It is international.
#occupy and assemble∞
transversal web journal
From the sit-ins on the Kasbah Square in Tunis to the tents on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, from the encampments on the Puerta del Sol in Madrid to Syntagma Square in Athens, from the Wisconsin Uprising to Occupy LA, from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Liberty Plaza in New York - there is an incredible movement of occupations growing in this year of 2011. Slogans like “They don’t represent us” call for a non-representationist political practice, inventive forms of assembling bring new meaning to the good old general assembly, reappropriations of space and time thwart the logic of private and public: There is a new abstract machine in the making, traversing the local practices, empowering itself with every new space that is occupied, every new assembly that finds another form of expression and sociality. This issue of transversal is a discursive component of this abstract machine emerging from the actual experiences of Occupy Wall Street, dedicated to all the precarious occupiers in the world.
http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011
Contents
Judith Butler: Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street
Nicole Demby: Liberty Plaza. A "Message" Entangled with its Form
Isabell Lorey: Non-representationist, Presentist Democracy
Gerald Raunig: The Molecular Strike
Nato Thompson: The Occupation of Wall Street Across Time and Space
Dan S. Wang: From One Moment to the Next, Wisconsin to Wall Street

It's happening...

2011-09-17T18:48:00.000-07:00

I take it back -- I went by earlier, and thought this was a ploy to get NYPD out in force... But they are really doing it! This looks like the best live chat, free of right-wing "troll" spammers: https://occupywallst.org/chat/. The photo is from CNN -- tourists, unable to get their picture with the "bull"... It's great that this protest gets major coverage in U.S. media. That is, in itself, a victory!
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Manhattan's financial district on Saturday in a largely peaceful protest aimed at drawing attention to the role powerful financial interests played in wreaking havoc on America's economy.
Modeled on the "Arab Spring" uprisings that swept through Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and other countries this year, Occupy Wall Street is a "leaderless resistance movement" orchestrated through Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools. The Twitter hashtags #OccupyWallStreet and #TakeWallStreet lit up Saturday with coordination messages and solidarity tweets. (See CNNMoney's coverage in photos and tweets.)
68421PrintActivist magazine Adbusters spearheaded the event, putting the call out two months ago for participants in a Sept. 17 demonstration in lower Manhattan. Protestors arranged to meet and discuss their goals at the iconic Wall Street Bull statue at noon, as well as at a "people's assembly" at One Chase Manhattan Plaza at 3 p.m.
"The NYPD is aware of various protests and we have planned accordingly," Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told CNN late Friday.
Early Saturday morning, police barricaded off Wall Street, erecting barriers around the bull statue that protestors had planned to make their rallying point. Protestors instead took to the surrounding streets, blocking traffic. By 2 p.m., nearly two dozen uniformed police officers surrounded the bull, while others worked to disperse the crowd.
"None associated with the demonstrations sought permits," Browne said Saturday. "A group that formed at the bull at Bowling Green spilled into the streets on each side of the bull, posed safety issues and impeded vehicular traffic. The streets were re-opened to vehicular traffic and barriers were subsequently erected at the bull to prevent a re-occurrence.
A marching band played as participants held impromptu yoga and tai chi classes in Bowling Green Park. Demonstrators moved their protest to another nearby park as their numbers swelled to around 500.
"Something needs to change," said one protester, who declined to give his name and covered half his face with a bandanna. "We need an economy for the people and by the people, not for the rich and by the rich."
Another protester, Rheannone Ball, chimed in: "It's our duty as Americans to fight for our country and to keep it true to serving its people. When it doesn't do that, it's immoral not to stand up and say something."
A call for 'justice:' Kalle Lasn, the editor-in-chief of Adbusters -- an activist magazine with a worldwide circulation of 100,000 readers -- said the editors there are angry that leaders in the financial sector "had not been brought to justice." Their inspiration came when pro-democracy uprisings broke out in Egypt on January 25 and quickly spread to other countries.
"We thought, why isn't there a backlash here?" Lasn told CNNMoney in an interview before the event. "We need to shake up the corporate-driven capitalist system we're in. To do that, we needed something radical."
Last month, cyberactivism group Anonymous released a video in support of the protest.
"It gave us a nice bit of street cred, some mystique. We lefties need a lot of mystique," Lasn said with a laugh.
That mystique is what drew Josh Dworning, a 20-year-old college student, to shell out $300 for a 24-hour train ride from Florida to New York.
"I heard about the protest through StumbleUpon, and I just really agreed that there's widespread discontent with the banks and corporations," Dworning said. "I'm no crazy radical, just a student who believes in something."
Dworning, who brought a tent for camping near Wall Street on Saturday night, said he's "planning on staying as peaceful as possible" -- though he'll be on alert, because "there's always the chance that someone can get a little too angry and throw a brick or something."
That's what scares Dworning's mom, Jeanne Molle, who said she's "a nervous mother watching her son get involved in a large-scale event in [a huge] city."
Lasn is hoping safety won't be an issue. A "Gandhi-like peaceful protest" is the only way the event will work, he says, though he acknowledges that central control is impossible over a group that organizers hope will swell to 20,000. And "there is a question of legality" around setting up tents and barricades, he admitted.
In a September test run of the occupation, nine people were arrested for disorderly conduct, and later released without being charged.
"It takes a lot to rise up and reform the global economic system," Lasn says. "And maybe this time we fail. But if we do, we're just setting the tone for the next revolution."
First Published: September 17, 2011: 4:18 PM ET
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Andrea Liu sent out this email -- Report on Second Day of Occupy Wall Street
i went down to the Occupy Wall Street Square Sunday night (9/18). it's coalesced since the first day into a relatively cohesive body with mechanisms to debate and decide action. they are calling it a "General Assembly." when i was there at 8:30PM they were trying to decide if they were gonna try to Occupy Wall Street this morning (Mon). people were taking turns giving speeches For or Against moving the protest to Wall Street. they were taking "stack." (i.e. at an activist meeting people get in line to give arguments for or against something).
there seemed to be 2 facilitators who were directing the discussion, they looked pretty young (college kids). then all of a sudden the police came and said that the (protest) signs all over the square had to be removed by 9:30PM, if the protesters didn't remove them the police would do it. then the debate switched to whether they should remove them or let the police do it. then they decided they would let the police do it, and film it. then some person who claimed to be a protester randomly started to remove the posters, and the protesters said he was an undercover cop, and they told him to stop. then they put back all the protest signs the removed, and sat on them.
here is the website for the process happening in the square--called New York City General Assembly:
www.nycga.net
Wall Street Bison (art project to replace the Wall Strete Bull with a Bison):
www.wallstreetbison.com
"Anonymous" (wikileaks hackers) is posting videos of Occupy Wall Street on its website:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6jdkpQjueo
"Celebrities" who have spoken in Occupy Wall Street square:
1. David Graeber, Yale anthropologist/anarchist who was fired for being too political, now teaches at Goldmsiths. parents fought in Spanish Civil War--he spoke around 7PM on Saturday:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
2. Roseanne Barr/(Stand-up comedian/TV star)
3. Immortal Technique (rapper)
4. Lupe Fiasco (rapper)
Here are some summaries of what speeches i can remember from the General Assembly:
(speech 1): Isn't it fitting we started the Wall Street March in front of the Musuem of the American Indian? The reason they originally called this Wall Street is because they built a wall to keep out Indians. Now we are the Indians. What is to stop us from calling ourselves Indians?
(people in audience say "white privilege")
(speech 2): Most of get people in this square are not from NY. We have to do outreach to bring more people from NY here, because it is New Yorkers who live here permanently who are going to cause change.
(conversation i had with filmmaker): There is nobody here over 25, and it is all white people. Everybody is from out of town. There are no kids from Williamsburg or Brooklyn here.
(that's all i can remember--unfortunately i didn't have video camera).
ABC story:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/09/wall-st-protesters-say-theyre-settled-in/
Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/wall-street-protest-continues-for-third-day/2011/09/19/gIQAKqbffK_gallery.html
twitter search : #Occupy Wall Street
thanx,
andrea

"House Magic" #3 zine available as download

2011-08-06T04:27:00.000-07:00

Before blasting off for vacation, I finished #3 and posted it online. You can download the 40-odd page zine from zinelibrary.info -- just search house+magic. Or you can go to the House Magic website at: https://sites.google.com/site/housemagicbfc/ (Number 1 & 2 are at both sites.)
“House Magic” #3 includes Bulletins from around the world; a stay at the Rote Insel in Berlin; a tour of the Regenbogen Fabrik/Rainbow Factory, Berlin; Ashley Dawson recollects her stay on Mainzerstrasse; “Right to the City” conference theses from Hamburg; a 1974 cover of Street by Ufe Surland; a new Provo pamphlet by Experimental Jetset; a talk with the artists of La Générale in Paris; photos and stories from the 1970s' squats on the Rue des Caves; visits by students to Metelkova Mesto in Ljubljana; stories from the USA, Bronx, San Francisco, and Hannah Dobbz' film “Squatumentary”; stories of “art squats” in Paris, London, Zurich, and Madrid; picture pages...
(That picture is the cover of HM#3 -- it was made into a giant banner and hung from the tower at New Yorck Bethanien CSOA in Berlin a couple of years ago.)

Consultations on New UK Anti-Squatting Law

2011-07-19T04:16:00.000-07:00

From Mujinga we hear -- In the UK, the government has now announced the consultation on the criminalisation of squatting - the documents make quite interesting reading-
press release
http://www.justice.gov.uk/news/features/feature130711a.htm
Consultation webpage
http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/dealing-with-squatters.htm
Consultation document (pdf)
http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/consultations/options-dealing-with-squatting.pdf

Neoliberalism's Boll Weevils

2011-07-01T03:58:00.000-07:00

When I was visiting at W139 in Amsterdam in May, I heard good buzz about Schijnheilig (Shine-high-lig). I headed over there late one night, after a poetry music festival, and saw that it was a big place, in a former school. They got kicked out this month. But no matter – they are going on to another place, as they have done for a number of years... This was the spirit of the squatters I met at Le Bourdon-L'Arsenal in Paris, painted on the facade of their okupa: “si vous nous expulsez ici... nous squatterons ailleurs/ nous n'arreterons jamais!”
Filmmaker Tino Buchholz has posted an interview with two Schijnheilig occupiers on YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGtrRKtBGgk. Tino produced a film “Creativity and the Capitalist City: The Struggle for Affordable Space in Amsterdam” (premiering next weekend) which examines the situation in which artists find themselves in that city today. The mainspring of the film is the conflict between the decades-old squatting movement in the city and its neoliberal commercial enemy, the “anti-squatting” businesses that fill empty building spaces with resident “guardians” on short-term contracts.
Tino writes, “With this film I want to cover the creative city/ creative class debate at its high peak - tracing its urban roots - and aim to portray the wider picture of the struggle for affordable space in advanced Western capitalist cities. This film is more than a local documentary on Amsterdam. The hype around the creative city began already a decade ago, it is global in scope and about to reach its peak. What happens when the hype is over? Housing as a job or the Right to the City? In this sense, the film explores the latest urban re-/development pattern in advanced Western capitalist cities and links it to existential struggles for affordable housing and working space in Amsterdam, such as temporary accommodation, squatting, anti-squatting and some institutional synthesis: 'breeding places' Amsterdam. Especially Anti-Squatting, the market answer to squatting, poses a threat to the Right to the City, how to address the question of vacancy in the future. Hence, one of the crucial questions is: Housing as a job (living as a Guardian) or the Right to the City?” Tino is working out of Technische Universität Dortmund.
IN OTHER NEWS, “A Brief History of Squatting in Brighton,” Mujinga's new zine is available from northern-indymedia.org/zines/2075 -- as: “using space 5” -- he is blogging at -- https://network23.org/snob/. He informs us of a new grab! -- “Building in Central Brighton Occupied in Solidarity with June 30 Strikes – An abandoned shop front in Churchill Square, Brighton’s biggest shopping centre, has been occupied in solidarity with striking public sector workers. The building had been empty since August 2010 and the occupiers are already making repairs in order to rescue the building from dilapidation. The space will be used to form links between the striking public sector workers and other members of the public who are affected by the government’s public sector cuts, such as students, benefits claimants and private sector workers. Starting June 30th, the day of the strikes, the space will be open in the daytime and used as a place for people opposed to the cuts in general to meet one another, drink tea, and find out about anti-cuts actions. At 6pm everyday there will be an Anti-Cuts Forum, a public meeting open to all to participate. From 8pm until the space closes at night there will be film screenings and acoustic music. Drugs such as Alcohol, Nicotine and Ketamine are strictly forbidden in the space, along with all forms of oppressive behaviour such as Racism, Sexism and Homophobia. The space is non-party political and is open to anyone opposed to the government’s public sector cuts is welcome to the space at 29 Western Rd, Brighton, on the corner of Churchill square. All enquiries to 07563696458.” Cheers!
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it's done -- Schijnheilig got the boot a couple days ago – here's the video --
http://nos.nl/video/253638-politie-amsterdam-ontruimt-kraakpanden.html
rockin' squattin' action!, complete with noise-rock soundtrack...

Slammin' at Joe's Garage

2011-06-13T06:50:00.001-07:00

Joe's Garage is a storefront social center in Amsterdam, and the site of the recent “mini-SQEK” meeting of squat researchers in early June. The center is amongst a web of streets named after the Dutch founders of South Africa (Afrikaaners). For years this nabe was the home of immigrants living in social housing, and now the relentless pressure of the city's housing market has led to a cycle of speculation, evictions, and redevelopment as luxury condos. Amsterdam's squatting group east has conducted a campaign of occupation and tenant organizing against this gentrification. The center is named for Joe McCarthy – not the U.S. rightwing senator from Wisconsin, really, but another, Joe Cyrus McCarthy, an Iranian who backed the Shah and fled to Amsterdam after Khomeini came to power. This Joe bought a house, Momo our host told us, with black money and intimidated the rental tenants into moving out. Amsterdam real estate, we were told, is a perfect setup for black money and the creeps who handle it. It's a laundry circle – a house is worth 150K full of tenants, and a million empty. But Joe was found out by the authorities, Momo said. He fled the country to avoid prosecution, and the squatters grabbed his house. This was the first Joe's Garage, which they held for seven years. (Relatives of the owner took them to court, but could not prove they owned the building.) Because of the irony of his name, the squatters used Charlie Chaplin as a symbol. (Chaplin was expelled from the U.S. as a communist during McCarthy's blacklist crusade.) In 2008 the water cannons of the police appeared at the door of Joe's Garage at 6:30 in the morning. It was time to move... across the street!
Nazima, a U.S. anthropology student, has been studying the squatters of Amsterdam for several years, immersing herself in their anti-gentrification campaigns. She shared her work, which is basically concerned with the internal dynamics of the squatter movement itself. She traces the dyamics and trajectory of activists' “careers in the movement as a scripted path to self-realization and autonomy.” She spent a while discussing conflict – the kind of thing artist Seth Tobocman limns so well in his graphic novel about NYC squats, “War in the Neighborhood” (1999). Through her work one can see how a squatted house can fail internally before it is evicted.
Cesar presented his work on the Italian social center movement in Milan in the mid-1970s, the high tide of the radical left. In only two years, between 1975 and '77, 35 illegal social centers opened in Milan – (among them were today's survivors Leon Cavallo and Cox 18). The city became a point of diffusion of the movement to other cities in Italy and abroad, especially Spain. Tino Buchholz, who just finished a film about Amsterdam called “Creativity and the Capitalist City,” reported on the big Hamburg meeting of Right to the City, which was nearly simultaneous with our conclave.
Miguel told us more about Spain, especially the encampment in the Puerta del Sol (which is packing up even as I write this – the first phase is over, but this movement is by no means finished). On the 15th of of May, Miguel went to the plaza with 500 people in the autonomist and libertarian bloc. There they found themselves in a crowd of 15,000, and their objections melted away. The group which had called the demonstration decided to occupy the plaza, and Miguel's bloc joined them under conditions they had not previously agreed to – i.e., no violence, reformist claims on the democratic system, talking to the mass media, etc. “But we liked that this demonstration was forbidden, management was absolutely horizontal, and no flags – even the anarchist flags were forbidden. Finally, taking the public space – we wanted always to mobilize people in the street.... Finally it was a very autonomous movement, even for people who never listened to the word 'autonomy' – it was absolutely new.” There were many problems, with homeless people, sexist attitudes by men, excessive drinking (a condition of this touristical square at any time), and a lack of political memory. “But the truth is that something changed. Now even squat social centers which didn't work together in the past are working together in this occupation.” (That is, the huge permitted social center in a government building called Tabacalera, and some illegal centers are working together. Recently, excellent analytic texts in English on this movement have appeared on the Transversal website and Interactivist.net.)
Hans Pruijt took on what he called an emerging argument among intellectuals that squatting is a precursor of neoliberalism. He outlined the reasons -- among them, that squatters and social centers are plugging holes left by the retreating state with their giveaway shops, language classes, free food, etc. This led to a lively discussion, particularly about the ways in which the squatting movement across Europe has become a sort of training ground for future managers and politicians.
While the “mini-SQEK” was fascinating as ever, I had also other fish to fry in Amsterdam. (The herring are running, and I ate some raw with chopped onions and pickles at a stand parked on a canal bridge.) I had an assignment in Amsterdam., to make a talk at the W139 art space. They were hosting a show by British artist Jonathan Monk – (Glasgow trained) – which was a kind of spectacular gloss on a 1989 show of “East Village” artists called “Horn of Plenty,” a show at the Stedelijk Museum which had influenced Monk as a student. He had W139 drop the ceiling on the spectacular interior space to exactly his own height while wearing high heels. The drop concealed about 10 meters of light-filled gallery, creating a bizarrely institutional environment to look at installation photographs of the 1990 exhibition. I had been recommended to the lanky director of W139, Tim Voss, to talk about the East Village district, aka the Lower East Side, “back in the day” – 1980s and '90s... but, typically, perversely, I talked about the Lower East Side in the 1960s. (If you're interested, a script of that talk will soon be posted on the “House Magic” website with the related Rote Flora show materials.) I'm afraid it was something of a mismatch. Monk is a very interesting artist, but political he is not. He seemed a little bewildered as I blathered on about Ben Morea, Valerie Solanas, Tuli Kupferberg, Bullet Space, Fly, ABC No Rio and the Rivington School – the standard roster of crusty heroes and heroines of the rebel LES. They are all really remote from the artists of the 1989 “Horn” show (at the time my gang called them the “neo-geos”). We did all agree that when there's no opportunities, artists really have to do it for themselves. (Jonathan did it in Glasgow, with his schoolmates.)
W139 is a prime example. It was squatted in 1979. I met Ad de Jong at Monk's opening party, a graphic designer and one of the original bunch who “cracked” the building. He told how a fellow wandered in then, a “financial guy,” who said his gang could secure the building for a long time if they did something for the community. So they made it a real art space. Now the W139 group owns the building, which has been beautifully renovated as one of the biggest cultural spaces in the center. It has a huge downstairs – which the artists' collective Jochen Schmith has asphalted(!), a bizarre floor treatment which made the opening party edgy with the tinkle of beer bottles just aching to be smashed... A friend of the crew later drove his custom made open road motorcycle around the place, making a hell of a lot of noise and a nice tire mark on the wall – it seemed superbly elegant and appropriate to the installation.
W139 is in the center, very close to the central station. They are surrounded now by “coffee shops” which sell marijuana and other intoxicants, and a stone's throw from the red light district where goggle-eyed young men oogle the ladies in their glass-fronted cages on the street.
What with the mini-SQEK and the talk for W139, I didn't have much of a chance to check out other squat scenes. Amsterdam abounds in them, past and present, despite the recent anti-squatting law. I made it to Schijnheilig (Shine-High-lig), a squatted cultural center in an old school which was hosting a music and concrete poetry night. (“It was in Dutch,” Renée Ridgway told me, to console me since I missed the performance.) Vincent Boschma, my host at W139, told me this place is due to be evicted in a wave of police actions against squatters next week. (Vincent was also busy with his installation in a deserted shopping center – but the artists did not squat, instead they have been allowed to use it) Although they will soon lose the place, the Schijnheilig was squatted by a group which reckons with being kicked out, just like the Really Free School in London. They will go on to another place after this. Renée and I went up to her place with Alan Smart. (She has a studio in the Kinkestraat, a famous old squat gone legal.) There we looked at Alan's collection of Provo and Kabouter documents, lovingly gathered from various antiquarian book shops. The vitality, creativity, and pure Dutch cheek of these movements is still palpable from these well-made (albeit cheaply produced) old pamphlets and books.
On my last day I biked around to look at Binnenpret and OCCI, two relatively recent squatted spaces out along the Overtoom, a busy street that runs near one side of the Vondel Park. Binnenpret is a complex of low buildings. One, an important venue for new music and punk bands in the city, has been renovated in some bizarre traditional manner. It is all tarted up with bright colors on bare wood, and looks like a postcard Swiss chalet. In the courtyard of Binnenpret, a complex of projects in small buildings, it's hippie-land. A bare-breasted Dutch couple darted out of the collective sauna to check the weather in the courtyard: “Oh, it's raining!,” and went back in. The lovely cafe, a glass-fronted jewel-box with a charming garden outside it was closed. Another joint, Ot301, is a giant dark 1955 office or school building fronting on a courtyard. Downstairs a finely tricked-out space is important for new music. The guy working there couldn't tell me about anything else going on in the building... but somewhere in there is the graphic design group Experimental Jetset. They are working on the legalization and contract for Ot301, visiting other places that began as squats to get ideas. Their last pit stop was ABC No Rio in New York. It's a small world after all....

Joe's Garage, een autonoom sociaal centrum in een kraakpand in oost amsterdam
www.joesgarage.nl/

Hamburg Right to the City conference in early June, 2011, an invitation to invites to collective confusions, encounters and diversions.
http://kongress.rechtaufstadt.net/

Creativity and the capitalist city, the struggle for affordable space in Amsterdam, a film by Tino Buchholz.
http://www.creativecapitalistcity.org/indexDe.html
(see also a trailer on YouTube)

i don't yet do this Twitter thing, but if you do, the hashtag for the 15th of May movement is #spanishrevolution

the contemporary art space W139
http://www.w139.nl/nl/

I will soon post the W139 texts to the House Magic website part which has related content, "Rote Flora solidarity show Spring 2011"
https://sites.google.com/site/housemagicbfc/rote-flora-solidarity-show-spring-2011

Schijnheilig, a nomadic collective in Amsterdam doing a queer venture of creative activism and critical yadda yadda
www.schijnheilig.org/

OCCII | Onafhankelijk Cultureel Centrum In It
www.occii.org/

Binnenpret
binnenpr.home.xs4all.nl/

OT301 home/news, studios/parties, cinema, de peper, gallery, agenda, archive ...
ot301.nl

Fun 'Endless Summer' Action...

2011-05-29T12:09:00.000-07:00

After my talk Monday night at Bluestockings Books, I am out of here (NYC). Some people from Real Democracy Now are in town from Spain. They are blogging in English about the occupations in Puerta del Sol, Madrid, and other parts of the country. I am hoping the people are still there when I return to town... Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, folks are taking off their clothes. Ask Katzeff tells us that around 1,000 people squatted an abandoned building near the free city of Christiania called Søminen. The idea is to turn the place into a self-managed social center. The photostream shows a really fun and wild-assed rave-up. The question is, can a party become an institution?

English blog on Spanish movement
http://ptqkblogzine.blogspot.com/2011/05/takethesquare-globalcamp.html

Photos in Java on the Copenhagen occupation
http://politiken.dk/fotografier/soundslides/ECE1293719/syv-dage-efter-stormen-paa-soeminen/

Back in the USSA

2011-05-17T08:41:00.001-07:00

I've been snuffling around the old neighborhood these days – the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Yes, of course, it's a zone of young corporate stiffs now. Some streets are solid with bars pouring cheap beer at perpetual happy hours. I made a weekend pub crawl, just to smell the crowds. They were all in rut. Outside the famous art bar Max Fish was a rope and two really big guys in black suits controlling entrance. They took my state ID and put it into a scanner device which recorded it. Then I could go inside. These are cops hired to protect the business from the cops. Max Fish was recently closed for serving and under-21. The building Max Fish is in was until recently owned by the Elliots, old school LES landlords. Then it went to a son of them, who is a global wheeler-dealer type. This schlub tried to get the place, lock stock and liquor license – in a kind of “primitive appropriation” of the cultural capital of artists that is revealing of the true state of creatives in the super-heated global cities today. When he was thwarted, the schlub sold it to the owner of American Apparel – a clothing company which people mistakenly believe is somehow a fair labor practice operation. (The company has “greenwashed” itself on that issue from the get-go, basing their advertising on a softcore update of the labor unions' own historical “Union Maid” [i.e., “made”] campaigns of the '30s. This new owner is really rich, not just a little rich, and he looks to have an in with the cops. Because the old-school bully tactics of the Elliot son have been replaced by continuous official harrassment of Max Fish. (Although the Fish is not alone in this; other places that serve a non-bourgeois clientele are also under pressure.) The kind of giant klieg lights you see being used on the main drug dealing streets of ghettos in Baltimore are set up to shine in the windows of Max Fish for no apparent reason. (They ought to flash “get out!”) And somehow it is nearly impossible to register a complaint about this via the city's 311 municipal help line. No city agency seems to be responsible for the lights which bear NYPD logos. For the artists who made this neighborhood cool, “The future's so bright I've got to wear shades.”
Around the corner on Houston Street in the new skyscraper built with German capital, the No Longer Empty group has installed an actually decent art show in a large vacant storefront. I told them they were the enemy, because in Europe their kind of group forestalls occupations by temporarily filling a prominent vacant property with cultural content. (Kind of like Max Fish, although there the illusion was that it was a business with some hope of continuous tenancy. “Don't worry, boss. We can fix that.”) The chipper young gals sitting the place were a little baffled by that. But that's the way in NYC, artists and their presence manipulated like quicksilver, flowing rapidly around the city's vacant spots like some kind of flouride treatment for the epidemic of caries infecting the commercial real estate market. The technique was pioneered by the daughter of Durst, a major developer of Times Square. She started Chashama to fill the vacated storefronts along 42nd Street before they were demolished. Chashama programs continue today. They just closed a street art exhibition in the vacant NY Public Library building across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. Chashama is intelligent, and fearless in their embrace of edgy (read “non-commodity”) art. They even hosted an early anarchist convergence. NL Empty is a lot more timid. And they certainly don't understand themselves as being essentially a volunteer-run version of the kind of companies that will fill your vacant building in Amsterdam and London with short-term tenants who sign away their rights to stay – the “squatter-proofing” companies. At the Berlin SQEK meeting, Hans Pruijt told us that representatives of these companies were working with him to lobby against the recent Dutch anti-squatter laws. Of course, like the CIA funding the Taliban... keeping a good thing going.
With its heavy security cordon, Max Fish was pretty sedate inside. Nowadays most East Village bars play such loud music that social intercourse is reduced to gulping drinks and smelling each others' behinds. So I could relax, among the other controlled, amidst the gloriously painted walls and lavish art displays. I chatted with bartender and painter Harry Druzd – all the employees there are artists – and then walked on, to the Bowery Poetry Club. Nearby another empty newly renovated storefront has been spraypainted “Private Property.” (Duh.) Inside, a sort-of art show seems to be in progress, evidenced by a Samo-style graffito on the wall to the effect that “I am my own person...” The two graffiti read together make a kind of odious continuity between individuality and ownership. I was philosophically disgusted. I walked into the Yippie Museum. “This place smells like cat piss,” I told the barista. He wanted me to leave. So I told my story, and the only other people in the place, a young man and his friend, told me, “That's a case of predicate logic.” Even so, it's dangerous. As the great Reverend Billy told us at “service” that Sunday, our freedoms are being commodified, and sold to us as products. Billy entertains to liberate. For the neo-culture industry, it is as the French journal Offensive puts it, “Divertir pour dominer.”

Max Fish, Lower East Side "original" art bar
http://www.maxfish.com/

Yippie Museum Cafe and Gift shop and the Lenny Bruce Academy of Sick Comedy
http://www.yippiemuseum.org/

Bowery Poetry Club, with "digital poet in residence" (??)
www.bowerypoetry.com/

Chashama -- group of theaters, gallery spaces, and studios
www.chashama.org/

Reverend Billy & The Church of Earthalujah!
www.revbilly.com/

Paris Is Burning

2011-04-26T03:58:00.000-07:00

My trip is done – Berlin, Hamburg, Paris – a rich experience, in forms both direct and mediated. Again I realize that for all I have learned, more in fact that I can tell, it is only scratching the surface of a vast networked cultural and political resistance tradition, a resistance that, having been denied systemic political outlets, has perforce become cultural and sportive. Stick this in your “creative city” and smoke it!
My hosts in Paris were in La Générale which is actually in Sèvres, across the river from the last metro stop. Their place is at the end of a rather harrowing walk along a metropolitan super-highway, towards forbidding looking corporate towers. I'm sorry, but Sèvres sucks. Along the Grand Rue one morning, I walked for an hour and could not find a cafe I wanted to have a coffee in. The mad expensive ones inside the corporate Novotel across the street were out of the question. After I passed the morning forest of salarymen on cel phones out front of the hotel, I walked on past sad businesses with bright neon-colored paper signs in profusion. The town seemed full of sour looking people, and devoid of interesting shops. Above the street, as if on cliffs, are obviously charming palaces – Louis Philippe's was here. But you are not invited. I don't know what is supposed to be going on in this town; some big schools and buildings with the ugliest architecture I've seen in a long while, kind of like parts of East Berlin or Poland, without those countries' good excuse for official ugliness.
But it wasn't always like this. Later, in a chat with Eric at La Générale, I am told that Sèvres was once a Red town (communist municipal government). The factories were here, and much social housing. Then suddenly the Renault plant was razed – it was a scandal at the time... During those “good old days,” there was a squatted street, or street with many squats – Rue des Caves... all evicted, and renamed “Rue des Caves de Roi” – like only the king ever stored wine here; revanchism with a capital R.
The artists of La Générale squatted a grand empty building in Belleville, central Paris some years back, and got popular. With wild parties attended by movie stars, they became hard to ignore. They were given short-term tenure in an abandoned school of ceramics behind the sprawling royal manufactory of porcelain that sits below Versailles, and began La Générale en Manufacture. All is quiet now, as the artists tiptoe around the listed historical building, making art and music in the light-filled premises. The theater people waited a couple of years, and then were given a building to continue normally. All of this history was laid out for me in a wonderful interview with the artists which will appear in “House Magic” #3. (I'm working on it now, rather than waiting like I did in July – with the consequence that all the Hamburg stuff didn't come out.)
I was welcomed by Jerome Guigue, Michel Chevalier's compadre. He was busy with his new baby, however, and Eric Lombard took over as my genial host. Eric is a punk connoisseur, and former co-conspirator in the Montreuil art squat Zoumééééé. Béatrice toured me around underground Paris, to Radio Libertaire, the “voice of the anarchist federation,” where I talked about “House Magic” and she translated. A rare honor, to be sure. Beatrice also took me to meet Anna in Montreuil, where we toured shuttered former squats, ending up at an apartment complex occupied by Malian immigrant laborers. The place, near metro Robespierre, had been opened by squatters who lived with the immigrants for a while before turning the place over to Bambara elders. Paris is the “second city” of Mali.
The next day we visited a newly opened squat in Fontenay, at the opposite end of Paris, in a former Catholic school that is awaiting transfer to the municipality. The house is across from the train station, and immediately identifiable by the red and black flags flying from its towers. Inside a handsome grubby bunch of young people, French, mostly but with a sprinkling of travelers from other nations – including two Russians. They were holding seminars on Marx's “Capital,” and the library is already full of books after only two weeks in occupation. (I saw Lefebvre's “Production of Space,” a theory of self-reflection for these guys.) There seems a chance to develop the place as a community center, open the door and let vendors sell in there, start a garden cafe, a library, a school for liberation education. But the squatters are young, and spoke self-consciously of their lack of unity. They were political kraakers, pure and simple, and they expect to be evicted. Someone else would have to do the job of insurrectionary urban development.
After spooning soup with the Fontenay occupiers, and washing some of their mountainous dishes in return – (I always feel compelled to do this when I eat with young anarchist squatters), I was invited to visit another. We rolled out to metro Bastille (do we see a pattern in these names?), to Le Bourdon-l'Arsenal, also festooned with red and black flags and defiant graffiti. The place has seen some memorable parties downstairs. Their logo is a deer in the street, fist raised beside a pile of burning debris. Behind the deer-person, what looks like a line of police with riot shields stand in front of a line of barbed wire -- or is it a crowd behind the animal? Maybe I am reading a cheerful fatalism into this image... I waited with the squatters for dinner. They were chatting and joking, and nervously looking out the window. The occupation had lost in court, and was awaiting eviction. “Ah, there's the flics now, across the street.” Very tense – really like a play of theater.
I am not really into talking about folks getting beaten and killed and all. “Accentuate the positive” is my motto. But it can be hard to avoid. I was looking for some photos of the Paris cops I saw at a recent demonstration for Côte d'Ivoire at metro stop Nation. (Mine were wretched and fearful.) But when I Googled for them, I got instead Washington D.C. police. Ugly? Yeah. I mean, these guys watched "Star Wars" and identified with Darth Vader. (They like black.) They do look exactly like the cops in Paris, except the French were dangling more guns. What's up with this shit? It takes Germans to tell the tale, Germany where cops like to visit bookstores and take things so others can't read them. From the University of Göteborg Resistance Studies Network, an article on how Richmond, Virginia police consider demonstrators terrorists, and warn of the new “methods of assembly” they are using. (Cel phones? Email lists? Blogs? “Can U Rd This?”) This is old news – January, '11. And uncovered by anarchists of the Wingnut Collective using Freedom of Information statutes. I wonder if these innovative police are in Bahrain and Syria now studying new methods of crowd control? Yes, well, sometimes you just have shoot people.

Le squat de la rue des caves à l'honneur
http://sevres2006.over-blog.com/article-12026863.html
although my French is wretched, you can see a chronological illustrated presentation here. This website is part of – http://sevres2006.over-blog.com/ext/http://www.lemonde.fr/web/vi/0,47-0@2-3246,54-946861@51-947082,0.html – which appears to be part of a 2007 Le Monde series on "Squats d'artistes, la culture en friche."

La Générale en Manufacture
http://www.lagenerale.org/

Radio Libertaire, 89.4, la voix de la fédération anarchiste
http://media.radio-libertaire.org/

Le Bourdon-l'Arsenal OSC
http://weshbastille.kif.fr/

Resistance Studies Network
http://resistancestudies.org/?p=1045

Berlín 2011: ¿Qué ha quedado de las okupaciones en el movimiento alternativo?

2011-04-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

por Miguel Angel Martinez
Guardado en: Movimiento Okupa, Movimientos Sociales, Espacios
El cuarto encuentro de SQEK (Squatting Europe Kollective) nos ha convocado a finales de marzo en Berlín. La ciudad está cambiando su apariencia a gran velocidad desde que cayó el Muro que la dividió sangrientamente de 1961 a 1989, y no menos mudanzas han ido experimentado estas últimas décadas los movimientos sociales de la izquierda radical. Como siempre, nuestro objetivo en tanto que grupo de investigadores-activistas dista mucho de enclaustrarnos en nuestras disquisiciones académicas por lo que aprovechamos cada encuentro para empaparnos en la efervescencia política de la ciudad y para compartir impresiones con la gente que nos acoge. En esta ocasión podía resultar paradójico que nos reuniésemos en un país donde las okupaciones están, en principio, proscritas y son ferozmente abortadas antes de sus primeras 24 horas de exposición pública. Sin embargo, todavía es posible percibir la estela de una de las oleadas de okupación más interesantes que hubo en Europa hasta 1981, por una parte, y en los años inmediatos a la reunificación de las dos Alemanias, por otra. Y su interés radica en que suscitaron una simultánea actividad represiva y negociadora que no dejó a nadie indiferente. ¿Qué ha quedado de todo aquello, pues? ¿Ha desaparecido finalmente la okupación del repertorio de acción y de identidad de la izquierda radical de la ciudad?
Carla Macdougall (profesora de historia de la universidad de Rutgers, New Jersey) y Armin Kuhn (politólogo realizando su tesis doctoral en la universidad de Potsdam) fueron nuestros cicerones por algunos de los hitos históricos del barrio de Kreuzberg que, en su mayor parte, quedó del lado occidental tras la escisión postbélica. Partiendo de la Oranienplatz nos indicaron la multitud de edificaciones residenciales que originalmente se habían apelmazado junto a fábricas y almacenes, alojando a humildes inmigrantes alemanes y turcos, y acumulando muchas deficiencias en su habitabilidad durante los lustros posteriores a la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Desde mediados de la década de 1950 comenzaron a idearse planes de renovación del barrio que suponían drásticas demoliciones en el conjunto del distrito. No obstante, poco a poco las protestas de los residentes empujaron a los sucesivos urbanistas a aceptar procesos participativos y a diseñar, ya en la década de 1970, una rehabilitación general menos agresiva, que no expulsara a la población trabajadora y que recuperara los espacios industriales y los patios dando lugar a los numerosos jardines y parques infantiles que son visibles hoy en día. En aquel período de intenso movimiento vecinal asambleario surgieron múltiples comités -como el pionero SO 36 del que hay abundante iconografía en el fascinante museo comunitario de Adelbergstrasse- que optaron por las okupación de edificios vacíos como un modo más de intervenir en los procesos de rehabilitación.
Sólo en Kreuzberg, Macdougall y Kuhn estiman en unas 160 las okupaciones de aquel período. De ellas, unas 120 adquirieron posteriormente un estatuto legal y las restantes fueron desalojadas. Al menos cinco casos, como los de Naunynstrasse y Mariannenstrasse (Schokoladenfabrik), se constituyeron como proyectos feministas y lesbianos que han perdurado hasta la actualidad. En realidad, aunque el movimiento urbano tenía por entonces una fuerza social inusitada, la mayoría de colectivos okupantes aceptaron la legalización tanto porque el nuevo gobierno conservador -desde mayo de 1981- no les daba un sólo día de respiro en la ilegalidad, como por las enormes ventajas económicas que les proporcionaba. Si los okupas negociaban un contrato adecuado con la propiedad del inmueble okupado, el gobierno de la ciudad-Estado (Stadt) les concedía amplias subvenciones para renovar el edificio: en torno al 80% a fondo perdido y permitiendo que el 20% restante se aportase en forma de trabajo por parte de los residentes. Al final, las condiciones de cada contrato dependían mucho del tipo de propietario, del estado del edificio y del vigor organizativo del proyecto de cada colectivo okupante, pero, en su mayoría, se firmaron contratos de alquiler por períodos de unos 30 años. Los problemas, por lo tanto, han arreciado cuando los contratos iban expirando y los propietarios se han negado a prorrogarlos o, incluso antes, han alegado su incumplimiento. Los desalojos policiales no se han hecho esperar y a ese fatídico destino se abocó recientemente a Liebigstrasse 14, en el distrito de Friedischain, que cerró sus puertas el pasado mes de febrero después de una intensa campaña de protestas que culminó con una manifestación trufada de disturbios y arrestos.
En Berlín apenas hay ya nuevas okupaciones pero estamos en una época en la que se suceden los desalojos de antiguas okupaciones que han subsistido en la legalidad como “hausprojekts”. El caso más sonado en los últimos años lo protagonizaron los habitantes de Yorckstrasse 59. Dos inversores privados, cuyas fotos y viviendas se difundieron ampliamente en carteles de denuncia, se hicieron con la propiedad del edificio y con diversas triquiñuelas legales consiguieron el desahucio en 2005. La respuesta social inmediata fue una okupación de unas dependencias municipales abandonadas en el complejo de edificios de Bethanien, donde se ubican un hospital psiquiátrico, una escuela infantil, un comedor y salas para ensayos de teatro. New Yorck fue el nombre que le dieron al nuevo proyecto que, sorprendentemente, no fue desalojado el mismo día de su apertura pública. Después de dos años de movilizaciones continuas las autoridades municipales temieron un incremento de la tensión y aguardaron cinco días, pero entonces ya era demasiado tarde y la policía se negó a ejecutar el desalojo al margen de los procedimientos legales. Unos meses más tarde el nuevo gobierno de izquierdas del distrito también intentó el desalojo pero enseguida aceptó negociar con los okupas y se firmó un acuerdo por un alquiler mensual de 6000 euros. El New Yorck se dividió entre un “hausprojekt” con 30 habitaciones y un centro social con salas de reuniones. Pagando una renta aproximada de 200 euros cada habitación se consiguen abonar 5000 euros, y los restantes 1000 quedan como responsabilidad de los distintos proyectos políticos y sociales que alberga el centro social, entre los que se han incluido las jornadas de SQEK.
Podrían parecer precios elevados si se desconociese la fulgurante transformación que ha sufrido la ciudad en la última década. En un artículo del número de abril de 2011 de la revista berlinesa en inglés EXB, se registraba un incremento del 4,3% en los alquileres y 5% en los precios de compraventa durante el pasado año. La elitización y la globalización capitalista de la ciudad han sido promocionadas con vehemencia por las autoridades buscando la atracción de turistas, sedes de empresas y capitales inversores. Para ello no han escatimado en recursos públicos con el fin de dotarla de una imagen cultural, urbana y arquitectónica acorde a esas expectativas. Las políticas públicas en favor de la vivienda social asequible, por el contrario, se han resentido notablemente a pesar de haber contado con un considerable patrimonio público en esa materia. Por mencionar una de las enajenaciones más escandalosas, en 2004 se vendieron 60.000 viviendas públicas al lamentablemente famoso banco Goldman Sachs a un precio por unidad de unos 6.100 euros. En 2009 el banco consiguió vender 15.000 de esos pisos a precios que rondaban los 50.000 euros cada uno (Joel Alas, EXB, abril 2011).
Kreuzberg y Friedrischain son todavía las zonas más populares y de mayor diversidad social de Berlín donde se habían concentrado la mayoría de hausprojekts, aunque en los últimos años su imagen multicultural y su animada vida urbana les han servido también para atraer nuevos residentes, cafés, empresas de servicios, especuladores inmobiliarios y operaciones de regeneración urbana. Es decir, que el incremento de precios y la expulsión de las clases trabajadoras está extendiéndose implacable por sus calles con la consiguiente repercusión en acortar la esperanza de vida de los proyectos de vida colectiva. En realidad, tal como apunta Sara, una de las más longevas habitantes de Rote Insel -el hausprojekt situado en Mannsteinstrasse, en el distrito de Schoneberg, que nos ofreció alojamiento- en algunos casos ha desparecido completamente el “habitar en común” que inspiró a casi todos los hausprojekt en sus albores. Desaparecen las cocinas y las salas comunes, se cierran con llave los pisos y, en ocasiones, se llega a adquirir individualmente la propiedad de las viviendas, olvidando toda relación con los vecinos y compañeros activistas previos. Rote Insel es uno de los proyectos que más se resiste a esa deriva. En una larga conversación con varios de sus miembros y revisando las reliquias de su álbum de fotos pudimos reconstruir los dilemas que se les han presentado a otras experiencias semejantes. Rote Insel fue okupado en 1981 y, tras muchos debates y rupturas internas, negoció un contrato de arrendamiento con el gobierno del distrito en 1984. Las obras de acondicionamiento del edificio, otrora casi en ruinas, avanzaron muy lentamente y con muchos reflujos que casi anulan la aportación económica pública. Se prolongaron durante diez años y los 25 primeros habitantes vivieron confinados a una cocina y muy pocos dormitorios. En 1997 firmaron como asociación (incluyendo a un centro social juvenil y unos espacios de aparcamiento) un nuevo contrato por 20 años más. Martin, Mufflon, Kathia e Iratxe -algunos de sus actuales residentes con quienes charlamos- consideran que será complicada la renovación del contrato cuando este concluya aunque de momento se concentran en resolver en su asamblea quincenal los abundantes conflictos de gestión que ya comporta todo el proyecto. El edificio tiene una fachada gris y granate, con una medianera pintada alegremente con imágenes y alusiones a los colectivos de la izquierda radical. Tiene dos puertas independientes y en cada piso hay una cocina común, además de todas las habitaciones sin cerradura. En uno de los bloques hay un salón donde se realizan las asambleas y se acoge a los visitantes ocasionales que les visitan constantemente. Excepto Sara y sus hijos, ninguno de los okupas originales sigue morando en el edificio. Al ser preguntados por los conflictos pasados, hay cierta unanimidad en señalara las drogadicciones como principal amenaza a la vida colectiva. Cuando se trataba de heroína, la expulsión era expedita. Sin embargo, declaran que no tienen unas normas de convivencia escritas y que tan sólo se guían por dos principios básicos: la prohibición de la violencia entre ellos y una mínima colaboración en las tareas colectivas. El consumo habitual de drogas, argumentan, suele conllevar relaciones violentas en la comunidad y, por lo tanto, no se permite que sus causantes permanezcan en ella. Limpiar baños, cocinas, escaleras y zonas comunes es algo que se consigue sin turnos fijos, con un poco de presión colectiva informal.
Desde octubre de 2010 se alojan provisionalmente en el salón Aritz, David y Saioa. Han venido de Vitoria a trabajar en Berlín en lo que pueden (empleos muy por debajo de su cualificación debido a su impericia con el idioma alemán) y esperan a que quede libre alguna habitación en Rote Insel para poder establecerse con más comodidad. Junto a Yunai, un arqueólogo turco que escapó del servicio militar obligatorio de su país, y el brasileño Gustavo, se encargan todos los viernes de la “solipizza” en el local del edificio. Vendiendo excelentes pizzas caseras a 2 euros cada una y cervezas a 1 euro constituyen una de las múltiples citas gastronómicas (voku) que se ofertan cada día en los espacios sociales de los hausprojekts, anunciadas puntualmente en la última página del boletín mensual StressFaktor. El mes pasado dedicaron la recaudación a la solidaridad con Liebig14. Son parte de la comisión de Rote Insel que gestiona esta especie de “bar privado” (por falta de licencia legal no está abierto al público y es necesario llamar al timbre para entrar) siempre con fines solidarios. Tampoco el taller de bicicletas está oficialmente publicitado, aunque resulta de utilidad para propios y allegados. Este relativo cierre contrasta con los “centros sociales” de otros hausprojekts muy conocidos y concurridos como el teatro y la sala The Clash en el Mehringhof, que antaño fue el principal bastión “autónomo”, o la Schokoladenfabrik donde existe un “haman” (baño y masaje árabe) sólo para mujeres y una cafetería en apariencia indistinguible de todas las demás con aspecto bohemio que se concentran en la zona. Como era de suponer, para algunos activistas esos proyectos de autoempleo pueden caer fácilmente bajo el aura de la despolitización, del consumo y de la gentrification.
A simple vista no es fácil discernir un hausprojekt de cualquier otro edificio. Ni siquiera la presencia de graffitti, frases elocuentes en las fachadas o coloridos murales son un indicio fiable ya que en algunos barrios son prácticas muy extendidas (la campaña RYC -Reclaim Your City- por ejemplo, se puede ver estarcida con grandes letras en muchas medianeras). Sólo la guía de personas involucradas en ellos puede ayudar a bosquejar su localización y las conexiones mutuas que mantienen. Los mencionados desalojos o las amenazas de próximos desalojos (como el que se cierne sobre la Kopi desde 2006) han puesto de manifiesto que todavía suscitan un apoyo amplio entre la izquierda radical de la ciudad. Martin añade que el otro punto de consenso es la crítica contra la elitización (gentrification) y la expulsión de residentes trabajadores. Pero, según este activista, los ejes de división clásicos entre militantes izquierdistas alemanes perduran y hacen mucho daño: el conflicto Israel-Palestina, el recurso a la violencia política, el sexismo y el anti-fascismo. Las negociaciones puntuales con los representantes políticos, por su parte, son aceptadas tácticamente por muchos colectivos aunque se rechacen en general, según la opinión de los miembros de Rote Insel. Dido, un miembro de la organización del Queerruption, indica que hoy en día predominan los grupos anarquistas en el movimiento alternativo de Berlín, coexistiendo con una organización “autónoma”, algunos colectivos punk, varias organizaciones comunistas extraparlamentarias, antifascistas, ecologistas, veganos, grupos de mujeres, artistas y empresas sociales. Más o menos, todo lo que aparece en la publicación regular StressFaktor y que él prefiere denominar simplemente como “movimiento contracultural”. El “May Day” o Primero de Mayo alternativo sigue siendo uno de los puntos álgidos de expresión de las facciones más combativas de ese movimiento en la calle, pero el resto del año no es frecuente asistir a convergencias muy duraderas.
Carla y Armin nos invitaron una tarde a conocer el proyecto Regenbogen Frabik (Fábrica Arcoiris) como otro ejemplo de resistencia y construcción de alternativas de vida social sostenibles y autogestionarias, a pesar de su relativamente precaria legalización. Aun no han pagado ni una sola de las mensualidades de alquiler a las que se comprometieron cuando cerraron las negociaciones con el Senado de Berlín en 1984. Y, sin embargo, hace poco han conseguido de esa misma entidad una subvención de 100.000 euros para arreglar los tejados y remodelar su salón de teatro y cine al que acuden espectadores de toda la ciudad. Andy, uno de sus más veteranos animadores, nos relató, prolijo, que el contrato firmado incluía la responsabilidad de los okupas en la descontaminación del suelo del patio. Ahora hay un parque infantil situado en el centro de la parcela y Andy asegura que la contaminación ya es mínima y que la tierra se analiza regularmente. El día de la visita -miércoles- tanto el taller de bicis como el de carpintería estaban restringidos exclusivamente para las mujeres. Además de un café-restaurante abierto al público en general en la calle Lausitzerstrasse 22, al lado del canal del Spree que atraviesa Kreuzberg, entre sus variadas iniciativas se cuenta un “hostel” con precios muy asequibles (de 10 a 38 euros por noche) en el que, aplicando a rajatabla el principio de “auto-ayuda”, se solicita a los huéspedes que limpien sus habitaciones.
Las viejas instalaciones fabriles y el bloque de 18 viviendas adyacente que constituyen Regenbogen Fabrik se okuparon en 1981 por unas 50 personas. Las motivaciones de aquellos jóvenes eran ya diversas en sus inicios: desde quienes deseaban experimentar con formas colectivas de convivencia y compartiendo la maternidad, hasta quienes la concebían como una lucha contra las políticas municipales de vivienda. Fueron el germen del partido verde en la ciudad y recibieron también su apoyo cuando aquel obtuvo cargos municipales representativos. Eso puede explicar, en parte, su anómala supervivencia que, incluso, les obligó a reokupar el espacio en 1991 cuando la propiedad pasó de manos privadas a manos públicas (eran tiempos en los que no había llegado a su fin el reflujo de la ola de okupaciones en el antiguo Berlín Este). Actualmente tienen un contrato por 30 años más y colaboran con los servicios municipales de educación infantil y de desempleo, pero las autoridades, según Andy, no cejan en sus intenciones de privatizar este vibrante centro social (la mayoría de las viviendas, no obstante, parecen más consolidadas y ajenas a ese acoso).
En su repaso a casi tres décadas de activismo en Berlín, Sara, de Rote Insel, constataba: en la década de 1980 nadie tenía un empleo, en la actualidad casi todo el mundo está trabajando y queda poco tiempo para dedicarlo a la política. El Estado de Bienestar ha reducido sustancialmente las rentas básicas que proporcionaba antes a los desempleados que se dedicaban a tiempo completo a la agitación y a construir formas de vida alternativas. Andy también incidía en este punto y señalaba que cada vez son mayores los requisitos a los desempleados exigiéndoles prácticas, formación y la aceptación de trabajos que algunos militantes han preferido cumplir en empresas sociales como las de la Regenbogen Fabrik. Berlín está dejando de ser la ciudad barata que era antes de su intensiva globalización urbanizadora y cultural y la infraestructura política constituida por los hausprojekt, al menos, proporciona cientos de alojamientos asequibles y recursos comunes a buena parte de la izquierda política de la ciudad. Las okupaciones que están en su origen, en definitiva, no han desaparecido de la memoria colectiva e, incluso, se siguen esgrimiendo en momentos puntuales. Hace mucho que dejaron de ser un ingrediente fundamental de su identidad política, pero la intensa lucha que auspiciaron es reconocida como la fuente de los modelos de convivencia alternativos y de crítica a la ciudad capitalista y elitizadora que de nuevo afila sus garras contra quienes la sufren o contra quienes disienten de ese modelo. El campamento instalado en los últimos meses por quienes defienden las riberas del Spree frente a la especulación urbanística, se enmarca en los movimientos urbanos actuales que siguen recurriendo a la okupación como una herramienta política útil y transformadora, aunque ocasional debido a las fuertes restricciones legales a las que se enfrentan y a la no menos condicionante huella de toda la pretérita institucionalización. Por eso, con todas las contradicciones y recesos que también han marcado al movimiento alternativo de Berlín, el encuentro de SQEK se enriqueció con todas esas complicidades y con los conocimientos in situ que alientan, necesariamente, la construcción teórica colectiva en la que estamos embarcados. [Alan W. Moore, uno de nuestros miembros más inquietos y que acaba de presentar una exposición en el Rota Flora de Hamburgo, ha publicado su propia versión en inglés de estas peripecias y descubrimientos: http://occuprop.blogspot.com En breve se actualizarán los archivos y el espacio web de SQEK, aunque hay una lista de correo electrónico mediante la que se puede contactar: squattingeurope@listas.nodo50.org]
image: Squattastic, London

Discussion on “Squats, Social Centers and Autonomous Spaces” at Tamiment Library, NYU for the Anarchist Book Fair, NYC April 2011 Now Online

2011-04-08T03:44:00.000-07:00

This excellent multi-generational discussion on “Squats, Social Centers and Autonomous Spaces” at the Tamiment Library, New York University, held for the Anarchist Book Fair, NYC April 2011 – was recently Youtubed by the organizer, Sebastian Gutierrez in several segments starting at: "Squats, Social Centers and Autonomous Spaces - I".

Hanging Out: That's What It's About

2011-04-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

I've been abandoned by my host in Hamburg – something about a birthday party in the countryside... He rode a horse for the first time. So I wander down to the Gängeviertel, an artists' occupation in Hamburg Mitte (central city). I've blogged this place before, on my summertime research visit here last year. It was occupied in '09 by artists who already had studios in this crumbling complex of low-rise buildings. It's a block of 19th century workers' housing, very quirky architecture. (That's the photo, ca. 1900, above.) In the past it was nothing special – but now it is. It's the last of its kind in central Hamburg. Yesterday it was lunchtime, and everything was closed. There's nowhere down there to eat. The workers on the giant building projects which ring the Gängeviertel are gobbling lunch in a tiny takeout sandwich shop. By now I really have to pee, and face the prospect of choosing a place to eat simply because it has a toilet. (Ah, age...) But at the Gängeviertel I find a high-mounted compost toilet! Perfect – it's a feminist project; I'm not exactly sure how or why... some fool pissed in the sawdust anyhow.
I find a nice lunch special up the street at Happi Sushi, a family run shop very unlike the main run of office worker takeout joints. Upon returning I find Regina opening her shop at the Gängeviertel. It's full of artists' works very low-priced, postcards, etc. – souvenirs of the artists' complex. Regina is an old-time San Francisco squatter who's been in Hamburg for 15 years. In the bay area, she worked with Rene Castro and Project Artaud. (Dunnno about anything about that, but the name is right by me; I love Antonin.) Contrary to what we thought when we were doing our show there last week, it turns out Rote Flora had an “art club” upstairs 10 years ago. It's been forgotten by present users. (Later I'm told it was more like a bar, with drinks and sketching, and it moved out.)
We are chatting and along comes C., a guy I met last year who loves the Gängeviertel. He's into a jazz festival in Morocco, a charming guy who's lived an adventurous life as a “permanent beginner.” We have a coffee, and he tells me stories of sailing on the Mediterranean, eating crab with ganja pancakes... the cafe smells of hashish. It's the place where you can lose your whole day... Regina and C. tell me about an art circus that passed through here from Lisbon on its way to Paris – “Arte Ocupa.” Things could really get rolling, if I can hook up with those guys. Now I am packing packing for Paris. Popped by Frise artists' house in Altona where I stayed in the summer to say hello to Sabine Mohre, my host then. She says Gängeviertel may get the chance to buy their squat – in Hamburg, that's how they say “we love you.”

Photo: Brauerknechtgraben um 1900, in the Gängeviertel
posted on http://hummel-hummel.blog.de

LINKS:

http://das-gaengeviertel.info/

the-toilet-project.tumblr.com

http://www.arte-ocupa.vipulamati.org/

We Squat – House Projects, Collective Factories and Scholars in Berlin

2011-04-02T01:54:00.000-07:00

Berlin! The big city, just like I pictured it. The style here knocks me out. And the trains get me lost. But the place is very doable on a bicycle, so I got one, a fat tire clunker that was just fine. The Squatting Europe (SQEK) conference was a blast. Most of us bunkered up all together at the Rote Insel, a “house project” squatted in 1981 southwest of Mitte (central city) in -----------. The place was big, with screaming murals on the outside, graffiti and radical posters all up inside it. Lots of Basque stuff – the nationalist movement that spawned ETA, an armed clandestine group – and “antifa” (anti-nazi, anti-fascist) slogans and decor. The house logo is an AK-47 between two palm trees! But really, most of that militance seems to be in the past. R----, who showed me around the house when I arrived, is a little embarrassed by that logo, and all the really hardcore posters are yellowed and peeling... Which doesn't mean these guys don't go on the streets when the state fucks with their movement. Rich folks' cars do sometimes get burned and bank windows get broken when a long-term house project gets evicted by the court so a developer can get to work. There was one of these dust-ups not too long ago, actually.
We, however, was in like Flynn, staying in the visitors' quarters of the house project. Gunejt, a resident from Istanbul, cooked a splendid meal for us on the first night, working from almost nothing it seemed. I bought a couple bottles of red wine, very cheap and good here in a city of beer, but a real luxury for the guests at the Rote Insel. Gunejt – it's pronounced like a French “Jeunait” maybe – is a trained photographer who worked archeological sites and now is cooking to get by in Berlin. A sharp cookie and a sweetheart. His brother lives in a community of “overnight houses” in Turkey. In these towns he said, is “the craziest architecture you ever saw.” The overnight houses are traditionally legal – if you build a house on unused land during one day's time, you can stay. In practice, the government often sends soldiers to evict them. “They do what they want,” Gunejt said.
The next day, the rest of the crew rolled in. Lynn from Vermont, Edward (mujinga.net) from the Brighton-based Cowley Club, Miguel and Elly from Madrid (CSOA Casa Blanca and Critical Mass, respectively), and Daniel from France with his partner. Tisba, who organized the conference on-site, showed up and jawed with R----, our host. They had never met; all had been arranged through someone else. This is the nature of good connections in the culture of resistance – they are fast and firm.
The conference was amazing. I have never been to anything like it (and I've been to beaucoup). We heard each other's papers, and responded carefully and insightfully. Nearly every conversation was meaningful. We lunched on-site at a kitchen run by a street theater company. Then we were also toured! The Rote Insel had their bar night and Voku – peoples' kitchen – on Monday night as always, and they told us the story of their house. The next day we were toured through an even older squat-based house and collective working project, the Regenbogen Fabrik (Rainbow Factory). Our grinning host with the red bandana was simultaneously translated by two young historians as he told of the 19th century factory yard and houses behind. These had been painstakingly renovated with a good deal of sustainable technology over the course of decades. Among the projects in the factory is a woodshop and a bike shop. Both do conventional work, but they are run collectively and they are open to a public to participate and learn these crafts. The Regenbogen also has a beautiful “sofa cinema” – a large room full of yes, couches – with 16mm and 35mm projection and a theatrical video beamer. This project actually was burned out by neo-nazis some years ago. I wonder why it is the dream factory that is seen as so threatening; the Surrealists of Paris also endured a fascist attack on their cinema in the 1930s. Regenbogen Fabrik's most successful money projects are a cafe and a hostel. I'll try this charming cooperative compound on my next visit.
Next we were toured through Kreuzberg by Carla and Armin, two historians of the movement. Carla showed us sites that have figured in the redevelopment of the district in the tangled history of struggle between the forces of capital and the peoples' resistance. That sounds so lame and old hat... But, like the conference papers, you will have to visit the House Magic website in the coming weeks and months, or wait for the book, to learn more! Actually maybe not – a show is being planned about the squatting movement in Kreuzberg for one week in early September. I expect it will be amazing. Already it is amazing that in fact there is no book on the squatting movement in Berlin! A handful of novels have been written. And a number of archives are bulging with material – zines and flyers and posters and videos. But the story of this decades long resistance to top-down urban redevelopment has simply not been told. It will be as new to most young Berliners as to the rest of the world.
The SQEK meetings were held in the New Yorck Bethanien, a big social center in an old hospital that was squatted several years ago. (That story is told on the House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence website, and in zine #1 – it searches up easy.) NYB will host some version of the Hamburg show that is now at the Rote Flora – when and how ain't yet clear. I booked out of the Rote Insel to stay with A-----, a graphic designer who is working at the NYB and will help arrange the show. He's made some knockout graphics for the Mediaspree campaign, an attempt to hold back the privatization of the Spree riverbank. We cycled by a quaint old Bauwagenplatz – a trailer encampment – along the Spree this morning. They host a beer garden and stage during the summer months. A----- said the camp faced a cooperative living development that had been built by well-to-do people. Despite the announced good intentions of these bourgeois, A----- felt the days of the encampment were numbered. Someone can make a lot of money there, right? Yeah. I had a chance to return to the Kreuzberg museum where I had seen a beautiful book “Wagenburg: Leben in Berlin” about these encampments. It is a portfolio of prints – maybe made in the museum's spacious book arts workshop – celebrating the free-living style of these gypsy-type encampments.
On my last day here I breakfasted in the Bateau Ivre cafe (drunken boat; a reference to Rimbaud). It's on the former “squatter village” square near the Bethanien. Then I visited a spot we had passed in the tour, the Oh 21 bookshop. We had been told this shop was the continuance of a squat infoshop. So are many bike shops in Berlin continuing from the open workshop days of squatting. Oh 21 had a nice poster in the window of a moose kissing a camel – it advertises a forthcoming event queer and transgender people for which they are a sponsor. I bought a copy of Alexander Kluge's epic film on Marx and Eisenstein, hoping it is subtitled in English. (The Goethe Institut showed this over three days in New York City recently.) I also picked up a back copy of “Interim,” a cheap-printed radical zine that happened to have an article on the New Yorck Bethanien in it. I asked if this was the same magazine that the police had confiscated at the Schwarze Risse (black crack) bookstore in the Mehringhof? They told us this story of the police in the bookshop, and I could scarcely believe it. In these days of e-info, why bother to bull into a bookstore? Yes, she told me. They had been five times to the Oh 21 to do the same thing. Zounds! Old habits die hard...
There is too much more to tell of this intense exposure to the deep squatting culture of Berlin – and I am not really taking a rest after the pressure cooker. Today I am off to Hamburg to see and talk about our show at the Rote Flora...

Berlin Conference on Squat Research, March 29-31 // Solidarity Show at Rote Flora Open Now

2011-03-23T04:31:00.000-07:00

We're going to Berlin! The SQEK group – Squatting Europe Research Collective – is having a conference at the New Yorck in the Bethanien occupation in Kreuzberg, West Berlin. SQEK is described in this text from the June 2010 London meeting (I blogged it), “Squatting Europe is a research network focusing on the squatters' movement. Our aim is to produce reliable and fine-grained knowledge about this movement not only as an end in itself, but also as a public resource, especially for squatters and activists. Critical engagement, transdisciplinarity and comparative approaches are the bases of our project. The group is an open transnational collective (Squatting Europe Kollective, SQEK) whose members represent a diversity of disciplines and fields of interest seeking to understand the issues associated with squats and social centres across the European Union.”
It's militant research – an academic trend that a 2009 seminar in New York laid out, complete with bibliography, including the texts in David Graeber and Stevphen Shukaitis (eds), Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). And the New Yorck Bethanien is a good place to have it. It's a recent occupation in the old hospital complex in Kreuzberg. Their website explains, “On June 11th 2005, residents and collectives of the house project 'Yorck 59' squatted 2 floors of the southern wing of the Bethanien, this happening just 5 days after being evicted violently by more than 500 cops from the Yorck Street 59. Since then, many new collectives and groups joined the project, in spite of repression and threats of eviction. One of them being the 'Initiative Zukunft Bethanien', which in June 2006 handed over more than 14.000 signatures to the district government - to call for an open cultural, artistic, political and social centre in the Bethanien and to prevent the buildings privatization.”
I have been very busy – and Michel Chevalier busier still, making this show in Hamburg which is up now: "Nicht das Neue, nicht das Alte, sondern das Notwendige," a No Wave Squatter Punk (Anti)Art Ausstellung, March 21-April 3, 2011. This is an exhibition at the Rote Flora (Red Flower), an occupied theater in Hamburg, Germany on the occasion of their negotiation for renewal of permission to use... In other words, a solidarity show with this center for independent political culture. The show consists largely of art information sent from New York City by agents of Colab and ABC No Rio that show a continuous history of radical culture in that global city.
Michel enthuses: “For two weeks an attempt will be made to put as much life and sense as possible into a mythical era that has not yet been fully understood: the tumultuous last gasps of musical and art rule-breaking in the capital of the twentieth century. In the first week, the Rote Flora will house an historical panorama (prints, books, posters, zines, videos, records) of the radically anti-commercial music, film and art-collective production that evolved in several low-income (and crumbling!) neighborhoods of New York City in the late seventies and early eighties. These people were not rule-breaking formalists of the ivory-tower type. Their struggles included attacks on the organization of society through norms, repression, and neoliberal "urban renewal" plans, and their gritty gallows-humor and clear focus was a karate kick against the sunny amnesia, the return to the 1950s, that Reagan and his friends in the consciousness industry propagated with their overwhelming means. Most of the rule-breakers we look back on said goodbye, forever, to normal careers and even, in the case of the many featured artists who were also squatters, to physical safety.
“In the second week, the previous artifacts will be supplemented by the more recent research and concerns of some of the "survivors" of this time and place, in particular the information project undertaken by Alan Moore (Colab, ABC No Rio), dedicated to raising awareness of Social Centers in squatted buildings worldwide, of which the Rote Flora is an example. Moore's new book on politicized collectives between 1969 and 1985 will also be included in the exhibition, and he will come for a talk at the Rote Flora on April 3rd. Our program will be further amplified by food from the Volksküche, a DJ battle, video screenings, a performance by Deus Ex Machina (Berlin), and a satirical DIY treatment of a wealthy Hamburg polit-kitsch painter. This project is the first attempt to collect these materials on this scale in Europe.”
I can't wait to see it!
MEANwhile, very cool and dire action on the left and right in London – Squattastic group is mobilizing against the upcoming anti-squatter law push. (Many cool Nils Norman-esque posters on their blogspot). And the Really Free School is rolling along, being very smart and engaged. (No gods, no schoolmasters – only you and alla youse.) Wunderbar dass todos geht fort – hulloo! hulloo!

LINKS:

Some materials from SQEK are at:
http://sqek2010.blogspot.com/

The SQEK program of talks, and my notes from the 2010 London conference are at:
https://sites.google.com/site/housemagicbfc/

This Is Forever militant and co-research seminar syllabus:
http://www.thisisforever.org/fall-seminar

New Yorck in the Bethanien
http://www.yorck59.net/

Squattastic posters are cool
http://squattastic.blogspot.com/

Really Free School
http://reallyfreeschool.org/?paged=2

“Prepare for the General Strike”

2011-03-10T10:15:00.001-08:00

Eric Drooker's sticker for the IWW Madison is getting us ready -- "Be prepared for the General Strike if and when it is called..." (The feline lead in the picture is the anarchist 'sabo-cat.')
Now it continues... More and more Republican-controlled states in the U.S. are trying to break their public employee unions. (My information is mainly from the close daily reporting of democracynow.org newscasts.) A chief target is teachers. Maybe in a while teaching will become a job for which you only need to know how to read – like in Afghanistan, a country to which Slavoj Zizek recently compared the U.S.. In addition to the prolonged occupation of the Wisconsin statehouse in Madison, there have been other demonstrations at the statehouse in Michigan. Although the attack on the politically powerful public sector unions is happening in other states, Wisconsin's right wing is taking the hardest line. (Home of Joe McCarthy, after all.)
My mom is there, watching TV and fretting. Now, apparently, despite the flight of the Democratic legislators to avoid having to lose the vote, the governor's union-busting bill has passed due to some shifty parliamentary maneuvering. Already, over the years, unions in Wisconsin have been weakened by the corporate flight of jobs to other states, and overseas. For Wisconsin, the pauperization of the public education system spells an end to a future skilled workforce. The right now is closing in for the kill. If these chumps get their way, Wisconsin will become a right-to-work state, like Mississippi – ripe to exploit a non-union work force. The campaign is well-orchestrated. Now, paid advertisements are running, setting private sector workers against public sector union workers. Likely then big corporations like those controlled by the infamous Koch brothers will come in with lots of nice low-wage jobs. My mom is appalled. She says, “Everything I've taken for granted all my life” is over with. Everything is being dismantled so easily, and so fast. Now she can see how it went in the Weimar Republic with their famous vacillating socialists. Of course there is fightback, like the doomed Spartacists of Berlin. The ever-busy Edu-Factory website tipped me that the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee's theater building has been occupied by students resisting Governor Walker's planned cuts.
Yesterday, Wednesday, March 9, 2011, I listened to Naomi Klein speak to Amy Goodman. Klein is the author of “Shock Doctrine,” the classic text on how hypercapitalism uses crises to impoverish workers and privatize public goods. For the right, crisis is opportunity – and the economic crisis is their chance to push through legislative measures that strip workers of rights. It's the climax of a 50-year war against trade unions; public sector unions were the last union stronghold, and now they're going after it. For Klein, the mass mobilizations in Wisconsin are an example of how to resist the shock doctrine. Why would the troglodytes do it? Money, duh. All of these care-giving services, services that mainly women provide can be very profitable if they are privatized. Ultimately, it's a corporate coup d'etat: the government is dissolved, and a company takes over. (This has happened, she said, in Sandy Springs, Georgia.) You don't get to vote. But you still pay taxes. (Sound familiar? Hmm... 1776? Ask Aaron Burr.)
And our president? According to Klein, there's been a lot of denial about who Obama is. Mainstream organizations have been waiting to see what Obama was going to do. (Even as they withdrew support for political direct action.) And behold, he didn't really do very much to end the privatizing and exploitation.
Where can unions go? What can they do? I have always somehow believed in a syndicalist solution – contest the corporations on their own ground, like Mondragon in Spain. Already it seems the Alinsky Foundation, the Industrial Areas Foundation (which nurtured the Cesar Chavez's UFW in the 1960s) is moving in this direction, designing co-op health care, and co-op housing alternatives to foreclosures and the like. Organizers are at work and things are happening.
While it may be only art, a lot of aesthetic and conceptual thinking has gone into these kinds of ideas. The irrepressible Steve Lambert pumps his Anti Advertising Agency, which includes the Samaras Project, about alternative economies. This was run by Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald -- I am always amazed by the stuff these guys get up to. These and other artists are opening roads that others can travel. I mean, they are talking Venture Communism!
Last U.S. news concerns resisting the plans of Big $ U's -- In Florida, a classic tree-sitting occupation is one month old – defending the Briger Forest of Florida, upland pine scrub and home to endangered tortoise and fern. It is slated to be razed for the Scripps Institute biotechnology and bio-science facility. Everglades Earth First! calls for donations to support the tree-sitters.
Meanwhile, here on the continent, the Madrid social center Tabacalera has been closed for a week to hold a series of internal discussions. This weekend there is a seminar to consider the effects of the right-wing neoliberal city government of Madrid. Again, I will be out of town... And on the shining isle – A group calling themselves Topple The Tyrants have just occupied the £10m Hampsted Mansion of Saif Al Islam Gaddafi, in solidarity with the Libyan people and their struggle to overthrow the murderous Gaddafi regime. A spokesman for the group said “We didn't trust the British government to properly seize the Gaddafi regime's corrupt assets, so we took matters into our own hands.... The British government only recently stopped actively helping to train the Libyan regime in 'crowd control' techniques, through the Department for Business Innovation and Skills and a Midlands-based arms manufacturer, NMS Systems.” I'd say watch your asses – the Libyan secret police may try to shoot you – they did that before, during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London in 1984. Killed a young policewoman.

////////////
LINKS:

Eric Drooker's sticker for the General Strike in hi-res, English & Spanish:
http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2011/03/be_prepared_for_the_general_st.html

Reporting on the ongoing crisis of public employee unions:
http://www.democracynow.org/
(Wednesday, March 9, 2011 Naomi Klein speaks to Amy Goodman)

Aaron Burr Society – (re. 1776)
http://aaronburrsociety.org/aaron_burr_society_home.html

Anti Advertising Agency
http://antiadvertisingagency.com/

Venture Communism
http://www.telekommunisten.net/venture-communism

University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee's theater building occupation
http://uwmoccupied.wordpress.com/

Briger Forest Tree Sit
www.ScrapScripps.info

Saif Gaddafi's London mansion occupied
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/03/475379.html

Lentil Stew at the White House

2011-01-28T05:47:00.000-08:00

Much to tell, maybe, now I am in Madrid. I've been holed up writing, but made a few forays – to Tabacalera CSA on a busy night, buzzing with many immigrants there for a music night and African crafts show in the bar. It's a huge, busy social center with the disconcerting presence of uniformed security officers paid by the state. This is counter-culture and this is official. Wild. I was there to meet videotistas from Tabacanal, the on-site internet video project. They were to videotape some visiting South American cultural officials – I never got the details. But they were hidden in one of the many rooms, and no one seemed to know where. (The administration of this big CSA is straining the resources of the assembly, I am told.) This weekend AK KRaak video collective from Berlin is presenting there. I'll be in the mountains, sigh.
But I also escaped the writing cabin for a drink at the bar of Casa Blanca, a newer CSOA not far from the Reina Sofia museum. It's smaller than Tabacalera, of course – but no guards! I bought a t-shirt. The shirt lists the successive occupations that have culminated in this one: “06 La Escoba, 07 La Alarma, 08 Malaya” and “10 Casa Blanca.” Last night I returned, as the Madrid Critical Mass bicycle ride wound up there. (A related poster features a drooling wolf riding along above a prowling cat.) The post-ride party started with a giant bowl of lentils, rice and veggies. I didn't stay for the basement dance party...
Meanwhile, Back in School –
I'm getting promo from Edu-Factory for their February European Meeting of University Movements in Paris. Buckets of folks are going to discuss their struggles against austerity. (Their 2009 book, “Towards a Global Autonomous University,” is available as a PDF download in English, Spanish and Italian on their site.) Resisting austerity seems like small change compared to overthrowing the government – northern Africa is going wild... But folks all over now have to fight for their future.
A lot of ground-level action is also covered at Occupy Everything. They've got the scoop on the recent Paris occupation across the street from the president's house! They're crusty, too -- i love the "DIY Book Bloc" videotape, showing how to make a street shield from Italian UniRiot TV. (Maybe a little too crusty; I don't like gun show propaganda any more than the thought of professors packing turns me on...)
Even the E-flux crew has put out an interesting journal on the topic – with contributions from some of the newly emergent usual suspects: Paul Chan, Claire Bishop, Brian Holmes among the U.S. names. It's not exactly on the topic. In the best tradition of philosophical-critical perspective mongering, most essays circle around it – except for Gavin Butt's on “being boiled,” penned by the London cops during the recent demonstrations. That's low level brutality compared to Mubarak's police, but cut from the same bolt of repressive cloth. Still, I am glad that our egghead powers-that-be are coming around – you can follow the turnaround on E-flux news reports of demonstrations – from the anxious report of Prince Charles being jostled in his car in early December, to a major union leader's remarks on 12/30 that “workers should be inspired by student protests against higher tuition fees.'The magnificent students’ movement urgently needs to find a wider echo if the government is to be stopped,' McCluskey [of the Unite union] wrote in the Guardian newspaper today[12/30]. 'We have to be preparing for battle.'” Workers and students united – De Gaulle's nightmare...

Links:

Tabacanal TV project – in Spanish
http://blogs.latabacalera.net/tabacanal/

AK KRaak video collective – in German & English
http://akkraak.squat.net/
and Youtube user/akkraakantiquariat

Casa Blanca CSO, Madrid
http://www.csocasablanca.org/

Madrid Critical Mass – in Spanish
http://bicicritica.ourproject.org/web/

European Meeting of University Movements: Paris, 11-13 February 2011
http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/european-meeting-of-university-movements-in-paris-list-
of-participants/

Occupy Everything
http://incorporealcommittee.wordpress.com/

“DIY Book Bloc” video posted at:
http://occupyca.wordpress.com/

E-flux journal
http://www.e-flux.com/journal

E-flux art & education updates
http://www.artandeducation.net/updates/2011

The "Occupation Cookbook"

2011-01-16T04:21:00.000-08:00

How long have I been asleep? The always excellent "news" at eipcp.net points to the impressive "Occupation Cookbook" produced in Zagreb, now online at slobodnifilozofski.org/?p=1915. Based on experiences in spring 2009, "The Occupation Cookbook or the Model of the Occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb" contains practical descriptions spiced with some theory of the way to organize the change we want to see.
They write, "The Occupation Cookbook is a 'manual' that describes the organization of the student occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences that took
place in the spring of 2009 and lasted for 35 days. It was written for two reasons: to record what happened, and to present the particular organization of this action in such a way that it may be of use to other activists and members of various collectives if they decide to undertake a similar action. "The Cookbook" is currently being translated into several languages. At the moment, all but the final few chapters have been translated into English, and the Introduction has been translated into Spanish. (Although it seems also a German version is available.)
The website slobodnifilozofski.org has many texts, videos and photos, as well as links to other movements in Croatia and beyond.
Contents of the Cookbook:
Foreword by Boris Buden; Introduction
The Organization of Student Control at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
How to Organize a Plenum?; The Plenum; The Rules and Guidelines of the FHSS Plenum
Code of Conduct During the Student Control Over the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
The Plenum Minutes; Delegates and mandates
The Media Strategy, the Media Team and the Media Working Group
The Operational Tasks, Logistics and Security Team
The Program and the Program Team
The Inter-Plenary Working Group; The Plenum Technical Issues Working Group
The Document Analysis Working Group
The Mini-Actions Working Group
The Working Group for Spreading Direct Democracy
The Blog/Portal and the Blog Team
While it may seem a little socialist-technical (it is after all sort of dedicated to Lenin), this is an admirably coherent attempt to synthesize a code for successful peoples' action in the school.
Avanti!
Photo by: Damir Gamulin of “5 do 12″ (”The Eleventh Hour”) mini action in Zagreb city square.

Games for a New Class

2010-12-05T20:56:00.000-08:00

Do the young people working job to job, contract to contract, without expectations that sustained their parents, and the migrants being exploited with no labor rights constitute a “new class” of precarious workers, a “precariat”? Or are they somehow in a temporary limbo before “real” work, or simply living the new conditions of labor with no claim on any kind of historical destiny? This was a thread in the discussion after the presentation of Alessandro from the San Precario group in Milan, in New York recently as the guest of the 16 Beaver Group.
The show began with a video of a young man in bed tossing and turning for fear of rent, losing his job, all the insecurity – and the figure of San Precario appears to him. The revelation, however, is different: Do not believe in me, believe in yourself and the power of others like you; I am a saint so that you do not become a martyr. San Precario figures in the banners of the “precarious conspiracy” of volunteers in Milan, the Chainworkers collective, which continues to organize temporary workers. The group has some 30-50 members, each of them networked to other political groups. They use “viral media and subvertising” to advance their agendas in the media and the public eye.
Some of these usages were cute, like saint cards for San Precario. Others were game-like, in the spirit of Jasper Groetveld's “marihu” schemes that organized the Provos in Amsterdam. A precarity puzzle assembles into a schematic picture of a different world. Trading cards depict “superheroes of precarity” (collect them all!). An elaborate precarity tarot, carefully designed, can indeed be used to predict the (limited, insecure) future. A pad of lotto-like slips form a game called “Welfare for Life”; it promotes (propagandizes) the “dream demand” for a guaranteed income, “flexicurity” for the new conditions of labor.
This isn't such a dream, it seems. The question is being debated in Lombardy, the province of Milan. It's a rich one, accounting for some 25% of Italy's GNP. To put this into discourse is an achievement. Just as the Chainworkers efforts have shifted the term from “flexible” worker to “precarious.” “We went against that word,” Alessandro said. “They were using it at first.” To shift mainstream political discourse through creative political agitation is a great achievement. In the U.S., it seems only the rightwing can do this (e.g. “death tax,” and “Obamacare”) through sheer weight of media capital (Fox).
There's a lot more – the most glamorous achievement of the group's “spectacle phase” was a spectacular intervention into Milan Fashion Week 2005, a trumped up controversy between the designer Serpico Nari and the social centers of Milan. (The Chainworkers were based out of CSOA Pergola.) The radicals vowed to blockade the modista's runway show, and a phalanx of cops showed up. The designer and radicals were one in the same, as it turned out – Serpica Naro is an anagram of, well, you can figure that one! And the media reported on the rough conditions workers in the fashion industry live with. And Euromayday, a carefully nurtured by now Europe-wide “rebranding” of the great workers' holiday as a street festival of the new class.
Those who want more can check out the links to videos, and Stevphen Shukaitis' essay explaining it all very well at: 16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/003168.php

the image is from metadesigncom's photostream

News: UK & Hamburg

2010-12-01T14:28:00.000-08:00

From London, JJ writes to tell us that the Slade School of Art -- two buildings of it -- was occupied by students two days ago. They are planning 3 days of alternative education, art, activism and disobedience this weekend, from Friday night 3rd to Sunday 5th December. The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination will be supporting this and we are calling on all art activists friends to take part in this act of creative rebellion against the cuts in the UK... Its going to be a great space for planning, discussing, plotting the next steps of what looks like a rising movement in this country, but one that needs our collective radical imaginations .... pass on and proliferate xx
Folks there are invited to either:
1) Propose a workshop/event/ talk/ performance/action/installation/ that you could contribute to the weekend ( a short description of it, what you need space and time wise etc )
2) Write a statement of support to the occupation - esp from international artists etc .. would be great
3) Just turn up with your body and rebel soul
The blog for this is -- http://artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com/. Please email your ideas to me at John@labofii.net and sladeoccupation@gmail.com.
Meanwhile, in Hamburg, the travelers are out for the holiday season: Michel Chevalier writers that the banners they are carrying say "squat the city...accept alternative housing... self-determined living.. allow bauwagenplätze...an end to hight rents, gentrification and displacement/expulsion... let's take over the city." Ho ho ho! (Photo is from the Hamburger Morgen Post.)
http://www.mopo.de/hamburg/panorama/galerie/index.php?GID=4254

Consensus Assembly versus State Authority

2010-11-20T08:28:00.001-08:00

To a full house at ABC No Rio, Amy Starecheski reported on her stint as a researcher in residence at Christiania, the famous, long-lived “free city” squat in Copenhagen. In the back of the room, on the grimy graffiti smeared cartons that serve as a countertop, the Brooklyn anarchist group In Our Hearts was “doing distro,” laying out a buffet of books and pamphlets.
Amy is an oral historian and student of anthropology. Her presentation mixed sound clips of her interviewees, videos and stand-up analysis. She talked principally about the consensus process of decision-making at Christiania, and how it has played out during the recent years of negotiation with the Danish state. After 30-odd years of existence, operating autonomously, and thereby largely outside the laws of Denmark and the city of Copenhagen, a rightist government was elected with a pledge to “normalize” the district. Their plans included privatization of all land and buildings, and development through high rise towers. The community – which charges “use fees,” not rent to its residents – appointed a negotiating committee to talk to the state. This committee insisted to the authorities that it had no power, and must report back to the assembly of all residents to make any decision. Amy observed that, from her study of the history of colonization, peoples who refused to designate and empower leaders were more difficult to colonize. In this sense, she said, consensus decision making turns out to be a mode of strategic resistance.
After some time negotating, the assembly was faced with a deadline, and a devil's bargain to privatize and develop Christiania. As part of the negotiation process, they were required to give an answer to the plan, yet were unable to reach any consensus. “Let's send someone out to play the flute,” one resident suggested. This idea excited and united the group. At an infamous 2006 press conference, a red curtain was raised and a flute player tooted while a jester dancing and scattered paper scraps. This was taken by the state as a non-answer. Clearly rooted in Christiania's long theatrical and circus tradition, this gesture was the only thing that everyone could agree upon. Despite the absurdity of it, the flute player's strategic response to the state helped to bind the community together.
Why did the state forebear? Why not just clear the place? The site is surrounded by woods and clearly indefensible. As a shoemaker told Amy, Christiania is “as famous for their riots as for their hashish.” The place also enjoys wide public support in Copenhagen. With the flute concert, Christiania called the state's bluff. There were no evictions.
In March, the adverse possession case of Christiania will reach the Danish supreme court, and Christiania is expected to lose. The peril to the “free state” is far from over.
But for the while, the very form of Christiania's governance has proven an effective form of resistance. “The state abhors consensus democracy; that's the beauty of it,” said one woman. The snail is an emblem of this process, and there is a large sculpture of one at the entrance to the community. It is the mascot of Christiania.
The consensus process, however, can be boring. It means many and interminable meetings. It can stifle new ideas, and keep people from speaking freely. The eloquent can use the meetings to garner power. One of Amy's interviewees said that for five years three angry people ruined every meeting by their raging. “When the structure is so loose,” she told Amy, “there will be a heightened power group. It's just not official.” (This point of view echoes the essay “Tyranny of Structurelessness” that came out of the U.S. feminist movement in the 1970s.) There were some attempts to reform the consensus process, but these were blocked by the substantial groups of drug dealers in the community, called “pushers.” Amy's interviewees agreed that in consensus assemblies there needs to be an understanding of the proper role of charisma, and controls on those with the gift of gab. When they act as spokespersons that is okay; but when they use their suavity to garner power, it is wrong.
After Amy's talk, Rolando Politti, a recycling artist from the Lower East Side of New York who was also a resident artist there, spoke about the process of “normalization” that is slowly and relentlessly asserting itself in Christiania. Brindalyn Webster, another artist who researched in the community, passed out elegantly printed envelopes with quotes printed on them from interviews she had conducted. (Inside were folded up longer texts, and, unaccountably, a seed packet of catnip.) The packed house of 30-odd folks read aloud from these texts, as Brindalyn passed them out in waves. In the process, we all became a sort of theatricalized assembly of Christiania, ventriloquizing the cogent, often passionate beliefs of these remarkable people.

photo: the flag of Christiania

Links: ABC No Rio, NYC cultural center
http://www.abcnorio.org/
In Our Hearts
http://www.myspace.com/anewworldinourhearts
promotion for Amy Staracheski’s talk
https://blogs.cul.columbia.edu/ohro/2010/11/13/ohro-oral-historian-amy-starecheski-to-present-at-abc-no-rio/
website of Christiania
http://www.christiania.org/

There's a flood out in California...

2010-11-18T08:39:00.000-08:00

[I've been writing, and neglecting this blog; more soon on Amy's trip to Christiania. For now, a spot of breaking news via the Edu-Factory list, your source for worldwide student revolt news...]
Protests against new fee hikes being met with violence
By mtd
via http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/protests-against-new-fee-hikes-being-met-with-violence/
San Francisco – As of 8:45am, 200-300 students are blocking entrances to the William J. Rutter building at the UCSF Mission Bay campus, where the Regents are scheduled to meet. On the agenda today and tomorrow are another 8% fee increase and a move to change “fees” back to “tuition,” which was formally prohibited under the California Master Plan.
Cops have reportedly donned riot gear and have begun to arbitrarily charge and assault the student pickets. Already, 2 UC Berkeley students have been arrested for unknown charges.
This also follows last night’s news of an agreement between the UC and UAW Local 2865, the union representing Teaching Assistants, Graduate Student Employees, and Academic Student Employees. Following 5 months of bad faith and illegal bargaining practices from the UC, unfair labor practices, stalling, walking away from the table, lying, and refusal to concede anything, the UAW bargaining team has accepted UC’s original proposal on wages, employment notification, and summer childcare in exchange for a minor concession on childcare reimbursement. If the contract is ratified by the membership, TAs will receive subinflation wage increases of 2% a year locked in for the next 3 years.
8:55am: There was a confrontation between students and police in the parking garage. Many of the Regents have been able to enter, smiling as they watch cops hit students.
9:15am: Reports that students and workers have pushed through the police barricades and are storming the building. Several students are badly hurt from police attacks and some have been maced. More arrests, 5 total: 3 Berkeley, 1 Santa Cruz, 1 Davis.
9:20am: Confirmed: students are inside the building!
9:30am: Police are indiscriminately pepper spraying students. Police have put masks on.
9:45am: Daily Cal reports that Berkeley student government Vice President Ricardo Gomez was among those pepper sprayed by police.
n Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Liz Mason-Deese wrote:
Cal Admins Blockaded
From: http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/cal-admins-blockaded/
BERKELEY, California – As of 6:30am this morning, students at UC Berkeley have begun blocking the entrances to the California Hall, the main administrative building on campus. All entrances are surrounded.
UPDATE:
8:50am: UCPD has opened up an entrance. Alameda sheriffs have come as back up.
9:40am: Numbers are still low, between 50-100. Expecting more, for now they’re just waiting. [correction: numbers closer to 40.]
10:20am: More from thosewhouseit.
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Hanse City Dream Squat

2010-08-20T05:08:00.000-07:00

Despite late Hamburg action and some visits in Berlin, I posted nothing here for a while, because I was on vacation. We rolled off to the Baltic Coast, starting out from Lübeck. Like Hamburg, Lübeck was a city of the old-time Hanseatic League, but the most westerly one, which was not part of the communist east Germany. The old city is rather small. It was ferociously bombed during the world war. The Marienkirche was deliberately destroyed in the last months of 1945, as revenge for the Luftwaffe's destruction of the cathedral in Coventry. Now the old gabled buildings of Lübeck have been lovingly reconstructed, and the city is rich again.
Just outside the old city is the Lübeck Alternative, a small grandfathered squat center which began in 1978. (I have the book, but haven't read it.) Behind the group of buildings is a Bauwagenplatz, an encampment of trailers for living. The Alternative is right across the street from a giant ugly new convention center, making for a curious juxtaposition. On one side of the road, punk concerts and a grungy bar. Across the street when we visited, a beer company was sponsoring a festival with bland entertainment and local restaurants offering “tastes” for many Euros.
Out of Lübeck we journeyed eastward along the coast, Wismar, Stralsund, Greifswald, Wolgast – Hansa League cities all, except for the last, part of the old Pomeranian duchy. (Their lead coffins have been returned to the church crypt in a new installation.) Many gabled roofs, half-timbered houses, fat straw roofs, and many many vacation rooms. Tourism seems the main industry now along the coast, that and making smoked fish. The tourists are nearly all Germans. Unless you speak the language, you can have a hard time.
Along the road on Rügen island we passed an abandoned dance hall, a mssive weathered gray edifice from socialist days. There are abandoned buildings along the coast – especially those beside the railroad. (The new Alternative is in one of these.) But I saw no evidence of any occupation action, and only one political sticker on the whole trip, one warning of talking to the police. That tiny shred of political evidence was balanced by a nazi graffiti on a medieval tombstone stuck into the wall of the Kloster ruin, a site made famous by Caspar David Friedrich's paintings. There is road- and trainside graffiti, big letter work, maybe by one or two vacationing artists. Otherwise, not even any evidence of alternative culture. (“Live jazz” once a week at a town cafe no longer counts.) The Baltic coast of eastern Germany seems a desert in this respect, but who knows what is hiding in the cracks? Driving through Greifswald we spied a clutch of punks on the street. The town is no tourist mecca, and there were a good number of abandoned buildings. We didn't stop. Could that be the punk Baltic? Inquire in Lübeck.
Caspar David Friedrich also made Hiddensee island famous with his early 19th century painting of the striking steep chalk cliffs, one of the first tourist postcards. That view, now clogged by trees, is today the site of a multimedia nature show. We visited Ahrenshoop, on Hiddensee island, touted for its history as a former artists' colony and resort of famous modernist authors and thinkers. Now it is mostly a massive encampment of resort hotels crammed together on a narrow spit of land. The art colony is sporadically evoked, mainly by galleries alternately schlocky and craftsy. (An interesting project, a “museum box” investigating the island's cultural history, is run by a school and was closed for the summer.) How many “sleepy fishing villages” became artists' colonies, and thereafter massive modern resorts? When artists arrive rural working people should shiver in their boots.
We fetched up in Ahlbeck for a couple days, a classic old-style Baltic coast beach resort town with all the trimmings: Long pier, cabanas for rent, horse and buggy rides, and garish sea palace hotels, all that – but no artistic pretensions. In our hotel I dreamed of a squatted social center called Squat Anya. In this fantasy I was being shown around by a guy who led me up tottering stairs in the back of the place past piles of sodden paint chips which had flaked off the walls. The front rooms were still dry, with dusty décor left over from a gala party. One banner read, “Making Revolution” with paper cutouts of 18th century soldiers. Another read “Taking Revolution,” hung over abandoned buffet tables. A girl told me that was where they held their VoKu, or weekly free meals. I suppose in dreaming this that I was thinking about the seaside resorts in the U.S. south that have appropriated revolutionary iconography as décor. Here in the former DDR (socialist east Germany, ended in 1989) I have no idea how folks relate to their pasts. Almost no one speaks English and my German is rudimentary. Ahlbeck is mostly old folks and families. A less hip place is hard to imagine. Occasional outbreaks of kitsch that make rural Georgia look modernist add to the claustrophobia. My sense of the place – and somehow I took it as exemplary of the whole coast – is that the people are overwhelmingly conservative. We watched the reactionary Frenchman Jean Le Pen on Pomeranian German TV making a visit to Japan. He went to a shrine associated with the Japanese military which even government ministers avoid. Le Pen may be old and doddering, but his venom is fresh. Even without translation it leaks through the TV to corrode the comfortable furnishing of contemporary liberalism, by vociferously honoring the defeated forces of a militant genocidal imperialism. But how is this kind of defeat internalized if it is always repressed, always kept out of public view? In the east of Germany first fascism and then communism fell – the first violently, amidst unimaginable ruin, and the second quietly, but leaving behind complex remnants. Does “Ostalgia” – fond feelings for a vanished egalitarian albeit relentlessly repressive regime – translate into any grounds for new forms of contemporary resistance to hyper-capitalism?

Link:

a Myspace page for the Lübeck Alternative concert space
http://www.myspace.com/treibsand_luebeck

Photo: Caspar David Friedrich, "Kreidefelsen auf Rügen," 1818

Lost in Repression

2010-07-25T05:21:00.000-07:00

I went with my Hamburg guide to a demonstration against police repression. The rallying point was a tourist center, near the famous immigrant embarkation point – ah, yes, here it is on the cover of the Eyewitness English guidebook, the Landungsbruecken. It's made from thick, rusticated masonry and features nicely expressionistic glowering statues. As a fine art sculptor Ernst Barlach does not thrill me, but this style in architectural ornament is a gas – like a Hollywood monster movie. A couple of dour looking statues near the top of one building looked exactly like the intimidating policemen who were marshalling beneath...
The march was part of a series of events considering state repression around the 9th anniversary of the police murder of Carlo Giuliani. He was killed in Genoa, during protests against the G8 meeting. The symbol of this campaign was the surveillance camera. The discussions, organized at a place in Hamburg called Centro Sociale, considered a repression which is “versatile, comprehensive and subtle.” But the repression in evidence at the event on Saturday certainly wasn't subtle.
The demo marshalled slowly – at first a speaker with some 20 or 30 around a truck, and then the crowd appeared. There were many – the paper estimated 1,000 – and they marched along the Hafenstrasser, waterfront road near the harbor. There were, said a speaker, just as many police present. It was pretty frightening, i must say -- to see all the German police with their body armor and helmets, also tanks and armored vehicles parked above the parade route. Mostly it was young people in black clothes, and many punks, but also mixed in older people marching, marching along the street with the police following in a line...
From the overpasses, tourists were watching – they had been blocked from coming down into the assembly point, where tickets to attractions are sold. People also watched from the balconies of hotels and luxury apartments. The punks were chanting -- all in German, I didn't understand any of that.
Also along the so way some of the formerly squatted houses – now they are all legal, low-rent apartment houses – had put out banners in support. One house, with the motto “Out of Control” painted on it, put on a display of loud fireworks from their roof. Sometimes these marches, which end at the Rote Flora occupied social center, conclude with a riot. This follows on, I was told, from a police provocation, a charge on the crowd or such. Then the young men react. On May 1st they demolished a bank with cobblestones. It seems almost necessary for that to happen, from the state's point of view. If you call out 500 or 1000 police onto the street, even bring them from other parts of Germany (there was a troop here from Berlin, one person said), then you have to justify the expense somehow. So there is a riot; you must make one happen so the repression has "value."
We left the "parade" before the end, where the riots sometimes happen. But the newspaper reports no riot, all was peaceful. This confirms one observer's guess – now, with the political situation uncertain, the CDU right wing party would not risk provoking the (anemic) left Greens by beating up on people of the left. If they do, there could be no coalition, and new elections would be called.

Photo:
Unter dem Motto "Lost in Repression" haben am Sonnabend rund 1000 Linksautonome auf St. Pauli demonstriert. (beneath the motto: "LIP" about 1,000 left autonomists demonstrated in St. Pauli district.)
Photo: Michael Arning, Hamburger Abendblatt -- more photos at:
http://www.abendblatt.de/hamburg/kommunales/article1578389/1000-Linke-demonstrierten-gegen-Polizeigewalt.html

Lost in Repression? Control Yourself!
details of the campaign, in German
http://nella-faccia.de.vu/
propaganda here:
http://lostinrepression.blogsport.de/

and a very impressive ad spot for the Pirate Party, which spells out the problem in English, German and Spanish: called "spot of the Pirate Party"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vsR-
WF0nLQ

A New Grand Bazaar

2010-07-22T02:20:00.000-07:00

Years ago I was in Germany acting like an artist, and I took part in a group show at NGBK in Berlin. There a critic observed that my art was kindisch, like Sesame Street. I was a little hurt by that. But now I think it is okay. So also is my theory, like in a playground, observing and learning from what the other children are doing. I like that the Frise Kuenstlerhaus where I visit now backs onto a playground. I especially watch the cool kids, not the ones who are always following the rules and staying close to the teacher, but the kids who have their own fort.
This is only to say that things that happen influence my theory. Since I have been in Hamburg, I have had a few of these kindische theoretical insights. Basically what is going on in cities now is a culture war, a struggle between productive and consumptive culture. This is a struggle between the local and the global, between self-organized, self-sustaining cultural producers and cultural marketers, i.e., culture within capitalism. It is most dramatically exemplified in Hamburg maybe by Gaengeviertel -- productive culture asserting itself, and the opera house monument to classical consumption, an as yet unbuilt tower of babel, reaching for the heavens of parity in signifying global cities' consumptive power, a crystalline crown of pure money. Now this consumptive culture ideal is consumptive in another sense: it is sick because of the economic crisis.
I see these two kinds of culture as exemplified in the movement of occupied self-organized social centers as versus capital markets and their collaborating institutions. To be sure, markets can act independent of the interests of speculative finance capital, just as institutions can collaborate with other actors rather than mainly or only with the speculating rich.
With its rich mix of activities, the SC embodies production culture, whereas the institutions of showing have galleries and stages in them where things are shown to be consumed. Most people only look, but the rich can buy. (Already we have here two kinds of “rich.”)
So, to other kinds of markets: in the Altona district of Hamburg where I stay, there is the Mercado, a vertical shopping center, air-conditioned in summer and warm in winter. Very nice. But inside no one is making anything, except money. In Istanbul there is the Grand Bazaar. It is a famous labyrinth of consumption, shops upon shops, arranged over centuries to make the winding streets of Altona seem like a grid. But among this maze are numerous workshops, called “hans,” where things are made. So the Grand Bazaar, a descendant of the caravanserai, and built to support the great mosque Hagia Sophia, contains both imports and local products in its form. To get into the Mercado, a local producer must start outside, to deal with the capitalist mediators who run the shops, and only then maybe they will be allowed to come inside. That can seem a little strange if you live and work next door.
The huge building that was recently occupied by artists in Altona is an amazing design. It is a department store with a parking garage – very typical for the USA. But there the the store and the garage are separate buildings. I have never seen them squashed together in such a manner. This old department store is gargantuan, but very exciting in its form. Now it is empty. Artists occupied it, turning it into a warren of productive culture with many outlets – galleries, shops, theaters and meeting rooms – forming around its public edges. The artists were evicted. Now it is to be taken over by Ikea, and become again a pure outlet for an archetypical multinational capitalist actor. Not only that, but it will be knocked down and rebuilt.
The form of the Ikea store in USA is invariably a shed, the cheapest form of construction, really like a humongous shipping container in Swedish national colors of blue and yellow. How nice! How simple! And how appropriate for Hamburg. I am sorry, but I think an Ikea shed would be a stupid replacement for the incredible grand architectural construction that sits like an abandoned space station in Altona.
The Frappant project was constituting itself not only as housing, or even as housing for productive capacities (studios and ateliers), but also as a market. But this was looking as if it would be self-sustaining, like a social center. The people who would run and maintain the place would live there, so they would not need to be paid much. The people who worked there would also sell there, like in a bazaar or medieval market. So there would not be any profit. If you are a capitalist, of course, this kind of situation would be intolerable. Where is there any room for you?
Now I see in Berlin there are a number of projects to reclaim Tegel airport, long abandoned, as a public space. This is very nice. Tegel was the site of the famous Berlin airlift. This was a response to a Soviet siege – very medieval, which the USA and western allies responded to by throwing food over the walls. It is a high moment of climate-destroying “air power,” and also of the form of post-war global trade, also really destructive of atmosphere. (Although I can't complain that I am here because of it.) Really the airlift of food falling gently from the air to defeat the brutal siege was the heavenly apotheosis of free trade. When he crowed about it, John Kennedy said, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” a nice bit of Germglish. Many people liked that he claimed he was a pastry. Now Tegel can be reclaimed for making pastries if you like, instead of bringing in things from other places.
So I apply this kind of kindische thinking to analyze the function of the social centers in Europe as I have understood it. The classic squat provides housing. They take an abandoned building – not abandoned in terms of ownership usually, but unused – renovate it and maintain it. There is no profit in that for the owner! But people need housing. This is understood. So finally some of the squats are legalized as social housing. This is good. The modernist social contract requires that the workers get housing in return for giving up their lives to the factories. You can see the same kind of deal in China today with the corporate barracks for the poor peasants who come to the cities to work. But maybe that isn't really so useful in the post-modern city. Maybe that kind of social housing, really a state subsidy for industrial capitalism, isn't what cities need.
There is no profit in making this social housing, to be sure. And finally people who were bold and aggressive when they were young get cheap apartments. That is nice, but.... what is the social benefit?
I think maybe the social benefit lies in what kind of people they are.
And that comes back to Richard Florida's arguments for the creative city, which Hamburg planners were very entranced with. Activists all over Europe (especially in UK) have vigorously criticized Florida's “creative class” ideas as a theoretical blunt instrument for planners of the hypercapitalist city to do what they want while pretending to respect people and culture. And what they want is to knock everything down and rebuild it bigger and more slick, so everyone who was there before falls off onto the edges, away from the new playground of the rich and their workers. Who are the real creative class? Those who can reconfigure everything, the masters of the universe. You say you are an artist? Ha, ha, ha! What do you really make?
So the occupation movement in the global cities proposed as a counter argument their own fort built in the woods of property-as-commodity, built inside large abandoned buildings in the form of the social center. (Hamburg now so far as I know has really only one, the Rote Flora.) Why should a city give these buildings to the activists who take them? Why should a city even give space to artists? Why shouldn't a city just dogmatically enforce all property rights?
Well, the answer to the last question is I think now maybe obvious. If you dogmatically enforce property rights, you uphold only speculative capitalism. And in this moment of crisis, when speculative capitalism has proven that it doesn't lead to uniform social benefit, but instead very efficiently produces mass social disruption and ruin, maybe it isn't so wise to put all your eggs into that one basket. Unless you like to color the ground with them... and egg tempera is a very durable pigment.
But it is less obvious why these aggressive people should get this space in the city. Maybe they should get it because of the social effects they produce. This is some of what Richard Florida says when he responds to the Hamburg manifesto, “Ohne uns.” That manifesto text concerned the hyper-gentrifying city that was being built without us, that is, without the cultural producers who are not rich.
What of this social effect, though? Of what value is that? Or, rather, how does that create value? Let me call that the Ganas effect, after a commune in Staten Island named Ganas, the Spanish word for “desire.” (It is only one letter away from ganar, or “win.”) The Ganas commune is not especially idealistic. They are business people. Ganas produces festivals in the community where they are located. That place is mostly poor, pretty depressed, full of immigrants and many abandoned institutional buildings. Year after year the waterfront festivals were very small-scale but charming events which involve a lot of artists who play for free, and the immigrants who can bring their families and eat cheap and have the kids be entertained. Very modest, really. But the people of Ganas build a kind of magical atmosphere around these events. How? There are about 20 people in the commune working the event, and as they move around they look at each other, smile, wave, interact nonverbally. (Ganas is deeply invested in using a special set of group psychological techniques among themselves.) This interaction spills over to everyone else who is there – every other person there also sometimes gets a direct look, a smile, a nod which has just bounced off another commune member. This is the social glue that makes everyone at the event feel that they are acknowledged and that something special is happening.
In a temporally condensed form, this is the kind social effect that artists and activists have in a community. Artists are always looking for connections and customers, and activists are always trying to organize people. For these reasons they look at people, say “hello,” and interact more than most people. People in the ideal shiny slick hypercapitaliist city are more or less going to their jobs and back home to their families. They can seem like figures in those marvelous toys where everything is on a track, running, running. They are entrancing to watch, but kids get bored with them really quickly. They want something they can move around off the track. Something they can play with. Similarly, the spillover effect from the kinds of social relations activists and artists engage in benefits a community by making people there more social. More social people create more networks, and more new initiatives likely to succeed than do alienated unsocial people.
So this is the primary social value that artists create. And I argue that activists also make it. They have bars, VoKus, cafes, infoshops, bike ateliers, and other primitive anti-businesses. They organize demonstrations. And all of this activity is useful in stimulating people involved in other parts of the city economy to think of what they do differently.
In Madrid a new artist occupation has been legalized by the state. It is called Tabacalera, because it is in a huge formerly state-owned tobacco product factory. (Actually it was first built to make snuff and playing cards for the royal court.) Like a giant cigar, the social nicotine from Tabacalera can stimulate Madrid's neurosystem to make faster connections. This could become addictive...

It Begins in San Francisco...

2010-07-21T02:56:00.001-07:00

A group of housing activists occupied the vacant second floor of a building on the corner of 20th and Mission Streets Monday night and said they don’t plan to leave unless they are forced out.

T-Mobile occupies the first floor.

“We are going to vote with crowbars,” said one protester at the rally that began at 5:50 p.m. at the 16th Street BART Station.

Another added, “You can put me in a house or in a jail, but if you put me in jail, it’s going to cost you more.”

Read more:
http://missionlocal.org/2010/07/protestors-take-over-building/

15h Anniversary of Reclaim the Streets Celebrated by European Union

2010-07-18T23:40:00.000-07:00

I may have to retitle this blog "Flexible Governance." I am diggin' this, as are a million Germans... [Reblog from Associated Press/Yahoo] "People gather, to celebrate `` Still-Life '' People gather on the Autobahn in Essen, western Germany, to celebrate 'Still-Life' on Sunday, July 18, 2010. The most-travelled motorway in Germany A40 is closed for one day on 60 kilometers for the most spectacular event of the European Cultural Capital Ruhr 2010, when 20,000 tables are set as the longest banquet of the world. About one million visitors and inhabitants of the Ruhr agglomeration area meet, eat and drink together on a Sunday between the cities of Dortmund and Duisburg in Germany's most populated region." (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)
Now, as crisis government shrinks, civic creativity is being outsourced... So take the next step! DePave Summer 2010!

LINKS:
Reclaim the Streets archive
http://rts.gn.apc.org/archive.htm

DePave Summer 2010
http://cityrepair.org/2010/07/depave-summer-2010-events/

Gummi-Governance!

2010-07-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

After the intensity of the Tabacalera's beginnings in Madrid, I bounced through Berlin to Hamburg. Now I am staying in a schoolroom a few blocks from the spectacularly busy port on the Elbe River. My hosts Sabine and Michel led me on a tour of the major historical sites during my first day, and I am afraid it passed in a blur. The next day Sabine showed me more, including the famous Gängeviertel occupation in center city.
That first day we had a drink on a terrace at a historic Bauhaus-constructed school building overlooking the Elbe. (I don't know the name of it.) The school has been vacant for 10 years, and only now some artists have permission to open a small cafe with exhibitions inside. Upon walking into the elegant modernist classic the first thing that struck me was the extraordinary flow of air through the building. It was coming from the terrace and rolling through the rooms, freshening the interior on a very hot day. This school is to be torn down to build a high-rise building, luxury apartments with views. There has been talk of occupying it to forestall this destruction.
Then we walked along the Elbe riverfront. Sabine pointed out a trendy bar that had been a squat only a year or so ago. Many giant luxury buildings have been built along the waterfront, ;like a wall obscuring the view of many others. Despite these monster, the walkway along the water remains a public access. We walked through tables filled with diners at one point.
Then Park Fiction hove into view. This is a park designed with multiple S-curved lawns to resemble a flying carpet, and tall metal palm trees, and it is full of people, chatting, drinking, strumming guitars. The park in St. Pauli neighborhood is the outcome of a 15 year long struggle to reclaim public space from top-down development plans of the Hamburg government. Park Fiction was a participatory planning exercise led by artists. They organized the process as a game, and collected an “archive of desires.” After the group was invited to present at the prestigious art fair Documenta, the city started to deal with them more seriously. The outcome finally was that the city withdrew its intentions for another giant high-rise, and today there is the park. (The Park Fiction group is in the thick of engaged artistic practice worldwide; of that more later.) Next to the park is the Golden Pudel Klub, the original squatter's bar with a political music scene which does a booming business – about which I am told they are ambivalent. Park Fictioneers remain very active, working with a new group called “It's Raining Caviar.”
We met Michel at a bar on Haffenstrasse, the harbor street where Autonomen squatters staged pitched battles with police to defend their squats in the 1980s. (Eddie Yuen, et al. eds., book “The Battle of Seattle” has a chapter on this.) Today it is calmed, and we walked on to Rote Flora, which remains an resistant occupied social center in a standoff with the city. We arrived at the antique theater which is the focus of a nightlife area thronged with young folks. A bassy disco was in progress, but a woman there showed us inside, and took us to the silkscreen atelier in the back. It is here that the beautiful monthly schedules are produced to be posted on the street. (Some of these are in the House Magic exhibition, since Michel had brought them to NYC.) Michel told me that during the winter the silkscreen workshop is the warmest room in the place, so the bands sit there between shows! Rote Flora houses a social movements archive which I hope to visit.
The next day, Sabine took me by the vast abandoned department store that is slated to become an Ikea (a Swedish furniture giant). This was occupied in protest and then evicted. We ended up at Gängeviertel, a recently squatted cluster of late 19th century buildings, survivors of wartime bombing, that adjoins the center city with its massive skyscrapers. The place is a relatively recent occupation, and it faces the stark skyscrapers of the Springer publishing company in a contrast that could not be starker. The artists turned it into an overnight warren of studios and ateliers (see diagram above). The surprising thing about this occupation is that they are talking with the city, which has been almost amiable! (The article from Der Spiegel below lays out the situation quite well.)
After this intensive introduction to the Hamburg scene, and a lot of biking and getting lost, I spent this day in bed, studying. Now I am going to hear some music... and probably get lost again! But for the “House Magic” project, it is clear to me that Hamburg is the place to be.

LINKS

my hosts, Kuenstlerhaus Frise
http://www.frise.de/

Park Fiction
http://www.parkfiction.org/

Christoph Schaefer's 2008 lecture at MIT is online; at about 27 minutes he talks about the Parkl Fiction project
http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/4174

Es Regnet Kaviar/It's Raining Caviar
http://esregnetkaviar.de/

Rote Flora website
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/roteflora/

Gängeviertel website
http://das-gaengeviertel.info/home.html

“Squatters Take on the Creative Class: Who Has the Right to Shape the City?”
By Philipp Oehmke (translated from German)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,670600,00.html

Tabacalera Is Smokin'

2010-07-10T02:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was busy! After a long lunch and a rest, we returned to Tabacalera, the new CSA in Madrid. (That is Centro Sociale Auto-gestionada, or self-organized social center.) A party climaxed the events of the week long fiesta for three years of “red”-sistance thrown by the CSOA Patio Maravillas (that's “O” for okupa, or occupied, a squat). Thanks to an artist who has been working with the group since the beginning, we quickly met half a dozen of the most involved people in the space. My Spanish is growing, leaning on guesses at the infinitive forms of many Latin-derived English words. Also I have learned a sort of Spanish word order from my lover, now much damaging my English prose style I am sure. While I can somewhat speak, I cannot well understand what people say to me...

Before our friends arrived, it was frustrating. We were to meet Ely at the cute, brightly-painted hut which is the bicycle workshop in the patio behind the building, but the way out back was blocked by a tape and a guardian. We could see people outside sitting there, but were not allowed to reach them. Also I needed water, but no one was serving at the bar. In frustration, I waited on the street for Ely.

Later my problems were solved in a very revealing way. The access to the patio is through a wooden spiral staircase, really a hole in the floor behind a cabinet, in a room that houses the historical relics of the old Tabacalera factory. “No tocar los cosas historicos,” (?) the sign reads – don't touch the historical relics. People had been vague about directions to us. It's kind of an open secret: Down the rabbit hole, and you are in the patio. When our friends arrived, we went to the bar, where there was by now a good press of people. I saw the stacks of plastic cups behind the servers, and behind the bar a large kitchen. I simply trotted in, grabbed a cup, and poured myself a cup of water at the sink. A sign behind the bar says something like, “This is not a bar. This is a place to serve yourself.” Not true during a big public event, but the principle holds true. Always, if you act, like you know what you are doing – yes. But the place really could use a drinking fountain!

At length Ely arrived, and we chatted on the street. She said that a number of people who had been active in the CSOA Laboratorio – 1, 2 and 3* – were central in the assembly at Tabacalera. They had long wanted a neighborhood center in Lavapies, the multi-cultural district where many of them lived. The giant building had been empty for ten years since the privatization of the cigarette-making business. Now at last, after long lobbying with the city government, they finally have it.

When Montfrague arrived with Manuel our tour began. First I met Anna, who did not have much English, so I tried to talk to her about the situation in the U.S., in NYC with ABC No Rio. She asked if it had been a squat. No, but founded in an occupation, and later, during the period of most contest with the city, in the 1990s when the Lower East Side squatter movement was most strong, the whole building of ABC was actually squatted. Today the director is a squatter, living in a now-legalized building wiith a very low rent so he can afford to work at ABC for very little money.

Anna was in the cafe, where a Czech actress talked with us about her job of doing theater for free. Tabacalera is dedicated to free culture as a foundational principle. The actress was a curious person, smiling, very sweet. At one moment I saw that she was standing with one foot in a large green plastic tub...

After this we descended into the basement, where years ago tobacco leaves were stored. There I was introduced to Ciril, who was central to the Taller Urbana, a group of street artists working collectively. They had a big table, with many people around talking, drawing, drinking – and in the first bay of the basement warehouse a sort of ad hoc exhibition area for the products emerging from the Taller. Ciril it turns out worked at Tacheles, the famous Berlin squat and art center, in the 1990s, from '92 to '96. These were during the glory days after die Wende of '89, when the wall came down and many vacant properties near it in the former city center were up for grabs. The Berlin squatter movement seized the day.

Ciril thought the scene in Spain was sluggish, so he went to Berlin and stayed for four years. Now, after the Barcelona squat scene has been more or less crushed, Madrid is where it is at. Ciril asked me to talk to the Taller next week, and I look forward to return and discuss the House Magic project. The street art inside the Patio Maravillas last year before their eviction was extraordinary. The winding stairs of the building were a blaze of colorful forms. Although the installation was a chaotic free-for-all, and many people didn't like that, the result was a striking spectacle. Something like that, if it could be put together with the coherence of the 2640 and Justseeds installations I have seen in the U.S., would be a wonderful show which could travel to cities all over.

Back upstairs, we stood beside the stage as a punk ska band blew it out to the crowd. Too loud for my old ears!, yes, but a crowd of boys were moshing like monkeys, and everyone seemed to dig it. The band – I didn't get their name – had horns, and one musicians used a penny-whistle and then a bagpipe. I couldn't well hear any of the “oi!”-ish chants, but if they didn't have to do with Spain's soccer victory, I'd be surprised.

At lunch I learned the bizarre story of the oracular octopus who has infallibly picked the world cup winner for many years by fishing food from a bowl marked with different flags. The creature is German, actually. I hope its disappointed keepers didn't eat it! All this was revealed over a delicious plate of the animal served with potatoes. I suggested that Spain should not eat “pulpo” for a while to honor the oracle.

A couple of the Patio Maravillas crew showed up beside the stage, bouncing to the music. Of course it was too loud to talk. Later in the hallway I met Luis, who has good English, and I learned more. I asked about the “legitimation crisis.” Tabaclera is a CSA, not a CSOA or occupied space, but in residence legitimately. The graffiti on the banner outside – “vendidas!” (sell out) – reflecting the fear that many squatters have that a legitimated space will mean that the other okupas will more easily become targets of the state. Luis said that remained to be seen, but that many of the other okupas were already seeing the usefulness that Tabacalera could have to the movement. The fact that the Patio Maravillas party was drawing a crowd of many hundreds shelling out 3 euros each could mean a lot for that place. I recall the confidence Pierpaolo Mudu expressed in London about raising money for a publication through a concert at the massive Roman CSOA Forte Pretestino. “Once with Manu Chao, and we have it.” Although free culture and “copyleft” are ideals in practice, there is disagreement about what role money should play in the new CSA. People are seeing the possibilities.

So the criticism being expressed by the graffiti outside may not end up to be too toxic. The movement in Madrid, Luis told me, is more open and less fractionated than it is in Barcelona. This cooperation among many people of many ages and points of view has made something like the Tabacalera possible.

Of course, when money appears, many open hands appear also. Manuel told me that the state has been making noises about the group in Tabacalera paying rent. I suggested that if they were to budget their project, with the “in kind” work, the “sweat equity” that everyone is providing cleaning, repairing and administering the space, the calculation should end up with the state owing them for providing such an extraordinary service on such a scale!

Just as Leoncavallo in [Milan] began in 1979 to provide volunteer social service, so the Tabacalera CSA stands ready to become a primary artist-run cultural center for a city which has never had one. Right now, in the heyday of its beginnings, the place is as Manuel said, “boiling.” How in the long run it will be run can be open to question. There are already many disagreements to be worked out in assembly, frictions between the culture of activists and artists. Manuel and I had an obscure argument about Tabacalera administration. I think he saw it as a kind of collection of groups, like religious cults, each revolving around a guru. I maintained that, with its anarcho-syndicalist tradition, Spain is in the best position to realize anarchism in its ideal, as “the highest form of order.” (Although their students now may not really get it, Stefano Harney, Matteo Pasquinelli, Stevphen Shukaitis and others teaching “critical management studies” in the London business schools are rolling out the really new ways of doing sustainable democratically organized economic activity.)

Manuel spoke also of the Medialab Prado. This e-art workshop and learning center lies behind the Caixa Forum museum in the city center, around the corner from what should be Henry Kissinger's favorite hotel should he dare to come to Madrid. (I guess this by the cloud of black cars and body guards all around out front.) Medialab Prado is a small but important state-funded center of special culture that represents the cutting edge of technological development in the kind of culture industry every city dreams of nurturing. The Medialab had an organizational meeting this week to discuss making some kind of arrangement with Tabacalera. What is the result I don't know yet.

As the evening continued my magic language pill was wearing off. I met two members of a “conceptual art group” called Tauromachia whose project I could not understand at all, only that it will be big. They were working on set-ups in the large sculpture studio we visited earlier. One of these artists told me he was working with a dancer who had choreographed movements in which she was at once bull and matador. “Ah,” I said, “the hamburger that eats itself!” I'm afraid that was a little flip for the week in which the bulls are running the streets in Pamplona. The Spanish relation to food is a lot more mystical than in the U.S.

All in all, though, this was a very big evening for me. Many of the initial goals of the House Magic project seem now somehow to be within reach – at last! A genuine relation with a CSA, deeply rooted in the squatting movement, can help move this information to the U.S. in its pure and unmediated form. We shall see. But the prospects are good.

As I move on to Hamburg, I have finally and unexpectedly, come upon the kind of public private cultural development project I had been looking for in Madrid. The Tabacalera it seems to me is real anarchist urban development, a clear instance of “the city from below.”

*We showed the video “Laboratorio 3, Ocupando el Vacio” at the House Magic show at ABC No Rio. I recommend it. The trailer is on YouTube.

Flexible Governance

2010-07-07T04:59:00.000-07:00

I had heard about La Tabacalera as soon as I arrived last week, but only yesterday did I get around to see it. I wandered through the decrepit halls of this new artists' project located in an immense former tobacco factory in a kind of disbelief. This emerging cultural utopia is right off the busy traffic roundel at Plaza de Embajadores, near a cluster of university buildings, and only a few blocks from La Casa Encendida, a large well-funded cultural center with a fine exhibition series, films screenings, workshops for young people, etc.
La Tabacalera has been given over to artists temporarily by the Ministry of Culture. I don't have the whole story yet – and given my lack of Spanish, may never have it... But La Tabacalera appears to be a kind of outgrowth of the work of Patio Maravillas, the occupied social center evicted last year only to reappear in a building on Calle de Pez owned by a bankrupt firm.
The Tabacalera is a building with a very interesting history, for labor and “capital,” built in the late 18th century as a royal manufactory of liquor and playing cards, then tobacco and snuff. Now it is to be a “CSA,” a self-organized social center – but not an “okupa,” occupation, but a legitimated short-term use. From the organizers' own account, an invitation from the Ministry to put up a photo show in the place turned into a proposal to organize a self-managed social center in the very multicultural and historically poor neighborhood of Lavapiés. After long wrangling, this was accepted – for a while.
The plans as announced are incredibly ambitious. Dozens of projects, ateliers, theaters, studios have been launched. All activities will fall under “copyleft” common license; they will be collaborative and cooperative, and ecologically sustainable. The Tabacalera is “self-organizing” – meaning that the administrative functions will be discharged in assembly, a regular open meeting, just as in a social center. This is horizontal rather than vertical administration.Symbolically, the assembly meets in the former office of the factory boss (“jefe”).
The Tabacalera outcome has a tortuous history, which may be seen to have begun at a conference at the Museum Reina Sofia in February of last year considering the case of the occupied Patio Maravillas. The talk was titled “Art of the Crisis.” The shadowy Spain-wide cabal of academics called Universidad Nómada produced a text at the time. Then in May of '10 Observatorio Metropolitano, a multi-disciplinary group which published a fat book on Madrid as a global city, organized a meeting to consider “economic crisis, social crisis and new political scenarios.” In particular, they wanted to talk about “the different possibilities of re-appropriation of common resources against the urban model of governance.” When eggheads get serious about activism, some different things become possible.
The building now sports a coat of arms with two dogs, a flute and the motto “quien la propone se la come” (“who proposes eats”). But already this is disfigured with graffiti – “vendidas” (sell outs), indicating that there are many who do not accept this line of action. (The legitimation question, extensively discussed at the SQEK conference by Miguel Martinez, is a divisive one among occuupied social centers and squats.)
The space is only on loan – Cinderella will have to fold her dresses on February 2011. Then a hard-line vertical governance may step back in to a building renovated by the free labor of dreamy-eyed volunteers. There are many things to be said from a skeptical point of view... Still, it seems promising. It is an outgrowth of very well coordinated and intelligent pressure by partisans of OSCs rather than the kind of clumsy appropriation of activist strategies by government and private firms that has been seen in Copenhagen.
I hope to find out more. There is a dance this Friday, concluding Patio Maravillas' third annual festival of resistance, “ Crítica Urbana.” As Times Up Bill always says, “you gotta have tunes.”

La Tabacalera
http://latabacalera.net/

An opening invitation, issued in later June:
http://www.quiendebeaquien.org/spip.php?article1855

a detailed explanation on a left website
http://mislatacontrainfos.blogspot.com/2010/06/madrid-el-csa-la-tabacalera-de-lavapies.html

a lot of work to do – “architects of necessity”
http://blogs.latabacalera.net/autoconstruccion/2010/07/01/la-tabacalera-patologias/

Patio Maravillas conference at Reina Sofia last year
http://www.museoreinasofia.es/programas-publicos/pensamiento-y-debate/2009/patio-okupado.html

(Casa Encendida is showing now a splendid assemblage of artists' publications culled worldwide and installed in a library-like atmosphere as part of “Inéditos 2010.” )

Summer from Below

2010-07-02T05:18:00.000-07:00

Now we are so many particles in motion... I am in Madrid, early July. It is very hot. So much has been going on since my last post! In late May I went with Matt Metzgar and Carla Cubit to talk about political squatting at the exemplary anarchist Wooden Shoe bookstore in Philadelphia. Matt organized the New York City Squatter Archives, part of which is now at the Tamiment Library, NYU, and Carla is an artist, a maker of brilliant assemblage works, who lived in the Lower East Side squats in the 1990s. Alan Smart, who is working on Provo, came along. We all stayed the night at the luxurious Basekamp, courtesy of Scott Rigby. I packed up the “House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence” show which had been there to take it back to New York.
At the roundtable at Wooden Shoe a number of Philly squatters turned out to talk over their issues. A “cloud” of crusty punks sat on the street out front of the bookstore, entering only occasionally to use the toilets. At one point, a speaker said he thought there were thousands of squatters in Philadelphia. But there is no network, no organization at all. Traditional housing activist groups do not support them. (The Kensington Welfare Rights Union squatted a number of buildings for the poor in the 1980s, achieved some of their housing objectives, and backed away from the tactic.) There is, in effect, no movement – but there is a lot of action!
Although it was not possible, I would have liked to go to Detroit in June. The Allied Media Conference there was soon followed by the U.S. Social Forum. Many friends were there – part of A New World From Below: An Anarchist and Antiauthoritarian Convergence. I haven't had time to track the blogs, but now that I cruise 'em, I see Nicolas Lampert has done a great series of reports on the Just Seeds artists' collective blog. And the gang from Area Chicago have dedicated a bloggish zone to the conference. So there is a lot of reading to catch up on, as well as the main left news outlets reporting on events like the conversation between Grace Lee Boggs and Immanuel Wallerstein.
Instead I went to London for the Squatting Europe Research Collective meeting (SQEK). This was an intimate gathering of people squeezed into a tiny little building called LARC (London Action Resource Centre). For five days these researcher/activists shared plans and papers, analytic frameworks, stories and camaraderie on squatting as a social movement. This experience has really super-charged my understanding of the subject and questions around it. A week later I am still typing up the notes, and there will be much to come about this here and on the House Magic website as I scope the Madrid scene and move on to Hamburg.
London is big, and I stayed with friends in Deptford, a good way from Whitechapel. I skipped the party in Hackney, and the visits to OSCs like Ratstar and Infoshop 56A. But we did all meet to support the Foundry eviction resistance. Here is a photo of the doomed building in Shoreditch...

Links mentioned:
http://www.woodenshoebooks.com/home.html
http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/squatters_rights_churchman.html
http://basekamp.com/
http://www.alliedmediaconference.org/
http://anarchistussf.wordpress.com/
http://justseeds.org/blog/
http://areachicago.org/b/USSF/
http://www.londonarc.org/
http://sqek2010.blogspot.com/

"Anarchist Track" at U.S. Social Forum Gets Beefy

2010-06-14T08:11:00.000-07:00

Cindy Milstein sends this along, and it looks great. I am in London for the SQEK conference at this time. But if you are in Detroit, check this out -- and report it back somehow!
Subject: The IAS at the U.S. Social Forum, as part of the New World from Below convergence: The New World from Below Organizing Collectives--a collaboration between AK Press, City from Below, the Institute for Anarchist Studies, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Manifesta Musicians’ Collective, Midnight Special Law Collective, Red Emma's, Solidarity and Defense, Team Colors Collective, and the Trumbullplex--is proud to announce the New World from Below convergence at the U.S. Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit from June 22-27, 2010 (http://www.facebook.com/l/9d17e;anarchistussf.wordpress.com/).
We believe that social forums can greatly contribute to strengthening social movements both in the United States and internationally. The ecological destruction and economic disaster, coupled with disillusionment about the Obama presidency, makes the USSF in Detroit an urgently needed convergence. We hope to bring what’s unique about anarchist and antiauthoritarian organizing to the social forum, and spark conversations not only about strategies of resistance but also visions of reconstruction from the bottom-up.
To that end, the New World from Below Organizing Collectives will be hosting the New World from Below workshop track within the USSF. This track will bring together 36 talks, panels, and workshops organized by anarchist and antiauthoritarian collectives from across the continent. These will all take place in the USSF’s spaces at Cobo Hall and surrounding locations.
We will also be hosting the New World from Below convergence center, where each day a different collective will organize this space for tabling, art and performances, facilitated anarchist strategy sessions, and socializing as well as networking. The center will be located at the Spirit of Hope Church, 1519 Martin Luther King Junior Blvd., Detroit, MI 48208, at the corner of MLK and Trumbull. And Food Not Bombs/IWW Solidarity Kitchen will be serving food at the New World from Below convergence center.
See the New World from Below Web site for the full schedule as well as updates and posts over the coming two weeks: http://www.facebook.com/l/9d17e;anarchistussf.wordpress.com/workshops/.
And see you, we hope, in Detroit.

Happy Birthday, Malcolm X!

2010-05-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

Today I went along to a demonstration for Picture the Homeless in Brook Park in the South Bronx, NYC. It was really charming, a lovely place, little grove of trees, broad sunny area for plots of vegetables, and Mexican dancing group and singing group performing. Rebel Diaz arts collective also, rapping about the banks. PtH is moving on some vacant properties -- dropping banners on them, calling for their occupation by homeless families. I was up to their HQ earlier working on one of the banners. I did the sketch for the one with the words "BLOOM BERG" on it! (From an idea by a young woman, painting by many kids, and letters by Seth Tobocman, a great political artist.) Sebastian was there with his camera interviewing, and mentioned the strike in Puerto Rico at the university there. This news is BLACKED OUT in North America, but looks like it's building to an island-wide general strike... (I am embedding the links as an experiment, now -- the English sources on this story are Occupyca blog and Studentactivism.net.) Me and Matt Metzgar of the Loswer East Side Squatter Archive project and artist Carla Cubit are going to Philadelphia on May 29th, to talk at Wooden Shoe Books about political squatting. It's a roundtable, organized with Basekamp. Drop by if you are in town! We need to hear about the Philly story...

"House Magic" zine catalogue #2 PDF is online at last

2010-05-12T21:06:00.001-07:00

It is right here.

Falling in Spring

2010-04-26T08:49:00.001-07:00

The 4th Anarchist Book Fair at Judson Memorial Church was a bucket of fun. All the oldtime radical geeks from NYC were there, and scads of anarchist travelers crouched on the sidewalks outside, dressed in colorful shades of black. The “House Magic” wallpaper went up in the hallways, and after the fair it was rolled up and taken away to the offices of Picture the Homeless. We even had a little Keystone Kops action, as local police with federal handlers raided a center in Brooklyn at 13 Thames Street, arresting members of the Independent Anarchist Media (I AM) collective as they were preparing to decamp to Manhattan to mount the film screenings for the book fair. This bit of foolishness was blasted all over the web – the blog Animal pegged it: “Anarchist Film Fest Gets Free Promo from NYPD.” It seems the police walked in without a warrant to enter, the probable cause being that the door of the place was open, and they thought it was a squat. A couple were arrested; judges the next morning dismissed all charges. The place is Surreal Estate, which I gotta visit, since it’s an active little joint. I don’t get over to Brooklyn much… But, as the U.S. Social Forum approaches in late June, I want to chat with local folks who are going. And they are.
At the ABF I flogged the “House Magic” zine. The proof of number two is finally at Bluestockings (still not on the web, sorry!). I’ve been striving to get HM#2 online, but at the fair I found out many people don’t really see online zines. The Affinities journal issue from Canada, the Monster Institutions issue of Transversal, and the fabulous UK compendium of social centres called What's This Place don’t seem to be as well known as they deserve. At ABC No Rio, the House Magic display featured a number of photocopied tape-bound copies of these online texts, and they sold (for copying costs). At the NYC ABF, I traded some of these for books I wanted. I saw a lot of retro stuff at the ABF – manuals of Zerzanesque neoprimitivism, of course, which appeal to my love of Ovidian Golden Age nostalgia (the New Suburbanism), and a charming richly made zine from Portland “Communicating Vessels” which proudly announces “no website”: CV, P.O. Box 83408, Portland OR 97283. Illustrations by Valloton, texts about Rexroth and Surrealism in the Arab world? This is modernist anarchism in the sense that Allan Antliff means it. Also out of Portland, “At Daggers Drawn,” a translation of a dark and brilliant Italian text of romantic incitement printed in silver ink on black paper (so it can’t be photocopied) in 500 copies. The IWW had lots of new merch and an online store! Zapatista merch was also on display. I have a doll, so I bought a scarf. There were lots more booths and texts of interest, like the Aftershock Action Alliance, taking off on Naomi Klein’s notions of solidarity in the face of crisis capitalism; prole.info’s lovely zine on food service shitwork (also a download) “Abolish Restaurants”; and an important tip to the South African zabalaza.net, which is dizzyingly international. I also traded for the chubby 2007 centennial edition of “Solidaridad Obrera,” the voice of the Spanish CNT.
So it was inspiring… Like that oh-so-68 picture up top. It's from an especially fetching collection, the newsprinted “After the Fall, Communiqués from Occupied California,” which collects “the major statements from the recent wave of occupations” in the public universities of California in advance of the March 4th mobilization. This mobe was more effective against the Bologna Process in Europe, I believe, than here in the U.S.. The full impact hasn’t really registered on U.S. students, or, rather, it is doing so unevenly. A key point in the “After” text is how the the growth and even continuance of the California public higher education system is collateralized against the fees students pay. A burden of crushing debt on students is thus augmented by the state’s incentive to constantly raise those fees… It’s a subtle point, but it is of such oppressive taxes, no matter how cleverly they made be hidden, that revolutions are made.

Photo: Students occupying Wheeler Hall, University of California Berkeley, from the “After the Fall” book.

NYC Anarchist Book Fair
http://anarchistbookfair.net/

Police raid on Anarchist Film Festival group
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2010/04/110357.shtml
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/film-fest-is-on-police-radar-anarchists-say/

Promo for the film fest
http://www.nyanarchistfilmfest.org/

Surreal Estate
http://www.myspace.com/surrealestatenyc

Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action
http://journals.sfu.ca/affinities/index.php/affinities

Monster Institutions issue of Transversal
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0508

What's This Place
http://socialcentrestories.wordpress.com/

Daggers Drawn
http://www.eberhardtpress.org/catalog/daggers.php

IWW online merch store
http://store.iww.org

“After the Fall” download
http://afterthefallcommuniques.info/

HM#2 on Display, but Still Unripe...

2010-04-07T13:44:00.000-07:00

Why so mute? Angst, I guess. But it’s been rolling, for real. "House Magic" zine number 2 has been beautifully designed and photocopied, and a few issues have trickled out (Bluestockings, Printed Matter). Yes, it was in proof in January for Philadelphia, and now it is spring -- but there remain still some problems, and some of it must be amputated. The pdf will be online in two weeks, for certain. (Contact me directly and I'll send you the current version.) Meanwhile, HM#2 was displayed in a nice display rack in the zine library at ABC No Rio for the Ides of March show this month. That show closes on Friday (4-9, 7pm), and zines related to the OSC movement will be sold for cost of copying. We will also sell “moonshine” made by the Aaron Burr Society. Next stop, the 4th Annual NYC Anarchist Book Fair at Judson Church (4-17, 11am-7pm), where the project will have a table display. Come on by and see, say "hi!", and talk about your experiences with the OSC movement for the record. Over the break – I am struggling with teaching early modern art history – I was in Madrid to talk at the new Patio Maravillas at Calle Pez 21. I was supposed to talk at La Macula, but they were evicted a few days before. The talk took me by surprise, so I rambled on, mostly about New York City. Miguel Martinez invited me: he has posted his SQEK group’s research agenda now, and is planning an international meeting in London in later June. I want to be there, after (even overlapping) the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit. Thereafter Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Berlin. A leisurely summer is in prospect. BTW: A nasty situation developing in San Diego for Ricardo Dominguez because of his group's work on behalf of migrants. Read and support: http://bang.calit2.net/

ABC No Rio “Ides of March” show:
http://www.abcnorio.org/events/ides2010.html

Aaron Burr Society:
http://aaronburrsociety.org/aaron_burr_society_home.html

4th Annual NYC Anarchist Book Fair:
http://anarchistbookfair.net/

the new Patio Maravillas:
http://defiendelo.patiomaravillas.net/

the defunct La Macula:
http://www.lamacula.org/

The SQEK: Squatting Europe Research Agenda:
www.miguelangelmartinez.net/IMG/pdf/2009_SQEK__7_Dec_.pdf

photo: The wall at the new Patio Maravillas cafe

Watching TV online

2010-02-27T07:26:00.000-08:00

The snow in New York is heavy and persistent. The zine “House Magic” #2 is in the hands of the designer. I called it for “winter,” but now maybe better call it “Spring 2010” since it will not be PDF’d until next month. I am hopeful, but uncertain where the project goes from here. As a traveling exhibition, it is much to bear, and my resources are thinning. Still, I have been digging, digging in the subject, and will start more to present my findings here.
I watched another part of “In Between the Movements,” the video project by Martin Krenn, which is online. This was the discussion between Gerald Raunig and Krenn at WUK in Vienna, 2008, in German subtitled in English. (From the WUK website: “The autonomous cultural center WUK (short for Werkstätten- und Kulturhaus) in Vienna,” one of the biggest in Europe, “is rooted in the ideas and demands of the ‘70s for spaces to enable contemporary cultural activities.”) It begins with the a primer on Félix Guattari’s idea of transversality, which arose out of his observations on the structure of power in his mental clinic. Specifically, the concept seeks to identify a flow of power outside of vertical hierarchies and horizontal forces. (Are those charismas? Let’s face it, I still don’t get it.) Then Gerald and Martin trot through the free school of WUK, talking about the way that school worked democratically between the interests of teachers, parents and students.
From the contradictions of this school, Raunig talks then of the “rule of forced self-administration” – in order to participate, one must attend the meetings where decisions are made. This is a key part of “instituent practice,” the arising of movement-based institutions. He notes the divide between two Vienna squats, the autonomous Ernst Kirchweger Haus and the institutionalized WUK. These two are antagonists: one is “good” since it accords with revolutionary principles, whereas the other is “bad” since it accords with neo-liberal civic transformations. (And, in other contexts, e.g., Zurich, one is “good” because it plays by the rules, and the other is “bad” because it’s illegal, and therefore subject to state repression.)
Raunig wants to dissolve this dichotomy, to reconcile the two positions, so that both are seen as movements, as part of the “machinization” of Deleuze and Guattari. Good luck. The radical anarchist “position,” that “a movement without institutionalization exists,” is not really at odds with the position that small scale “civil society institutions” could exist, and then create the “big Other of institutions.” Rebels will always need lawyers. And without direct action, we wouldn’t have any autonomous spaces to embrace or resist institutionalization.
In other news, I learned via Krax of the Ljubljana OSC Metelkova Mesto, which is thoroughly integrated into the youth tourist infrastructure of clubs and hostels. (City Mine(d) plans a conference there.) Rozbrat in Poznan, Poland is facing mid-March sale of the land their OSC stands on after 16 years renovating and enlivening “wasteland” in that gentrifying city. And I stumbled upon the first 2007 issue of a Canadian e-zine called “Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action,” which has articles on queer autonomous spaces, radical world building, Italy's Social Centers (by Steve Wright), Argentina’s worker-recovered enterprises movement, Zapatistismo in the U.S., and much more.

Martin Krenn, “In Between the Movements”
http://www.in-between-the-movements.net/

WUK
http://www.wuk.at/language/en-us/wuk

Rozbrat stays!
http://www.rozbrat.org/news-in-english

Affinities: Theory Culture and Action
http://journals.sfu.ca/affinities/index.php/affinities/index

Continental Drift jibber-jabber in L.A.

2010-02-19T18:49:00.000-08:00

I have to post this. I am a fan... And this looks like a hardcore egghead slam jam on the Left Coast.
Continental Drift; Control Society/Metamorphosis with Brian Holmes
at the Public School in Los Angeles February 27 and 28th
http://occupyeverything.com/events/continental-drift/
Come down and participate in a two-day theory convergence, a “Continental Drift” seminar with the Paris and Chicago based theorist, Brian Holmes.
Though this Drift is situated on the West Coast in a time of University of California occupations and walkouts, it is connected to the budget cuts and "crisis" brought on by changing economies around the world and the emergence of a neoliberal control society over the past few decades. This drift aims to trace these situation and find ways for liberatory culture to supercede the moment.
++++
1. The Continental Drift; Control Society/Metamorphosis
2. On Brian Holmes and the Drift
3. UC Strikes and Beyond
++++
1. The Continental Drift; Control Society/Metamorphosis
Saturday, February 27 –Sunday, Feb. 28
@The Public School 951 Chung King Rd., Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Join us for a mostly horizontal seminar conversation with Brian Holmes, UC strike Organizers and Academics and independent intellectuals.
day 1. 2/27- control society
12 pm: disassociation (psychological effects/desire)
facilitators: Liz Glynn and Marc Herbst
2 pm: financialization & the UC crisis
facilitators: Aaron Benanav and Zen Dochterman
4 pm occupation/ collective speech
facilitators: Cara Baldwin, Nathan Brown, Maya Gonzalez, Evan Calder Williams
7 pm: discussion day one
facilitators: Brian Holmes, Solomon Bothwell
day 2. 2/28- metamorphosis
12pm: Autonomous Space
facilitators: Hector Gallegos, Robby Herbst
2 pm:. Precarity
facilitators: Christina Ulke, Sean Dockray
4 pm: Brian Holmes Lecture
7pm: Sharable Territories/ Bifurcation
facilitators: Jason Smith, Ava Bromberg
occupyeverything.com/events/continental-drift
Note: This is a collaboratively organized event. Organizers include Zen Doctherman, Cara Baldwin, Jason Smith, Sean Dockray, Liz Glynn, Solomon Bothwell, Christina Ulke, Marc Herbst, Robby Herbst.
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2. On Brian Holmes and the Drift
Brian Holmes is an art critic, cultural theorist and activist, particularly involved with the mapping of contemporary capitalism.
An article Brian wrote that he asked to read in preparation for the drift:
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/guattaris-schizoanalytic-cartographies/#sdfootnote10sym
Holmes on the UC Strikes:
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/the-u-c-strike/
Journal interview we did with him from issue 4:
http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/4/holmes.html
Some publications by or with Brian Holmes:
http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?S=R&wauth=Brian+Holmes&siteID=1JSk6CbYEf0-bBxS9UMaaFGtIjUV42joJA
The Drift has taken a variety of forms in its manifestations at 16 Beaver (2004-2006) in New York, through the Midwest’s Radical Culture Corridor (2008) and in Zagreb Croatia (2008)
Here is An interview with Brian Holmes from the first continental drift in NYC in 2004.
http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/001168.php
++++
3. UC Strikes and Beyond
The Drift was independently organized though occurs in coordination with the
Beyond the UC Strikes working group.
The working group occured when folks who were participating in the strikes and talking about them
decided to meet up the the Los Angeles Public School to see what could be done.
We are promoting these linked events.
http://joaap.org/other/drift/BeyondtheUCStrikes.html
http://occupyeverything.com/
These are not specifically Journal events. The working group includes Organizers include Cara Baldwin, Solomon Bothwell, Micha Cardenas/Adzel Slade, Zen Dochterman, Sean Dockray, Ben Ehrenreich, Ken Ehrlich, Liz Glynn, Marc Herbst, Robby Herbst, Elle Mehrmand, Marko Peljhan, Kenneth Rogers, Jason Smith, Cybelle Tondu, Christina Ulke, Caleb Waldorf, Michael Wilson and Kim Yasuda.

Chicago Town

2010-02-13T18:46:00.000-08:00

I am writing in the palatial Hostel International in Chicago,and the annual College Art Association conference is over. This is a great city, but the conference was strange. It is, as always, a heterodox assembly of artists and art historians, from the reddest revolutionary (intellectual, to be sure), to the most unreflexive treasurers of cultural capital. The latter have the upper hand, since those who honor the legacy of 19th and early 20th century scholar-dealer Bernard Berenson have all the money. (Berenson was an assiduous student of the Morellian method. Evolved as a means of identifying criminals and criminal “types,” Berenson used it to recognize the authorship of medieval and Renaissance painters. [I'm wrong on this: thinking of Cesare Lombroso; but the very adaptable Morellian method was linked to detective work.]) So we all wander around the Hyatt Hotel here, a giant, incomprehensibly mazelike, interconnected complex.
Chicago, though, is the locus of numerous significant political cultural projects, and the gang rallied around this year, producing a number of talking events inside and outside the convention. At the thick of it was the group Temporary Services, and the north Chicago space Mess Hall.
I was snowed into New York and so missed the “shadow session” In fact, I missed my own session on autonomous education initiatives and their relation to art institutions. My co-chair had to fill in. Everything went well, they say. I hope so. It was arduous getting here (late), and I have been basically exhausted for days… But for me these conventions are always fun. And, since I am teaching art history again, they are a source of renewal of that basic disciplinary intelligence, such as it is.
Meanwhile, the “House Magic” zine catalogue is in proof – although we bound it backwards, so the first run is pretty unimpressive! Maybe it will be a collectible someday.
The table of contents is as follows: 1) Introduction – More “House Magic” Tricks; 2) Reflecting on the “House Magic” Project; 3) Barcelona: Fighting for “Thousands of Homes”; 4) Michel Chevalier at ABC No Rio, 2; 5) Last Call Hamburg in New York (Frise Kunsthaus); 6) Vincent Boschma, The Autonomous Zone/de Vrije Ruimte (Amsterdam); 7) Bullet Space: “The Perfect Crime” (NYC); 8) Telestreet: Pirate Proxivision (Italy); 9) El Patio Maravillas Turns a Corner (Madrid); 10) Christiania: Survival of the Interesting; 11) Christiania: How They Do It and for How Long; 12) Scandinavian Bulletins; 13) NYC’s Picture the Homeless Goes to Budapest; 14) AK57, Budapest; 15) The Story of Villa Milada, Prague; 16) Rozbrat Squat, Poland; 17) Greek Bulletins; 18) rampART, London; 19) SQEK: Squatting Europe Research Agenda; 20) Andre Mesquita, Real-Time Action in Brazil.
I hope to have it printed by the end of the month. It may still happen – there is nothing much more to do but pay for it. Pretty much the same day it goes to press, the PDF will go online at the HM:BFC website. The archive show remains up at Basekamp in Philadephia (see previous post). No events are yet scheduled.
picture: the "key" in the Reuben Kincaid Realty office window, Bridgeport, Chicago, 5/09 (pic by me)

"House Magic" is up near Independence Hall

2010-01-26T20:35:00.000-08:00

I wrote this while training out of Philadelphia last week. The railscape is what you usually see in a decaying U.S. city: scrap yards of twisted rusting metal, empty factories with busted windows and walls broken open, junkyards, trash dumps and spills, vacant houses. Then there are odd, inexplicable spots. The newly roofed geodesic dome in an industrial park. A train caboose standing in a field, with washing hung on a line behind it. A community garden, and beyond it a couple of low-rising row houses with bright murals rising up their three story heights. The long strips of spray-painted names on parked railroad cars, factory walls.
Like so many other U.S. cities, Philadelphia is a place that has forgotten itself. Its rich have moved out, building their corporate monuments somewhere else, and letting the old city – the city of the 20th century and before – sink quietly into the ooze of time. Basekamp hosted the “House Magic” show in their space located only a few blocks from the historic city center. The famous 18th century revolutionary Benjamin Franklin’s house was here, and his visage and silhouette is everywhere. But it seems a quarter of the stores and buildings are empty. Lovely 19th century constructions, some very fancy, are shuttered. Many have been disfigured with “modern” style storefronts, blank, cheap attempts to clean them up at the street level. The impression of dereliction, misuse and abandonment is strong. Coffeeshop proprietors look glum. Their shops are empty at mid-morning. Again and again I am the only customer. Somewhere rich people are hustling and bustling and spending their money, building new prosperity somewhere else, and electing politicians who promise to keep their money out of public hands. But in downtown Philadelphia, there is depression, many ragged poor and beggars.
“House Magic” went up on the wall at Basekamp, where it will remain for some while (not sure how long exactly). It is part of the series “Plausible Artworlds,” a year-long project Scott Rigby has been percolating for some time now. Last week the Library of Radiant Optimism was set up with a little alcove for their “book of the month club” project, and The Public School open self-education franchise was launched in Philadelphia. So “House Magic” is in good company. Last Tuesday was the conversation, an online and in-person discussion of the social center movement that was dense and interesting. I look forward to receiving the audio and email transcript of the HM:BFC installment of this regular series so that I can post it on the “House Magic” website.
Albon Jeavon showed up at the talk from the Wooden Shoe anarchist bookstore, and spoke a little about the squatting movement in Philadelphia past. One of the leaders, it seems, was elected mayor! Then he sold out the movement. His brother was recently imprisoned for fraud. There are numerous squats in this city, but this was not a research trip so I did not investigate. Albon told us of LAVA, the activist-owned place that runs many programs similar to those in OSCs (occupied social centers). It is described as a “media center,” and its occupants publish the Philadelphia anarchist newspaper The Defenestrator. Hopefully Basekamp and Wooden Shoe will do more projects together. It seems like a good direction as the political landscape in the U.S. begins to darken once again. The hope invested in Obama's presidency is starting to turn sour, and the reactionaries are once again emboldened to lead the people on in their selfish, destructive course.
Things around the “House Magic” project became clearer at Basekamp, the first unpacking of the developed out-of-town suitcase version of the HM:BFC project. (Chicago was a modest trial run.)
The zine catalogue #2, which was ready at the Basekamp show as a proof, includes a good deal of NYC material, trying to draw out some connections between that well-known (if under-published) squatting scene of the 1980s and '90s and the European social center movement. They are really separated in time, the new wave of activism in EU and the long-ago bravado of the nascent U.S. anarchist movement.
Upon arriving and unpacking the “suitcase,” I discovered that I did not have the clipboard materials that go on the boards, that is, the dossiers we had laboriously assembled by downloading and translated material from OSC websites. What to do, what to do? I lost sleep Monday night. On Tuesday, I started out to remake the clipboards. In a few hours I had pretty much succeeded! And I think the material is somehow less opaque and more engaging than the “original” research materials we assembled in the spring of '09. It is certainly more current. And in doing this I realized again the nature of the HM:BFC project – it is a process exhibition, not a finished art object. I was reifying the old clipboards, even though in truth they were only a beginning of an on-going research project that is only real, only living insofar as it is continued, or even, as I had to, begun anew.
The ideal “suitcase” setup, I think, would include a workstation with an online computer and a printer so that visitor/participants could download and print out their own researches and add them to the dossiers or start new ones. Each “suitcase” show should build the whole, accreting the record of the many experiences of doing bottom-up, grassroots, disobedient, radiantly optimistic urban development using creativity and labor rather than capital. These stories are all remarkable and we need them badly.
“House Magic” will live at Basekamp for a while, and hopefully there will be film screenings and discussions around the questions that will continue and generate more material. The next “suitcase” will be in Baltimore -- probably more like March than February, since everything is moving more slowly than I thought, and now I have to go back to work. But with any luck, we will snowball out of Philly to Crab City, Baltimore, and from there build movement towards the Detroit U.S. Social Forum in June. By then I hope we have assembled also numerous U.S. dossiers reporting on the American versions of the European OSCs. They are more numerous than I think we all realize.

Basekamp
http://basekamp.com/

The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let's Re-Make the World
http://www.letsremake.info/

The Public School
http://all.thepublicschool.org/

Wooden Shoe Books
http://www.woodenshoebooks.org/

LAVA, the Lancaster Avenue Autonomous Zone
http://www.lavazone.org/

Chicago February 10: Autonomous U

2010-01-20T19:31:00.000-08:00

So behind here! Much action -- Philly coming up. But here's this now, for those traveling to the chilly northern midwest next month:
"Pedagogy of the Periphery" CAA Shadow Session
Wed., Feb. 10, 4-8pm, at Three Walls (119 n. peoria #2d, http://www.three-walls.org/ )
A workshop-style event on the history, practice, and theory of experimental pedagogy inside and outside institutions, in conjunction with AREA Chicago’s issue #9 (Peripheral Vision), the Open Practice Committee, the Emma Goldman Center for the Study and Practice of Creative Anarchosyndicalism, and the Radical Caucus for Art’s Autonomizing Practices panel at the College Art Association meeting. Educators and students discuss pedagogical practices, broadly defined—with their optimism, obstacles, methods, pleasures, and frustrations—with short informal presentations and time for large- and small-group discussion, including questions submitted for discussion in advance by students and flexibility to address current events as needed (such as events in the campus uprisings happening in California, Europe, and elsewhere). This free event allows people not attending the conference to benefit from a sampling of visiting speakers and Chicago teachers. It is not conceived as anti-CAA, but happens alongside the conference to illustrate the fact that some conversations are easier to hold outside the professional machine.
Tentative Program:
4:00 meet and greet
4:30 Panel I: Greg Sholette / Dara Greenwald / Liz Mason-Deese and Tim Stallmann
5:45 Panel II: Eve Ewing / Nicole Marroquin / Bert Stabler
7:00 Small group discussions / report back from small groups
wrap up

Recommended readings:
From Occupied Berkeley
http://anticapitalprojects.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/necrosocial5.pdf
From AREA Chicago
http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/peripheral-vision/please-bring-your-cell-phone-art-class/
http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/6808/educating-68/
http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/peripheral-vision/relative-freedom/
Questions and discussion:
Students and others are invited to send questions in advance that will be compiled and distributed for discussion in small groups of no more than 8 to be facilitated by the speakers. These might be responses to the readings, burning questions about your education, things you want to discuss. There will be time for discussion of the speakers' presentations, but this allows everyone in the room an opportunity to help set the agenda for discussion.
Send proposed questions (and any requests for information about the event) to youngjkwak@gmail.com. pLease also indicate if you would like to register to participate in a small group discussion. The event is free and open to all but there are limited spaces in discussion groups. Anyone can also start their own small group discussion at the event.

"Climate Bottom" at Christiania

2009-12-08T20:23:00.001-08:00

What do I know?, I'm sitting in New York. But Thursday is the Radical Urbanism conference at the Grad Center here, and Jordan Zinovich will talk about Christiania there -- and I see that Interactivist.net bears this interesting post about the "Climate Bottom," a summit, or rather anti-summit taking place simultaneous with the muck-a-mucks' one in Copenhagen. Christiania, despite their troubles, is a place unafraid to host activists during the global summits of the rulers. As one of the greenest and most sustainable places on the planet since the 1970s -- (a friend of mine insisted that it wasn't "hypocrisy" to repress them during the summit, only "a paradox") -- this community is a beacon to the world... our world... the world of the future. Make noise -- be seen -- tell all the party people what you mean!

Climate Bottom info
http://climatebottom.dk/en/

That It Was...

2009-12-04T14:50:00.001-08:00

Back in NYC after my little jaunt to Madrid. Before I left, Jay entertained me at his squat in Tetuán. It is in a very old building, of which there are a number abandoned in advance of new construction of apartment houses. Now, with the crisis, the construction is stalled, so some of the deserted houses are being used. We also visited a new social center in the district, across from a mosque. It is run, Jay said, by Zapatistists, and is a local social center as opposed to say, Patio Maravillas or Malaya (closed), which are open SCs located in the central city. The local SCs are just that -- dedicated to the concerns of the community in which they are located. The open ones are more public, and, like Patio, may be more culturally oriented. Jay is a member of the media group SinAntena, which made a documentary "Lavapiés: 18 años de okupación." [URL below] I dropped back into NYC just in time to catch the very end of the An Architektur group's sympsium, "Ten Days for Oppositional Architecture: Towards Post-Capitalist Spaces," in a storefront in Dumbo, Brooklyn. This was an ambitious event, produced by a Berlin collective which publishes a journal of the same name. It was part of a performance art festival called Performa, and was held in a space donated by a real estate group (naturally). (Further evidence, of course, that Stefan Dillemuth's prediction of "corporate rococo" is coming true; "post-capitalist" in this instance having perhaps another stopping point than socialism!) A number of the presentations are on their website in audio form, including the sessions on decommodification of housing, the prospects of planning, and the commons: taking versus granting rights. I made it to the wrapping up session, with invited guest Damon Rich. Rich works as a planner in Newark, and is a founder of CUP (Center for Urban Pedagogy). This group is committed to education, and to "making policy public." On that website, they have posted a PDF of "Predatory Equity: The Survival Guide." It describes the cycle of speculation in property that destroys low and middle income housing in the USA. This is the cycle, said planner Peter Marcuse in a session last night, that must end. Why is land a commodity?, he asks. It's a natural resource. Housing tends to be a monopoly, with a largely fixed supply. A rise in rents does not lead to an increase of units, just more profits for the owners. In this panel, sponsored by the CUNY Center for Place, Culture and Politics (run by Neil Smith & David Harvey), Rob Robinson of Picture the Homeless and Max Rameau of Take Back the Land called for a nationwide land and housing direct action initiative, to reclaim TARP properties (that is the U.S. "Troubled Asset Relief Program," under which defaulted home mortgages were bought by the government.)
These houses are held off the market so that the price of the remaining supply may rise. To assert the moral right of persons to be housed -- to argue that "housing is a human right" -- is an argument that these activists feel can now be made. PtH has been meeting with the visiting United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing.
This is clearly important stuff. And a nationwide campaign is needed before the government decides to bulldoze
the nation's cities where it is possible for poor folk to find housing. PtH organizer Frank brought this up rather quickly, but it's a bombshell. As the UK Telegraph reported in June, "“Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic `shrink to survive' proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline." This story is being followed by rightwing blogs. There is a restatement on a site called "Inhabitat" with the motto "design will save the world." They seem pleased that the plan would be "big news for environmentalists," since the poor districts would be replaced by parks and forests. Again, Werner Von Delmont would approve. Fox hunting anyone?
While I have been dabbling in the discourse of planning and finance as it has been purveyed in NYC lectures and symposia on the crisis this year, I continue to investigate the social center movement, and collective forms of disobedient direct action in the cities of the world. This Sunday (12-6-09) I will lead a second conversation about European squatted social centers as part of the Public School for Architecture produced by the Common Room group. The talk will take place at 3pm in Brownie's Cafe in the basement of Avery Hall (the Graduate School of Architecture building) on the Columbia University campus. The second issue of the catalogue of the “House Magic” project will be produced this month. Texts and images are invited by the closing date of December 15th of this year. Please send to awm13579[at]gmail.com, and include in the subject line: “HM2”.

see the film "Lavapiés: 18 años de okupación":
http://sinantena.net/mov/18_anos_okupacion_en_lavapies.mov

An Architektur event:
http://www.oppositionalarchitecture.com/

CUP
http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/

"Making Policy Public" Predatory Equity Survival Guide:
http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/index.php?page=predatory-equity

Photo by Brett Weinstein from inhabitat.com

Dry Fears for Fate of Marvels

2009-11-13T04:35:00.000-08:00

I joined a group of volunteers at the weekly bar at Seco SC in Madrid last night. They were trying to karaoke, but the software was not cooperating. Earlier in the evening, there had been an assembly meeting at the SC Patio Maravillas (really a “CSO” for “Centro Sociale Okupado”; Seco is legalized). El Patio is under an order of eviction, which could come any day. They were discussing what to do. Earlier in the year, the authorities had announced the time of eviction, so hundreds of people were able to assemble. This time the cops are being more cagey. So tactics were discussed… Let’s just say at this point that an innovative use of technology is planned by the “hacktivists” of the place. Stay tuned to the website!
Ironically, Patio was criticized for negotiating with the authorities. This SC was hoping to legalize itself. Other squatters criticized this position, arguing that if one group negotiates, the state can more easily criminalize the other groups. The argument became incendiary, when some people planted a bomb in the door of Patio. The explosion blew out the door. Still, the incident was not reported, the perpetrators were suspected. A family argument? Perhaps…
Some at Seco expressed bewilderment about the younger squatters in Madrid. To these older social center volunteers, these youth seem “identitarian,” overly immersed in their sullen, conformist subcultures to be doing any useful political work. (I remembered the man outside Joe’s Garage in Amsterdam earlier this year, who told me that the place was “a social center for squatters”!) I suggested this might be after-effect from the Copenhagen “Youth House” eviction, in which the forces of the right pretty much rubbed young peoples’ noses in the facts of their powerlessness. Kids from all over Europe converged to fuck up the streets, and a new wave of squatting was born. I am told now it has even spread to super-sedate Munich.
Tonight in Madrid there is a party at a squatted social center in an old building inside a cemetery in the La Elipa neighborhood. This will be a very late night hardcore goth and rap scene, so again this old man won’t go. The motto of this squat, I’m told, is: “Dando vida en espacios muerte” – Bringing life to dead spaces.

The Big Political Show

2009-10-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

It’s over now, the Creative Time “Summit” last weekend – a great hit, with many folks in town chatting up the work so far – that is, political art in its new formations. The Yesmen took the “prize,” since, indeed there was one. An award ceremony I missed, since the show at New York Public Library was sold out. I came later Saturday (pretending to be on my way to do research very overdue in that library), and managed to sneak into the shindig, thanks to a friend from Baltimore Development Cooperative.
The procession of artists with great schemes was consistent throughout the day. Then the presenters went upstairs to a conversation room for closer discussions. I heard of the terrible cost young people have paid for taking part in “pirate radio” projects in Mexico, pursued by corporatist death squads, and learned more of the harrowing conditions of prisoners forgotten in the U.S. in SuperMax prisons (TAMs movement). At the same conference, a rich artist spoke of his work portraying some of the poorest of the poor in Rio, then leveraging the money raised from the artworks to help create a cooperative enterprise that employed tens of thousands. It was an incredible story Vik Muniz told, and I’d really like to know more details about how it was managed. Mel Chin, another famous artist there, spoke of his project with schoolchildren to produce handmade hundred dollar bills – “fundreds” – in the amount needed to clean up the lead pollution in New Orleans’ soil ($300 million). Of course the famous were not the big story of this event. (But hey, it’s New York, so of course it will be.) Creative Time is very good about making their proceedings public, so I look forward to the DVD or whatever they choose to release about this stimulating convention.
In a party afterwards Jos of Bikvanderpol tipped me to the existence of two major catalogues of exhibitions which surveyed the Dutch squatter movement of the 1970s. I look forward to learning more. The question of how artists represent their squatting experience is at the heart of this project. I wrote of this in a text about Andrew Castrucci’s Bullet Space squatted art gallery project for which he is preparing a 25-year show. (It is posted at post.thing.net; URL below.)
The first Public School lecture class on the social centers movement went well. (It was a lecture only because time was short; another meeting is scheduled for November 22 at the Van Allen Institute.) The very day of the class, Miguel Martinez sent me the manifesto of a group of scholars studying social centers. They ask a host of good questions. Their third meeting is scheduled for June, 2010 in London.
While I confess I was making fun of these guys earlier, the Berlin-based An Architektur group is swinging into action here with a conference, “Ten Days for Oppositional Architecture: Towards Post-Capitalist Spaces” in Brooklyn, November 12-21. They have lined up a good bunch of speakers, including Neil Smith and David Harvey from NYC, Teddy Cruz from San Diego, Brett Bloom from Urbana, Max Rameau from Miami, and Peter Linebaugh from Toledo, Ohio. Many other great people are involved, and although I will miss this conference, I am hoping to locate the “House Magic” library of social center books and films in their “reading corner.”

Creative Time “Revolutions in Public Practice”
http://www.creativetime.org/email/Summit.pdf
my text, “Bullet Soaked in Piss” – about the Bullet Space gallery in NYC
http://post.thing.net/node/2872
“Ten Days for Oppositional Architecture”
www.oppositionalarchitecture.com

Deadlines, Falling Leaves

2009-10-17T19:13:00.000-07:00

Rolling forward on the project -- end of year events, May 2010 for version 2. Just a quick note to let you know I am presenting the “House Magic” project on European squatted social centers as part of the Public School (Architecture) Tuesday, 10/20 at 4pm at the Center for Architecture on LaGuardia Place. This is a part lecture, part round table to consider how best to represent this movement based on the first “House Magic” as an object of critique.
536 Laguardia Place between West 3rd St. & Bleecker
Public School for Architecture website: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/
(see below for session title, details)
We will look at Dara Greenwald’s “Tactical Tourist” (2007; 15 min.), a video of a trip to Barceona to visit Milles Flores and Can Masdeu SCs, then discuss the recent “House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence” shows at ABC No Rio and Sculpture Center as part of the University of Trash. Virginia Villardi will present on her work with ESC Atelier in Rome.
(Dara's great video is online here: http://www.daragreenwald.com/ )
Related news:
I plan to produce a second incarnation of the “House Magic” exhibit project in May of 2010. There is as yet no venue and no budget. Any suggestions are welcome. The project is invited to Baltimore in December. We will also likely visit in Philadelphia during the winter months. I will be in Madrid for a week or so during early November.
The “House Magic” zine catalogue #2 deadline closes December 1st, 2009. There are a number of texts based on presentations at ABC and in Queens that are going into the zine, but your experiences and reflections on the social center movement are also very welcome. The deadline is hard; production begins on that date.
BTW: Thanks to the Solo Foundation for a grant to assist with printing for the first zine catalogue, and the purchase of a video camera.
The “course” is titled:
“Representing the Social Center Movement”
The squatted social center has been an important movement globally, and especially in Europe, since the late 1970s. The life cycle of these "monster institutions" (coinage by Universidad Nomada in Transversal) reveals a lot about autonomous political intitiatives and state responses. This course considers the movement, and seeks new strategies to represent it to a general audience. An earlier effort, "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence," will serve as a case study and object of critique.
http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/1584

Getting Schoolish

2009-10-01T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Public School project from Los Angeles is doing a "public school" here in New York. I have proposed a "class" on the social center exhibition project, and a few people are interested. The title and description is as follows: "Representing the Social Center Movement: The squatted social center has been an important movement globally, and especially in Europe, since the late 1970s. The life cycle of these "monster institutions" (coinage by Universidad Nomada in Transversal) reveals a lot about autonomous political intitiatives and state responses. This course considers the movement, and seeks new strategies to represent it to a general audience. An earlier effort, "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence," will serve as a case study and object of critique."I put this in quotes because my intention is to present the information I have gathered and the project so far, and open the question of representation up to discussion. I invite all who are around -- and even some who are not -- to join us when the meetings are finally scheduled. (Who knows when that will be? Soon, I hope.) I want to do the next events in May of 2010. If you want to attend meetings, go to the website -- http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/ -- "browse classes" and sign up for this class, or express interest. You will be contacted when the meetings are arranged. The fund raising effort is slowly beginning... Solo Foundation gave $1,000!
Speaking of schools -- be sure to check out the occupation underway in University of California's idyllic Santa Cruz campus -- http://likelostchildren.blogspot.com/. It is really inspiring -- like a movie. As our Spanish friends say, occupying spaces produces subjectivity. You don't know what it feels like until you do it.

Return from Vacation

2009-09-25T13:16:00.000-07:00

[NOTE: Hyperlinking is causing problems and delays in posting -- here they are indicated by asterisks, and put at the bottom.]
It is beautiful fall weather in New York City right now, and I am back in town and be back on the job. Right after a road trip vacation, I slammed into the weekend symposium with Franco “Bifo” Berardi organized by 16 Beaver Group. This was very heady, and ultimately rather depressing. Bifo considers the social center movement in Italy to be of the '90s, although he did note that a new one had just started, called Bartleby -- after Herman Melville's Wall Street clerk who "preferred not to."Some friends came soon after from Seco Centro Sociale in Madrid. Although there were five of them, they were a little shy, and we did not have a chance to do a public event with them. They brought an armload of books from Traficante des Suenos bookstore, and we sat down and had some beers. They had attended a 40th birthday party for the Young Lords Party in Harlem! (The Young Lords, as I note in the first post on this blog, were inspirational political occupation artists in NYC in the 1970s.) I hope in November I will have a chance to renew contact with Madrid, and go further on cooperation.Hamburg, where Michel Chevalier had the “House Magic” catalogue in his Autonopop store this summer, is sending us two artists to talk about their experiences in self-organizing. They are from the FRISE aka Künstlerhaus Hamburg, and they are doing an exchange project with Le Petit Versailles garden here. That project is run by Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, former directors of ABC No Rio. On October 5, Sabine Mohr and Torsten Bruch (both FRISE artists) will speak about artist organized projects and the development of artists’ self-organization in Hamburg at the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building on East 3rd St. NYC on the 5th of October. Their project, installed from Oct. 2 – Oct. 12 at LPV garden focuses on the artistic exploration of the use and preservation of public space and public premises—particularly open green spaces in highly developed, urban environments.My German is slim, but their web links look pretty cool, and I’ll Google translate some of this stuff and study it. The Frappant group seems most directly concerned with architecture and urban space. They also run an internet radio station, and have started a new artists’ house occupation which they are blogging into My Space Comedy! An extended conversation/symposium with other European groups has been loaded onto YouTube as “Gaengeviertel versus Subvision” parts 1, 2 and 3.In book news, the Prestes Maia occupation in Sao Paulo (2002-07) is described in a text by Andre Mesquita in the Australian catalogue “There Goes the Neighborhood” (May 2008). That is the high rise occupation many in NYC have dreamed of, as they contemplate all those halted and vacant luxury co-op developments in formerly poor neighborhoods. Andre contacted me, but I have not been able to follow up to learn more about self-organization in Brazil. Virginia Villari, who wrote the text on ESC Atelier in the first issue of the HMBFC zine, has agreed to work on a second iteration of the “House Magic” project, which we have agreed to try to put together in May. Maybe this will be the “museum of the social centers” that one Canadian editor envisioned. At least our next phase of work will include the social center movement Latin America, long overdue for investigation. BTW -- let me know via email to awm13579 [at] gmail.com if you want me to send you a compressed "House Magic" zine #1. Next – a report on the visit of the artists from FRISE in Hamburg.
Bifo symposium
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/002940.php
Seco
http://www.cs-seco.org/
Young Lords Party anniversary reunion
http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/ylp220809.html
Frise
http://www.frise.de/
http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/ney/kue/en5032894v.htm
Le Petit Versailles garden
http://www.alliedproductions.org/cgi-bin/view.cgi?n=/lpv/home.xml
Frappant
http://www.frappant.org/
[see also projects on Radio --
http://www.fsk-hh.org/ ; Comedy -- http://www.myspace.com/vorwerkstift]
Prestes Maia background
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestes_Maia

Busy at Last in NYC

2009-07-23T10:50:00.000-07:00

HOMELESS TENT CITY! One Hundred Homeless and Allies Grilling Food, Playing Music, Taking Back The Land at 115TH AND Madison Avenue in New York City. Call for all to come out and show your support. Bring food, hang out, share company...
At 11am EST, July 23 Picture The Homeless and allies installed a tent city in a vacant bank-owned lot at 115th and Madison Ave. 100 people are in the lot, enjoying corn, beans, bread, fruit, and music by the Welfare Poets. Police are on the scene, but everything's calm. We have a casita, a stage, barbeque grills, banners, signs, cardboard shovels and pick-axes, and tent structures!
As the foreclosure crisis festers, Bloomberg and the banks fail us. Across the street from the tent city is public housing, where families are doubled and tripled up. Over-crowded apartments, the shelter industrial complex, or sleep on the streets - we need better options. From Miami to Sacramento to now here in NYC homeless people aren't waiting around. Come show your support! 115th and Madison, we'll be here as long as we can. (They're bloggin' it; for Twitterers, it's pthny; and Facebook tiny.cc/pthonfacebook.)
Yes, that's the press release. And I've just left the lot. This is a great project, a long time planning, and they have generated a very friendly atmosphere. The set is by the Not An Alternative crew from Brooklyn, and it looks both festive and homey. Frank Morales is the lead organizer; an Episcopal priest and a long-time eloquent squatter, he is wearing his clerical collar. I found a little poison ivy in the lot, but we took it out pretty much before anyone got bit. Oh, and twenty plus cops and plainclothes are standing by in a line just outside the lot. I met up with the gang at Union Square Park and we headed uptown on the subway, trailed by police. Experienced activists chatted with the cops -- Ben of ACT-UP, and Chris of the Shadow newspaper. Legal observers in their green hats rode along with us, just as they did during the RNC 2004 protests. Most of this activist crew is young, however, and I'm happy to see it. When we got to East Harlem, we were split into groups. Our group, me and the Japanese writer and journalist Sabu, were followed by five cops. We went around in circles and finally hailed a black car. Where but in America can you ask a cab driver to take us somewhere because we're being followed by cops? He was like, "Okay, where to?" Some congeros showed up and beat drums, played guitar; one guy danced very nice. Then lunch was dished out, and everyone relaxed under the tall trees in the shady grove and chatted. I'm back at work on my writing here in the library -- hope it's gonna last up there! (BTW: "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence" zine is ready to ship, and it looks real slick. It costs $8 to make and post in the USA.) Wow, only a couple hours, and the cops are massing. It looks like everyone still there is going to jail. It's raining in New York. At least they made the New York Times. This is one inventive group of creactivists.

Stalled construction in NYC: My first reblog...

2009-07-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

Hi folks -- first some project news.... I cannot post the 'zine catalogue to the web. It is too big, even compressed. If you want me to sent it to you via FTP, please contact me at awm13579 [at] gmail.com with subject line "send me the HMBFC zine, please!", and I will get it to you.
There is some serious business in the air here -- I'll report it when it goes down. In the meantime, the glossy bourgie magazine New York has started paying attention to the scuttlebutt about squatting in Brooklyn with the following article on what they are calling "the Billyburg [as in Brooklyn's Williamsburg] Bust"....
[This blog post is here, along with many snarky comments, and another article on "heroin-addicted hobo invasion" of squatters to Williamsburg. Repression, anyone?]
Oh pity the poor denizens of Williamsburg. The erosion of hipster trust funds is leading their greasy little utopia to slowly devolve into some sort of Mad Max-esque, post-apocalyptic real estate wasteland, just like Miami! So says New York Magazine. Anyone who's walked around Williamsburg lately can see the painful signs of a busted bubble. New developments sit virtually vacant. New building constructions have stopped cold with the landscape of the area littered with semi-constructed buildings. We already knew things were bad, but we had no idea that things were this bad.
With sales across Brooklyn down a staggering 57 percent from a year ago, Williamsburg, with its high density of new construction, has taken on an ominous disposition. Walk down virtually any block and you'll come across an amenity-laden building that sits nearly empty: relics of a moment in history that seems, increasingly, like a fever dream.
Most unsettling are the cases of the developers who seem to have vanished, leaving behind so many vacant lots and half-completed buildings-eighteen, to be precise, more than can be found in all of the Bronx-that large swaths of the neighborhood have come to resemble a city after an air raid.
All over the city, overleveraged developers have seen their projects stymied by the recession, but the highly speculative nature of what's happened in Williamsburg stands out as exceptionally dramatic and misguided-New York's version of the collapsing exurban "boomburgs" in Florida and Arizona.
Oh but wait—This is only the beginning!
Part of what makes the present situation so dire is that it is still in the early stages of unfolding. There are already about 400 new apartments on the market in Williamsburg, and additional condos are completing construction every month. According to a study (Real estate broker David) Maundrell released last month, 2,818 new apartments will have hit the market by the end of this year, with another 2,766 projected by the end of 2010. On top of this, Fannie Mae, the country's most dominant home-mortgage lender, recently implemented a policy requiring that buildings be 70 percent in contract before guaranteeing mortgages, thus delaying the moment when a developer can stop covering the taxes and common charges on a finished project.
The writer of New York's massive piece, David Amsden, took some time to visit a few of the new developments in the neighborhood.
I made my way to a building called Warehouse 11, on the corner of Roebling and North 11th Streets. Marketed by David Maundrell, the building has 120 total units (plus the requisite yoga center, playroom, parking garage, 24-hour concierge, gym, and communal sundeck). While the model apartment seemed an appealing enough place to live, there was something generally off about the building as a whole: Despite having been on the market since early 2008, only 30 percent of the units were in contract, and it was clear that construction wasn't complete. The list prices, too, were significantly higher than comparable products, as if the developer had not been informed about the current state of the economy. A few weeks later, I noticed the front doors of the lobby had been padlocked shut. The process of foreclosure had begun.
Looking at the bright side, we suppose all of these vacant new developments will lead to some awesome squatting opportunities for the hipster looking to enhance his or her hardcore street cred. We look forward to having our tips line flooded with ridiculous Williamsburg hipster squatting stories for years to come!

Oh yeah, the catalogue!

2009-06-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

The "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence" zine catalogue of the exhibition on European Social Centers at ABC No Rio is done. It is the first. There will be at least one more, with a closing deadline of the first week August. (These deadlines are firm, people!) At this moment, the zine catalogue exists only in a print form. There are several copies in Queens, a few in Madrid, a couple in London and Hamburg. When I can get some help to make a PDF, it will be online for everyone to download. Here is the table of contents of volume one, Spring 2009:
Why “House Magic”? – a background on why this project was undertaken
Film and lecture program
Excerpts from an exhibition about the New Yorck Bethanien
Michel Chevalier discusses the Rote Flora in Hamburg, and projects at the New Yorck Bethanien
Communique from RampART Social Centre
Micropolitics plans in London
400th Anniversary of Dutch Squatters in Manhattan
Krax City Mine(d) call for a European Conference of Social Centers
A Roof Over One’s Head, by James Graham
Atelier ESC, Rome, by Virginia Villari
Communique from Social Center Cox 18, Milan
Michel Chevalier translates “Rhino Féroce,” about a Geneva squat
Danish artists talk about a road occupation in Copenhagen at the University of Trash
Credits and acknowledgements

A Quick Trip

2009-06-23T13:35:00.000-07:00

Back in Madrid, on recreation I thought. But things have changed in a few months, and I was sucked back into a little action. I went by Traficante des Sueños and ran immediately into Pablo, outside talking on his cel. He directed me to a talk at El Patio Maravillas, the Madrid social center, that very evening. This rundown place in February had some encouraging bustle and a seedy looking bar. Now the place is plastered with a galaxy of posters and paintings, and humming with activity. They organized a "jornadas," or conference at the Reina Sofia art museum in February on the role of social centers in an increasingly provatized culture. I found this out from Dani, a filmmaker from Frankfurt I interviewed who is living in a squat in the Madrid suburb of Tetuan. Although he was involved in the first group at Patio, he is ambivalent about what he sees as the new bid for legitimacy. Surely, I suggested, something as vibrant as Patio is good for Madrid? It seemed there one could make a very long video of authority figures asking you to leave an ostensibly public space you had wandered into to get out of the sun. Unfortunately El Patio is only open during the evening.
During one evening I attended a session I assume of the permanent working group on precarity. The speaker was Zoe Romano of Serpica Naro in Milan. (As the talk was in Italian, with a translation into Spanish, I faded quickly.) Serpica Naro is an anagram of San Precario, the fictitious saint of the precarious worker which has been carried in hilarious procession in numerous demonstrations. Ms. Romano showed some of the projects the group has done. The presentation is part of a series of meetings, including a workshop, on questions around precarity and the commercialization of cultural institutions. Very interesting, dense, and too demanding for a vacationing burnout case.
Still, I later met and interviewed Dani with my camera, and he interviewed me. I will show the tape in Queens, at the University of Trash. Dani is involved with the Cinesinautor group (cinema without authors, which meets at Patio), and spoke of his group's encouraging meetings with people in Tetuan in their project to make a movie portrait of the district. He was surprised that the people who attended were not conventional in their ideas of what the movie might be. They were thinking like Dziga Vertov, Dani said, encouraging experimentation and imagism rather than narrative and coherence. While I envy Madrid its social center scene, everything looks more glamorous from far off. Dani complained of a strain of intolerance between social centers, antagonisms that were working against network. Dani is a fan of the writings published in Tiqqun, a French group I did not know. Very heady stuff it is, and looks to me at first glance like an egghead Crimethinc.
It's clear at the least that the scene in Madrid continues to cook hard. The social centers are clearly essential laboratories of collective forms, the only places perhaps from which one might imagine an integrated (i.e., non-academic) egalitarian future culture emerging, able to withstand the "desert" conditions outside of capitalism.
I also met with the artists of Democracia, Iván López and Pablo España. They are pretty well established, it seems, having curated the Madrid Abierto (Open Madrid) public art component last year that coincided with the art fair Arco. They recently did a controversial project called Welfare State (2007). They set up bleachers for an audience to watch the demolition of the shantytown El Salobral, just south of Madrid. The people cheered, the bulldozers did wheelies -- it was "like a rodeo," Iván said. There was a lot of criticism from the left, it seems... While most of the residents of the encampment had been relocated, many had not, and activists were there to do eviction defense. The project was hot at the very least, directly political in a way that U.S. work really avoids. It struck me as Laibach-y, NSK-like -- taking the position of the police, exploring the subjectivities of the right. From other work the duo showed me, I can't really think they inhabit that ideology. But playing into it surely earned them some enmity! The Welfare State project was included in a great Australian show on public space issues called "There Goes the Neighborhood." I just got the catalogue from Half Letter Press in Chicago for pretty cheap. (The photo is by Olga Berrios of a show at Patio a while ago; I'll post my own later.)

Whose Land Is It?

2009-05-20T08:14:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended the talk by Max Rameau of Miami Take Back the Land at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Max has been conferring with Picture the Homeless, a Harlem based group, which is in turn in league with the academic unit Center for the Study of Place, Culture and Politics whose director, Neil Smith was also there. His colleague Peter Marcuse of the Columbia University planning department also spoke, as did two veteran New York City squatter activists.
Max Rameau’s position is by now well known in activist circles. (You can see him talk on the City from Below website.) His group founded the Umoja Village shantytown, taking over city-owned land in the black Liberty City neighborhood of Miami that had been intended for sale to a private developer. Not surprisingly in view of the tumultuous past of the district, the city kept hands off. Take Back has now taken over another tract of land to grow fresh food in a community garden.
After Max, Brenda Stokely spoke. She had participated in a squatting campaign – then called homesteading – in Harlem during the 1980s. She reminded the audience that the state moved against their organization under criminal enterprise statutes (RICO), although the grand jury refused to indict. Neil Smith spoke of the “global social crisis” which has closed down this last and greatest wave of gentrification. Now, he said, there is the political possibility of changing the rules of the game, to forward tenant and neighborhood control of city housing resources. He too warned that state repression is likely, given the example of 1930s activist movements that led to public housing.
Frank Morales spoke, pastor of the St. Marks Church. For him, squatting is “putting flesh on the bones of an abstract right” to be housed. He briefly recounted his work squatting in the Bronx, beginning with the St. Ann’s Avenue garden, described by Jonathan Kozol in his book “Amazing Grace.” His views on the agenda of capital, “spatial deconcentration,” were formed through contact by murdered housing activist Yolanda Ward. Frank ended by expressing the hope that this panel might issue a call for a large-scale occupation movement in New York City.
Finally, Peter Marcuse asked what happens after a squat? What can happen, and what ought to happen, and what needs to happen so that what ought to happen can. He recalled the policies of NYC’s last progressive mayor, John Lindsay, who set up the Division of Alternative Management in the city housing department. In the absence of such policies, the cycle will continue as it has after this interruption. “The next generation of gentrifiers are buying up houses now,” he said.
Additional References:
text of a Neil Smith interview on conditions in Berlin conducted by Andrej Holm, a sociologist who was later arrested by the state (he was later released)
Frank Morales is a forceful speaker; here he is in a KPFA interview in March.

[The “House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence” show on European squatted social centers is now up in Queens, NY as part of the University of Trash through 8/3/09. I am preparing a zine catalogue of the first part of the show; submissions are welcome. Firm closing 5/31.]

HM:BFC Up in Queens

2009-05-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

The "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence" project begun at ABC No Rio has become a research component of the "University of Trash" at the Sculpture Center, in Queens NY. HM:BGC will participate in UofT events; the schedule is here. This Saturday (5/16) from 4-7pm, the Baltimore group behind the City from Below conference will present. They will discuss Participation Park, an ongoing public art project and activist initiative based on converting a vacant lot in east Baltimore into an urban farm, social space, community kitchen, radical planning studio, free store, and adventure playground. Then Monday (5/18) 7:30pm at Brecht Forum, Max Rameau of the Florida Take Back the Land group will talk.

"HM:BFC" in a Blur -- It's the Last Week

2009-05-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

The last week of this "House Magic: BFC" show looks pretty tight. [It's pasted below.] So I am promoting the shit out of it. Last night at Bluestockings with Emily Piper Foreman talking about our project, and the situation in global cities it was a pretty serious crew. The tech didn't work. We weren't reading. We may be getting close to assembly. I showed pretty much part one of this blog, with the sign for the Real Estate Show, "a building is not a precious gem, to be locked -- boarded and hoarded." Seth Tobocman's building-fist and the bulldozers, police and angry crowds, the nationalist Puerto Ricans standing in front of the church they took that was not serving them, Adam Purple's expunged Garden of Eden, where beauty was pitted against housing as the City of New York turned the people against art and reaped the political benefits of philistine destruction. The tangle of the Rivington School sculpture garden, Tacheles, EIPCP's Transversal, old Amsterdam squat posters, websites from Ela Eskalera Karakola, which Emily had visited, el Patio Maravillas, Centro Sociale Seco, a mani for Cox 18 in Milan, the call for last year's day of action at this time, and then our show. The computer is slogging up with spyware, so I'll get those "HM:BFC" installation photos up some other time. There is the great flag of the pirate Queen, which Julie Hair copied from our download of "What's this place?" BTW Jordie Montevecchi's short film “Take Over,” about the group that took an old church in Brighton, UK, was lovely and affecting. I hope we get a chance to show it again at the "University of Trash" in Queens. Opens March 10th at Sculpture Center which is quite near P.S. 1, if you are in town. This is the current schedule and updates now going on are here: http://collectiva.wikispaces.com/House+Magic. Bifo was here talking about Radio Alice. Now there is going to be a radio station...
THIRD (and last) WEEK
Tuesday 5 May 09
“Visions of Utopia,” directed by Geoff Kozeny; Part One, the historical background (94 min.; 2009); and excerpts from Part Two, on urban communes Two (about 30 min); collective living discussion with James Andrews of Nsumi, other invitees
Wednesday 6 May 09
Zurich -- The Art Squat – “Dada Changed My Life,” directed by Lou Lou and Daniel Martinez (2004; time?) about the Zurich art squatting action that saved the Cabaret Voltaire Guest: Olga Mazurkiewicz
Thursday 7 May 09
Denmark, Copenhagen -- “Christiania You Have My Heart,” directed by Nils Vest (62 min.; 1991; Danish with English subtitles); talk with Rebecca Zorach
next venue for the boxed-up "HM:BFC" for the summer is at "University of Trash."
press release: http://www.sculpture-center.org/pressSpecific.htm?id=12595

Chicago Spring

2009-04-26T09:56:00.000-07:00

Oh man, I didn't realize how far behind I was on blogging this show! "House Magic: BFC" has been up and running for a week. It was a nonstop exhausting ordeal, but the two more weeks it has to run should be smoother sailing. We had a great first week, with Michel Chevalier of Hamburg Target: Autonopop group presenting. Michel also spoke about the social center Rote Flora, and brought some beautiful distinctive posters they had made to advertise their schedules. Next we showed Jordie Montevecchi's short film "Takeover" about Brighton squatters, which is a really tight, affecting piece of work. And the week finished with the "De stad was van ons"/"The City Was Ours," Joost Seelen's remarkable documentary on the Dutch squatting movement 1975-88. (It is online at squat.net videos.) And we still have two weeks to go!

This weekend a “suitcase” version of the “House Magic: BFC” exhibition is in Chicago, at the Version>09 (or Versi9n) arts festival. This multi-venue artist-organized festival is themed around “Immodest Proposals." This included “temporary housing structures, independent contemporary art space networking, one day only exhibition formats,” a “free public school” and etc., etc. (thru May 3). It is coordinated out of the Co-Prosperity Sphere art space in the Bridgeport neighborhood, a place run by Ed Marszewski. I slept last night on the floor of “Edmar”’s studio, and this morning I browsed his bookshelves. Koolhaas “Content,” Bruce Mau “Massive Change,” Mike Davis “Ghost Cities,” Chris Marker films… Edmar also publishes a magazine called Lumpen. The current issue reprints an interview with Max Rameau of Take Back the Land in Miami. As part of the Versi9n, the large window of the CPS art space contains two installations. One is a ghostly office, with huge electronic consoles, and two enclosed bunk beds. It looks like a spaceship. This morning there is a crumpled pair of jeans, shiny shoes and a beer bottle on the floor in the window, because a party-goer is sleeping it off in one of the beds. The corner window shows a model for the community of Bridgeport after Chicago Olympics redevelopment is done with it – a totalizing wipeout, the Bridgeport Superphere Olympic Village megacomplex. Is this for real? I don’t know, but Chicago is a candidate city for the Olympics, and that usually means massive redevelopment and often displacement. The other window shows the offices of “Reuben Kincaid Realty” which advertises properties to squat. Very cute!

The “House Magic” display is set up in the lobby of the Nfo Expo, and extends into the Free University. Today is the last day. I am coffeed up and ready to talk! Last night I visited the Experimental Station for a children’s evening, the King Ludd’s Midway Arcade. These were beautiful hand-made games by Material Exchange,

There I met Karen, who started the Massolit bookstore in Krakow, Poland. She was very interested in Rozbrat, the social center in Poznan, and offered to facilitate communication. She introduced me to Jack Spicer, one of those who had started the Experimental Station by squatting University of Chicago land to make a community garden. Just as we began to talk, my ride was leaving. These were the people of Incubate (Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and the Everyday – whew!). When “car guy” moves in a big U.S. town, you must move with him/her. It was that or face an hour long bus ride through the poor parts of Chicago on late Saturday night. Sigh.

Besides Karen, I talked with Emily of St. Louis. She told me of a group of squatters who had started a community garden and greatly improved their building in a derelict neighborhood in St. Louis. The city evicted them. Discouraged, they moved to Kentucky. Many cities are tearing down vacant buildings as quickly as they can. The fear is that they will become drug dens, crack houses, dens of vice. Those cities that cannot distinguish between socially productive squatters and criminals will simply drive motivated young people away from their failing cities…

How Occupation Works (events)

2009-04-13T11:12:00.000-07:00

The Anarchist Book Fair at Judson Church was nice. I bought Erick Lyle's book "On the Lower Frequencies," since it had been recommended to me by a few people. Surprisingly, it includes the story of a remarkable squatting action in the late 1990s... The AFB was a nice touristy thing to do during my internal vacation. Now that is done, and it's back to work for me. It's time to make the donuts, as my favorite Lower East Side malcontent Clayton Patterson says... (although I'm afraid he has been pissing in my batter!) One member of the ABC No Rio visual arts collective, Michael Cataldi, is starting work today on his University of Trash installation at Sculpture Center in Queens, and Nils Norman is flying in. I'll be blogging this speaking event coming up, a panel at the Left Forum next weekend; here's the dope:
SATURDAY, 12-2:00 PM
How Occupation Works
16beavergroup (Chair)
Kurt Hill - People's Firehouse
Father Frank Morales and Jerry the Peddler - Squatting Movement of the Lower East Side
Lynn Owens – Sociologist, on Amsterdam squatting movement
Take Back NYU : Ellie Kahn, Drew Phillips and Olive McKeon
New School in Exile: John Clegg
and Friends from Picture the Homeless
This workshop is concerned with occupation as a means of resistance: inspired by the latest NY schools occupations, the chicago's factory sit in and historical squatting of empty buildings in New York and elsewhere. We would like to investigate the struggles in which such tactics emerge and are useful and in addition develop a how-to of occupations in light of the current economical and political situation.
And another event -- “ we will occupy yet we're against your occupation” -- an open screening at the Migrating-Forms festival @Anthology Film Archives
http://migratingforms.org/mf09/
Sunday April 19th 2pm 90 Minutes
Occupation is used to describe two entities: one related to the state, its strategies of control, and the other is part of the strategies of resistance, to occupy a building as a protest for example, or simply to occupy/squat a building to live in. In relation to this topic, everyone is encouraged to bring in a cued selection from a video or a film by others or themselves (Length: 1:00 to 5:00 minutes).
16Beaver is the address of a space initiated/run by artists to create and maintain an ongoing platform for the presentation, production, and discussion of a variety of artistic/cultural/economic/political projects. It is the point of many departures/arrivals.

"House Magic: BFC" Schedule of Events

2009-04-10T10:17:00.001-07:00

[This is a place to post the events that I can edit, so this will be the most up to date post of them, I think. See also: ABC No Rio events calendar, and our emerging wiki website.]
This is the schedule of events for "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence," the show about squatted social centers at ABC No Rio, NYC. For nine Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings we will have evening events. (The show will also be open during the day, beginning around noon.) Films about squatted social centers and related questions will be available to view in the gallery, and also will be screened in the evening, accompanied by discussions around a bowl of soup and bread – an evocation of the VoKü (Volxküchen, or people’s kitchen) of German and Dutch squats. The films will start at 7pm. A $5 freewill donation is requested to cover the cost of the films. Here is the schedule: APRIL FIRST WEEK Tuesday 21 Germany -- German films to be announced. Guest: Michel Chevalier, Hamburg.
Wednesday 22 United Kingdom -- “Take Over,” directed by Jordie Montevecchi. The film follows a group of Brighton, UK, squatters who take over an old church.
Thursday 23 Netherlands, Amsterdam – “The City Was Ours,” by Joost Seelen (time?; 1996; Dutch with English subtitles) Amsterdam squatting movement, 1970s to 1980s; Rijksmuseum occupation, 2008 & other short subjects
SECOND WEEK Tuesday 28 Spain, Barcelona -- Octavi Royo, "Okupa, Crónica de una Lucha Social" [Spanish & Catalan with English subtitles] Reflexión sobre el fenómeno de la okupación que empieza con el desalojo del Cine Princesa en Barcelona (1996) y termina en la actualidad; Dara Greenwald "Tactical Tourist" [English]; selected bangin' shorts from "Resistir es Crear: 10 años junto al Centro Social - Casa de Iniciativas de Málaga" Guests: Dara Greenwald, Brooklyn, others we hope
Wednesday 29 Spain, Madrid -- "Laboratorio 3, Ocupando el Vacio" (66 min.; 2007; Spanish with English subtitles); music videos from Casa Iniciativas, Malaga
Thursday 30 Italy – program to be announced
MAY THIRD WEEK Tuesday 5 -- “Visions of Utopia,” directed by Geoff Kozeny; Part One, the historical background (94 min.; 2009); and excerpts from Part Two, on urban communes Two (about 30 min); collective living discussion with James Andrews of Nsumi, other invitees
Wednesday 6 Zurich -- The Art Squat – “Dada Changed My Life,” directed by Lou Lou and Daniel Martinez (2004; time?) about the Zurich art squatting action that saved the Cabaret Voltaire Guest: Olga Mazurkiewicz
Thursday 7 Denmark, Copenhagen -- “Christiania You Have My Heart,” directed by Nils Vest (62 min.; 1991; Danish with English subtitles); talk with Rebecca Zorach on her visit to the Copenhagen free town
In the gallery: A rotating selection of videos about squatted social centers will be playing in the gallery, as well as the following artists’ documentaries: Oliver Ressler -- “5 Factories - Worker Control in Venezuela,” 81 min., Span./Ger./Engl., 2004 {with Dario Azzellini}, and “Disobbedienti,” 54 min., Ital./Ger./Engl., 2002 {with Dario Azzellini}; and “What Would It Mean To Win?” 40 min. / 2008 / PAL / Engl./Ger./French (with Zanny Begg),Marcelo Expósito, "Primero de Mayo (La Ciudad-fábrica) [First of May (The City Factory)]" (61 minutes, 2004) Span./Engl.

A review of “Occupy and resist! Examining the European Social Center Tradition,” by spud

2009-04-01T20:14:00.000-07:00

This reblog comes from the City From Below public blog about the session I co-chaired in Baltimore. Spud beat me to it… “Submitted by spud on Sat, 03/28/2009 - 21:11. in [subject] * squatting social centers:
“I [that is, spud] attended this session in the basement of the Village Learning Place this afternoon. I arrived a few minutes late, and the smallish room was crowded to capacity. By the time I arrived, questions were already being taken from audience members, and there couldn't have been too much time for any lengthy presentation before that. I assume that it was intentional to have organized the workshop in an informal, conversational manner.
“Because there exists such a huge discrepancy between squatting in the US and squatting overseas [I disagree, but of course I’ll have my turn…], a fair amount of discussion revolved around the legal and strategic issues involved in moving into an abandoned space without immediate eviction. (The answer, broadly speaking, is two-fold: 1. don't announce yourselves if you don't have to, and hope to avoid detection, or [er, "and"] 2. build yourself a solid base of support amongst both your neighbors and the community you hope to build.)
“Both of the presenters, Alan Moore and Lynn Owens, are essentially researchers, and needed to defer to the first-hand expertise of audience members in a number of cases -- a woman from Barcelona and a long-time squatter in Rome provided helpful information about their specific experiences.
“Four other audience members, hailing from Durham, NC, chimed in with the hope of hearing more about the actual organizational structure of the Social Centers in Europe (but very little response was offered). These attendees belong to a self-styled "Social Center" in Durham and were hoping for tips from their analogs in Europe. They received none, but their description of their own organization, El Kilombo was itself inspiring.
“Overall, an interesting conversation, but not very useful in terms of any strategic information, and it seemed like a lot of questions went unanswered, though they raised enough points for a much longer session.”
* Add new comment.
Yes, Spud, you are right! [That’s me.] Our presentations were deliberately very short. The question is, What are the questions? That is not to be flip, but only to say that a strategic casebook, a "best practices" kind of compendium of what we need to know about EU social centers, is some ways off. And it begins with the questions you ask. I was delighted that the Roman woman responded directly to a question from the audience, something like, "How does a big social center run?" That's pretty vague... her answer was succinct but short. Hey, we are on our way! -- Alan W. Moore

The City From Below: “Hello”

2009-03-31T21:03:00.000-07:00

Baltimore is a charming city. It is of a type deemed obsolete during the modernist era -- a European style walking city. Yet because the city’s been depressed for so long, they haven’t had the money to destroy that charm.
The City From Below conference was held in an old Methodist church, a grand basilica with stained glass and a light-filled community room behind. The church was crumbling, its congregation unable to support the place. Two years ago they invited in the crowd of radicals around Red Emma’s bookstore who have helped maintain the building in exchange for using it for special events. Now they run the front, and installed a bar and kitchen. The diminished congregation meets every Sunday in the back. That the Methodist ruling body (synod?) would go along with this rather than seek to sell off the handsome old building is good, but I found it surprising. Perhaps they had no other options. I saw another old church in town that had been converted into an office complex, yet was still entirely vacant. (On perusing the church’s history page, I see that it is in itself a radical congregation with a transgendered minister, so maybe the Methodist bigwigs don’t have so much to say about it!) Red Emma’s crew doesn’t own the place. Cash poor, but rich in energy, labor, faith and vision -- Baltimore’s radicals are the best contemporary users of this great religious assembly hall. They have and will accomplish much there. It seems like a model arrangement. It’s also a libertarian’s dream, the return of social and cultural services to “faith-based” hands.
The conference was very exciting, and filled with interesting and unusual presentations. It had the substance of an academic symposium without its stultifying rituals, constraints, and necessary uselessness. It had the networking intensity of a neighborhood organizing conference, as indeed it was, hosted as well by Baltimore’s United Workers Association, which is building their April campaign behind t-shirts and posters with the stern and striking visage of Harriet Tubman, the slave-freeing heroine of the 19th century Underground Railroad.
One could follow any of a number of threads in the sessions, and when the videos are mounted to the web, we’ll be able to follow up on the others. (Some are on the UWA site already.) I followed my friends, through the egghead theory and cultural work panels. In the opening plenary and a later speakout session, I caught a good invigorating dose of the community organizing strain. The keynote speech was a recording by Mumia Abu Jamal, the long-jailed black journalist. Several of the sessions were animated by the prospect of direct action squatting by the recently dispossessed on foreclosed properties and vacant lands. A strong thread of permaculture and urban farming packed in the clear-eyed crusties and would-be hayseeds, like one gal wearing a vintage fox pelt as a hat.
It was the braiding together of these strains that made the conference so exciting. If there is in fact a grassroots revolution in the making, a true insurrectionary urban development, this is what it might look like. This was its planning meeting.
[The image is by Icky, of Justseeds.org, which did posters for the City From Below.]

The Dirty South

2009-03-31T12:20:00.000-07:00

Baltimore -- I am training out of the city now, past block after block of boarded up row houses without a soul on the streets. The “City From Below” conference has folded its tents. (A detailed account of relevant sessions will be posted here soon...) It was a titanic effort of grassroots organization undertaken by a bunch of freedom-loving anarchistas clustered around a bookstore called Red Emma’s. Baltimore is one of this country’s shrinking cities. Since deindustrialization, the city on the Chesapeake Bay has lost a third of its inhabitants. (Now, 15 minutes out of town, the train passes high-tech factories and a military air base, signs of the “rimming” of business -- moving out to the suburbs – that has affected many U.S. cities.) The eminent geographer David Harvey gave a talk on Friday from the top of Federal Hill. This unique promontory overlooks downtown Baltimore and the Inner Harbor. From this hill Lincoln’s zouave army trained cannon on the city below to keep the state of Maryland from seceding from the Union during the Civil War.
This day Harvey pointed with his fingers and fired only his analysis. A score of undistinguished or plain ugly high rises and office towers litter the landscape, the results of decades of “public-private partnerships.” While these heavily subsidized and now doubtless largely vacant buildings were constructed, the city’s neighborhoods, especially its schools, were systematically starved of funds.
So where, I asked my hosts, was the bronze statue of John Waters, the filmmaker whose early work celebrates the quirky denizens of Baltimore in the 1970s? Or better yet Divine, his earthy drag queen hero(ine)? Those movies made Baltimore seem like an east coast New Orleans, brimming with fun craziness. I’m afraid Divine, should she appear, would be hustled out of the “new” Amtrak station -- a beautifully preserved turn of the last century Beaux Arts building now marked by signs, loud regular announcements, and roving squads of police with dogs. They’re on the lookout for Arab terrorists, of course. It's plainly absurd. We should better be protected from rogue ice blocks and polar bears. But repression makes jobs. On these streets large black signs with white letters proclaim: “BELIEVE.” Blue flashing lights mark surveillance cameras, and across from the tiny nightclub and bar strip a large set of klieg lights prepares to blast nighttime crowds with a military daytime. Closing time fun. Inner Baltimore, the depopulated city of the bourgeois, is like much of the urban United States clearly a police state. Running it seems to be the only growth industry in town. This is George W. Bush’s lasting legacy, the production (for both domestic and foreign consumption) of an overwhelming paranoiac fear in his constituency.
The last day of the conference was a sorry one for me. Through an hour’s inattention, my coat with my camera in it was taken. This happened in an adjunct building of the conference, a beautifully restored public library run by community volunteers. (The city defunded many neighborhood libraries years ago – to educate the workforce in the futility of aspiring, one supposes.) During the session, the library was of course open, and local people were coming in and out. It was a reminder of the desperation of many Baltimoreans. Thieves haunt open situations, where people are relaxed and trusting. When we started work at ABC No Rio in 1980, we had to warn every woman who entered not to let her purse out of her sight. The charming children who ran about the place were thieves. Teaching two hour classes in the Bronx in 1998, I had to tell my students to take their textbooks with them when they took their break. A ring of thieves was picking up the expensive books while their owners went to the bathroom, later to resell them. Places where people come to learn – art centers, schools, libraries – are places where people let their guard down. Those people are easy prey.
The incident was profoundly upsetting to me -- not for the camera, which was aging, nor the jacket, although it was a good one and I’m wearing three shirts in the springtime chill air. I lost dozens of photos I had made of European social centers -- made and not yet downloaded. Plain stupidity… I paid for it with a sleepless night of remorse. Lessons learned: in the field, tech stays on your body. Data gets duplicated immediately, as soon as it is practical to do so. (Think of it as corroding the recording device.) And always know where is the nearest used clothing store!
But back to Amtrak: What is this loony social model costing us? What is it preventinig us from doing? In the clean, overly-patrolled security zones of the under-used Amtrak rail station is the potential for small scale enterprise -- mobile food and beverage carts, which can go where the customers are and don’t require as high a level of patronage as a fixed establishment. I paid $5 for a roll and coffee, a very unsatisfying breakfast at a silly price. So I’ll never do that again, and they lost a customer. That place can only sell to the unwary. This kind of retail strategy in the station runs counter to any professed ideology of market competition – you funnel customers into a zone where there are no other options, then overcharge them for shoddy goods. Amtrak in Baltimore does what airports used to do (and many still do). The egregiously overplayed security scenario -- (only in Baltimore, not in New York, where there is certainly more risk) might be some kind of way to make air travelers feel more comfortable. It’s not a grungy old antiquated rail station, really, it’s just like an airport! The “tarting up” of this lovely rail station in airport drag is carried forward by a gleaming white plastic bench with a luggage measuring guide, just like the airport, and two plastic plants placed atop this glaringly ugly piece of furniture, like bangles on a brassiere....

Collectivized...

2009-03-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

Last night the Visual Arts Collective of ABC No Rio met to update on exhibition plans and proposals. My scheme for “House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence” got taken apart and put back together. The show will be sharper and more focused. The new format is going for graphic and punchy – “eye candy” for the casual viewer. Accumulations of information relevant to the different centers will be held on clipboards next to the stenciled images of social center logos on the walls. The focus of the exhibition will be on the events, the screenings and discussions. Each member of the group is going to take a different social center, and try to gather information from them over the next few weeks when the show opens. Whatever the result is will be put onto a clipboard, even if it’s nothing.
This was a strenuous meeting for me – actually a series of them, since I’ve been working at ABC, and the storm has been gathering. But it was increasingly clear to me what was probably obvious to everyone else long ago, that I could not do even half of what I’d planned, and the public presentation was at risk of looking shitty. I don’t feel proprietary about my concepts. One thing I’ve learned is that my own ideas for situations recur over and over. I do what I do; I’ve done it before, and if I don’t do it now, I’ll do it later. The big outcome of collectivization is relief – I can relax, as the whole load comes off my shoulders…
A very significant development to come out of this meeting was Michael Cataldi’s offer to include “House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence” in the “University of Trash” exhibition he is making with Nils Norman at the Sculpture Center in Queens over the summer. So, once the show concludes at ABC No Rio, the correspondence desk and show walls will be carted over to Queens. We will be able then to welcome visitors until early August. So this show at ABC in April is really only the beginning, only just the start…
In other news, Franco Berardi, aka Bifo, is coming to New York. He will talk to Mackenzie Wark at the space run by Change You Want to See/Not An Alternative in Brooklyn next week. I took a peek at Bifo’s list-serve, Rekombinant. It announces a new SC in Bolognia, called “Bartleby” (he of “I prefer not to,” Herman Melville’s Wall Street office worker character). The squatters are streaming radio from the place…

Picture the Homeless Getting Busy

2009-03-24T07:57:00.000-07:00

I'm prepping like mad for this show April 17, and far behind -- but I must mention this action. Last week an organized group of homeless activists took over a building in East Harlem, aka "Spanish Harlem." (It was covered in the Spanish language press.) These guys learned their chops from people in Miami, at Take Back the Land. One of the key groups involved is called Picture the Homeless, which for ten years has been very active and inventive in their activist work. It's about housing, not social center style occupation. I am looking forward to conversations in Baltimore this weekend, to learn more about it!

Photo: A homeless man, with his cup for change, sleeps on the street in downtown Vancouver (Steve Bosch/Vancouver Sun) -- it's not New York, but I loved the handmade quilt.

Free Schools, Free Minds

2009-03-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

An exciting session tonight at 16 Beaver, lasting some three hours, with Anna Curcio and others from the Edu-Factory project. They run a website, and have a book coming out from Autonomedia soon. The subject – or the problem is the corporatization of the university worldwide, stimulated definitely by the Bologna Process in Europe. This has motivated many self-education initiatives. The conversation was wide ranging, with many of the people present involved with autonomous education projects, as well as working as teachers in colleges. 16 Beaver is a group of “self-educators,” primarily artists and media makers, who have been meeting in lower Manhattan for several years. Anna it turns out was involved in the ESC social center in Rome, along with Paolo, who I had spoken with in London. ESC is part of the second wave of social centers which arose after the Genoa G8 protests were so brutally repressed, Anna said. There are also centers in Rome, Milan, Bologna and Turin. This social center was set up across the street from a large university, and its members engaged the students directly, providing study space, counseling and other services in an autonomist atmosphere. Now, she said, the task of the Edu-Factory group was to “stay within and against” the educational system. They are starting a journal, which will feature texts in different languages.
This morning on the way to Tribes I stopped in at the "Broadcast" exhibition at Pratt Manhattan gallery. It's coming from the ICI in Baltimore, which I'll be in two weeks for the City from Below conference. (That website is really shaping up!) The picture above is Gregory Green's mobile radio station project, " Radio Caroline, The Voice of the New Free State of Caroline." He set it up in the gallery, and it's just as chaotic and intentional as any real radio station -- only 1 watt, though. Radio Caroline was a famous pirate radio station off the coast of England in the 1960s and ‘70s. The artist duo neuroTransmitter memorialized this broadcast adventure in their sculpture “12 Miles Out,” which was also in the "Broadcast" show. Like many of the social center places I’ve “visited,” the Radio Caroline it seems was a virtual location, a free state which could not be visited, only heard.

Crossing the Desert

2009-03-12T07:50:00.000-07:00

It’s now called “House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence.” And I’ve been working on the show this week at Tribes office. Steve Cannon is great, an irascible hipster saint. The response from my European friends and comrades to the call for materials has been – well, silence! Last night I asked my friend who lives in a commune in New York and runs a café for them if he would speak at the show about collective living. Earlier, another member of the same group had declined, saying they didn’t want to be identified with squatters. My friend more or less repeated the line, critiquing the show plan in its parts and in concept. He said it would be a “fuck you!” in the face of any general audience. This made me sad. I believe this group has a great method and lots of experience which they could share with progressive people. But it is not getting out. (In general, for more information on the network of this group, see the website run by the Federation for Intentional Communities.) Well, they have their reasons, which I respect. But there is such profound fear of other ways, even among those who are living alternatives! We are really now sadly ungathered tribes.
“House Magic” and “Monster Institutions.” Magic and monsters, the realm of fantasy that is not reality. Reality is regulated. We are regulated first by our poverty, our lack of wealth. That is lack of the means to accomplish big things, to be enterprising, to make changes in our world. Then we are regulated by laws, by customs and usages – all of which run in the interests of wealth. So then, if the light never turns green for us, how are we to cross the street? We must just go, go across. Sooner or later the officer comes to write us a ticket, which we must answer. But we are over there. We are on our way…

Draft Press Release for April '09 Show

2009-03-07T10:13:00.000-08:00

We have a draft press release… “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE”: "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence," part one of a project exhibition at ABC No Rio, New York City, April 17 to May 10, 2009
The social center movement in Europe will be the focus of a project exhibition at the Lower East Side cultural center ABC No Rio during the month of April. Images and information, videos and discussion will engage the realities of this vital urban movement.
The social center phenomenon arose in the late 20th century. An outgrowth of political squatting, the social center in occupied vacant buildings was a key feature of the Italian Autonomist movement of the 1970s and '80s. Squats on the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1990s borrowed elements of the English and German social center models, including cafes, infoshops (library/bookstores), performance spaces and art galleries. Across Europe, the often short-lived social centers became important organizing foci of the global justice movement during the first decade of the new century.
The "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence" exhibition will be an open structure, a newsroom and a channel for a continuous flow of information from the social centers themselves. Bulletins will be posted, banners will be painted, soup will be served. Video documentaries will be screened, radio podcasts will be played, and guests will discuss their experiences with social centers.
The social centers arose out of direct action squatting. In the new century, however, these actions have been less about housing, and more intended to create social, cultural and political space for action in the city.
In many cases, social center squatting is a response to gentrifying development in the city, an instance of "bottom up planning and architecture." The social centers are usually well integrated into the neighborhoods in which they are set up, and provide free space for cultural activities to take place. Many social centers work closely with immigrant groups, organizing, supporting and demonstrating to protect their rights.
Throughout the month of April we will be working the theme at ABC No Rio, processing and presenting information about the social center movement. A key node in global justice organizing, squatted social centers have sprung up in cities throughout Europe. They represent a new wave of activism, often highly theorized, with participation by both radical intellectuals and grassroots activists.Increasingly architects, urban planners and artists are joining political activists in this movement.
"House Magic" is the first step in an ongoing project which invites public participation as we share the stories and synthesize the lessons of the vivid life and often spectacular deaths of these temporary autonomous zones.
Among the centers and agencies past and present considered in the show are Bowl Court, Ramparts, CoolTan, ASS and 56a in London, El Patio Maravillas, Seco, Laboratorio, Caracole and SinAtena (Madrid), La Casa Invisible (Málaga), Krax City Mine(d), (Barcelona), ESC (Rome), ROG (Ljubljana), and many others.
references: "Social Center" on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_center
blog of the show, called "Occupations and Properties" -- Photo: "Fingers of an extreme nail-biter" from Wikipedia entry on "nail biting."

Back to the Books

2009-03-02T09:47:00.000-08:00

I'm back in NYC, after a week in LA for the CAA conference. I bounced there straight after Amsterdam, and talked about mapping projects I did with classes in Atlanta and Tampa. Re. occuprop, Atlanta is home to the long-lived group Mad Housers, centered around Georgia Tech, which builds shanty-style houses for homeless people where they are encamped. I also talked at the Public School, a very cool place for meeting and discussion. It is in a basement in Chinatown, off Chung King Road, where many art galleries are located. You reach it by going down an alley off a closed street, with restaurant staff at the back doors blowing reefer on their breaks -- very mysterious. The circle of politically engaged artists in California has greatly enlarged since the days of the “Cool School” of Pop artists. There was a party for Dara and Josh, who curated the great poster show "Signs of Change," which is now on tour. (Here it is in Pittsburgh, likely an ephemeral link.) There I ran into Ava Bromberg, who put together the swell “Just Spaces” show in LA in ‘07. The network of participants and bibliography of readings on that website remain an inspiration for anyone trying to work through cultural institutions to address these kinds of social justice issues.
Now begins the process of going over notes, and sorting through the materials brought back from Europe. Gradually the shape of the ABC show will emerge... now it is only something in mind, although it is already taking place in my dreams. (I bought a book on Belgian Surrealism at CAA, and find interesting Paul Nouge's theorization of absences -- that is exactly what this project is about, the absences or aporias of contemporary activism, the things not being done.) As I do this I will add those materials and reflections to this blog. But I am moving out of the realm of direct, on-site observation and conversation into a zone of more mediated considerations.
[image: Andrew Becraft's "Lego revolutionaries" series, Marx & Engels; it should be Hegel, for his "Philosophy of Right," but hey, they're just so cute!]

A Deep Past in "Kraaken"

2009-02-21T08:17:00.000-08:00

My week in Amsterdam is ending, and it has been a doozy. A grand city, gilded with the architectural dust of antique empire, but a village for all that. There are many squats here, both legal and illegal, new and old. The movement -- “kraaken” – began in the 1960s, during the time of the Kabouters, the band of radical political provocateurs who were the successors to the infamous Provos of white bicycle fame. To get some handle on this past, I trotted to the International Institute for Social History, a grand imposing building, which houses a squatting archive. Actually it’s part of the state archive… but it’s all in Dutch. Thank goodness I’m into art! The archive was assembled by Eric Duivenvoorden, who also put together the magnificent book of posters, Met emmer en kwast. Veertig jaar Nederlandse actieaffiches 1965-2005. (That’s roughly “with bucket and paste, 40 years of Dutch action posters”—thanks to Google translate.) The book is packed with lovely posters, many of which are on the IISH website.
I also watched “It Was Our City,” a film about the Amsterdam squatters movement 1975-1988, made in 1996 by Joost Seelen. (Duivenvoorden co-wrote the scenario.) The story told in the film (subtitled in English) is both inspiring and cautionary. The squatting movement began in earnest in Amsterdam in the 1970s. It was about housing – too many of the few vacant buildings were being held off the market for speculation, and young people needed places to stay. The government’s housing bureaucracy was swamped and ineffective. One the “kraaken” of empty houses got underway, it was full speed ahead. The police finally reacted, the mutual violence escalated, and in the end the squatters were fighting amongst themselves.
Afficionadoes of “demo porn” would love this film. Once the police first attacked to clear a squatted house, the squatters got real about their defenses. The first defense of a house from eviction was entirely passive. The defenders were beaten. Next came the first real defense – doors and windows were barricaded, and as cops started climbing the ladder, the squatters poured oil on them. When they ran out of oil, one shouted, “It’s all gone, come and get us!” The event turned into a kind of slapstick. Old people were not so amused by the police tactics. “This is like the war,” they said, like the Nazis had come back.
The squatters trained, dressed with helmets and leather jackets, defensive sticks and gloves for the next confrontations. A kind of apogee was reached with the defense of the Big Keyzer Squat in 1978, a massive building owned by a big corporation, OGEM, with ministers and ex-ministers financially involved.
The “squatting surgery” barricaded the building with medieval ingenuity. First wooden sheets went up on the windows, then steel plates and pipes behind (these were welded), then scaffolding and sandbags. There’s much more… but that brief description is enough to clue you to the unique combative and entitled nature of Dutch squatting. As was explained to me later, Holland is a consensus society, where they try to appease everyone. It is far easier to give in to the legitimate demands of a militant band of organized squatters than it is to enforce the absolute property rights of big capital.
Today many squats exist, new and old. I visited one not too old, a small building called Joe’s Garage. The place is surprisingly neat and tidy, with tile-lined walls like a butcher’s shop or charcuterie, and well appointed with blond wooden tables and chairs. By no means my idea of a rough and tumble squat! There’s a bunch of folks around the bar, and at a table seated a bald-headed 30ish gent in leather pants. I smile and nod. He is not smiling. The soup is very good, with cress maybe and mushrooms, butter and flour. I pop a fiver into the “donatie” box, and the barkeep smiles and asks me if I want a beer. Yes, an ale. He’s never heard of it. I get a Jever. Everyone ignores me. Unlike Ramparts, I am not giving a talk, and I know no friend of the space. Two French girls enter. They order beers in English. Their entry is attended by much interest by some young men, but they sit by themselves and do not take soup. They are ignored. More folks arrive. I am pleased to see that it is multi-generational. One elderly lady arrives bearing a fat package.
Soon the dinner is ready. It’s a kind of bean fry up with pineapple! (“an experiment”) says one of the cooks. More folks enter; three English gals talking of their gay affairs. They are there to eat. But I must go, having played only the fly on the wall… Outside a raffish looking gent is smoking a cig. “Lovely meal,” I say. “The best café I’ve been to in Amsterdam.” He replies, “It’s not a café. It’s a social center for squatters.” This remark I thought was revealing. I think by “social center” he meant “social club.” Many squatters have their own idea of what they are about.
Nazima, a student writing an ethnography of Amsterdam squatters, had tipped me to Joe’s Garage. She asked me if I’d consulted Squat.net? Well, no. I’m really winging it here. Nazima was generous, but a little mystified by my project. My principle contact here is Renee Ridgway. She is an artist and long-time Amsterdammer, fluent in both Dutch and English. But during the first days of my visit she was laid up in bed. It took a while for us to meet…

NYU Reoccupation in New York City

2009-02-19T05:31:00.000-08:00

This is a difficult thing to do... but they have done it, they say. Live, with streaming video, the politicals are back inside New York University. Here is the skinny. Meanwhile, I am in Amsterdam, in the beautiful state archives building housing the International Institute for Social History. I am researching squatting in Amsterdam, hindered perhaps a little by the fact that everything is in Dutch. Saw a great film, though -- "The City Was Ours" (1996), about the movement. I will have much to report when I get a chance to blog up good... Now I shall go in search of SCs. Into the fog and rain!

“My Dear Edifice”: Roaming London

2009-02-14T03:51:00.000-08:00

I was invited to talk at the Ramparts Social Center in East London by Peter Conlin, a Canadian graduate student who is closely involved with the space. Ramparts is a solidly built 3-story warehouse with a café on the ground floor, gallery and offices on the 2nd, and 3rd floor offices. The night I spoke saw a hot night of action for a traveling art show called “The Archetist,” based on a psychological cyberpunk story about a psycho-architect who analyzes nomadic buildings. Despite the wacky costumes and fringe-type theatricale, the content made the work seem very appropriate to present in a social center. The effort was somehow removed from its fan fiction context into a wider zone of social significance by being held in a space that has exhausted its appeals and hangs perilous awaiting eviction. Why the bailiffs haven’t come is a mystery… Their forbearance is attributed to “the crisis; it costs money to stage an eviction, and then some more to seal the building.
I spoke in a rambling way about my work researching artists‘ collectives. I was pleased to see Nils Norman showed up with a friend for the first part. After my talk I had interested albeit brief conversations with Rampart people -- the place was bone-chillingly cold… A fellow also named Alan told me of Area 10, an artists’ project space in Peckham, that is producing a big event Sunday. It is a factory building with artists’ studios. They have stopped paying rent because of lack of services.
Alan introduced me to a friend who had organized a Pirate University project in Barcelona. (I regret his name escaped me.) They staged a talk on Jacques Derrida’s concept of nothingness while seated on chairs in the middle of a street in London. It sounded like the perfect combination of post-structuralism and activism, mixed to the pitch of absurdity. He lamented the fractious nature of squatters ni Barcelona, saying there was no unity -- two years ago it was better, he said. Oddly enough this was precisely what Alan was saying to me earlier abuot London. “Network is coming,” wrote the organizers of the social center conference in January, but it seems it may have to clamber over the fractious tendencies of autonomists worldwide. [Next: A visit to Queen Mary.]

Madrid: The Traffic in Dreams

2009-02-12T02:56:00.000-08:00

So Pablo takes me on a fast tour of Diagonal the newspaper, which has a very clean, bright modern storefront tucked into Lavapiés, an older part of the city of Madrid. The place includes a store selling t-shirts and media items. In the back, a fellow is folding aprons printed with a bright red and black design in Constructivist style -- “keep the kitchen clean!”
Diagonal published Pablo’s review of the Barcelona conference of European social centers in early January.
In the basement a meeting is slowly getting underway of organizers of the “sin papeles” community (without papers), preparing for an upcoming demonstration. It will be a march from Lavapiés to Sol, the historic city center of Madrid.
Many of the sin papeles are Senegalese and other Subsaharan Africans who have been coming into Spain in increasing numbers in the last 10 or so years. We chat outside the Diagonal offices with a Pakistani activist -- about New York. Not so surprisingly, many immigrants to Spain speak English; so many, that handouts in Spanish classes may be written in English.
After our visit to Diagonal, I follow Pablo into the Metro, and we head downtown to the Seco social center. The pink panther is the logo of Seco.
This centro is located in a city-owned building now, a strikingly designed rounded modern structure. The building was sitting empty, and the Seco group, which began working in a squat years ago, was given the use of the site after a negotiation. There is a small rent which they mostly pay. Inside Seco a clutch of kids play on the internet, and a small group of youths is conferring. It is the hacklab, Pablo says. A small room holds bicycles and parts of the Critical Mass group -- Bici Crítica, an uphill struggle in Madrid. Classes in Spanish at three levels are held here for immigrants.
Seco is near a working class district which is now 35% immigrants. Seco strives to relate to these populations. I am introduced to Elia, who is traveling to NYC this summer… August. She is shy with English, and quickly returns to setting up for a party, a music night honoring the “Mods” of UK.
I was impressed by Diagonal. Like Traficante, it is a very together left space, not a squat, not dirty or unimproved at all. Seco also is very clean, a modern building, not brand new but not shabby.
Bernat emerged from the classroom where he had been teaching Spanish. Pablo said he was a writer for Diagonal. Bernat is a very personable Catalan wearing a black and white kefiya. Guillermo was also there, a researcher making “maps” of the social movements in different Spanish cities. He was reserved, and although he spoke English very well, I did not have a chance to speak with him. Bernat sees the predecessors of the social centers of today as very definitely rooted in the “ateneos” (athenaeums) of the Republican era, cultural centers where working class people could educate themselves. I asked Pablo about the questions which had preoccupied me in regards to the social centers, that is the subjectivities that participation in their activities generates and requires, the new mentalities beyond capitalism. In the words of the Universidad Nómada text, it is a matter of “creating new mental prototypes for political action.” For Pablo at this moment, the challenging work of Seco SC klies in the conversations of diverse people, making the “mixtape,” or “building the Esperanto of our movement.”
On Friday afternoon I had a very good talk with J, a hacker from Miami. He was participatng closely in the “Garage Science” workshop at Media Lab Prado, and asked that we meet there. There I found him huddling over his project. In the middle of a swirling crowd of techno hackers stood the great Steve Kurtz directing the actionj, or as he put it, trying to help out the folks working on various techno projects. (Just what these did consist of I had not the time to learn.) Also on hand by purest chance was the architect and urban theorist Kyong Park, in town to give a talk at Casa Encendidas. Kyong now teaches in San Diego, and works mainly in Asia. He was in the lab because he was having problems with his computer. After suffering through an intricate technical presentation on the electrical properties of various fruits, J and I repaired to a Turkish café nearby. He has been working with a group called SinAntena, also based in the Traficante space. This is , a media outfit that has been covering political events in Madrid, including squatting. Jay sees the social center squatting in Madrid as having come out of the shantytowns on the city’s periphery. These arose in the 1970s and ‘80s. Most were destroyed. Some were replaced by permanent housing (That’s the solution recommended by the UN, according to Mike Davis in his book “Planet of Slums.”) Gradually squatting moved into the city center. The task of building a social center is arduous, and many folks cannot sustain it. Many people J knows now squat only for housing, not to make a social center. This kind of energy is rare!

Una visita a Patio

2009-02-06T04:39:00.000-08:00

El Patio de Maravilla is the largest squatted social center in Madrid. Just after I arrived in Madrid, strolling about, we ran into a demonstration for the place, which isunder threat of eviction. In the nearby square, before a statue of a revolutionary heroine, many hundreds of people gathered to support El Patio in the face of an eviction threat. It was an excited crowd, listening to speakers on megaphones, whipped up by the big drums of a samba school band -- a festive event. Today I meet some folks at Traficante de Sueños, a leading political bookstore and publishing company that carries many items on the social center movement. I was there in November to pick up some of these books and DVDs, the colorful independent media products that explain the movement. All of it in Spanish, of course. I can dance to it, but most of it regrettably I cannot understand… I return to Traficante, but the meeting is pushed back. I will return, and we will visit Seco Social Center. Traficante is buzzing, with customers and people working at computers in office suites just visible from the second floor of the bookstore. It is an architecturally curious place, built around and over a meeting hall. I profer a copy of the old book describing ABC No Rio (1985), and receive in return a lovely portfolio of silkscreen works by Taller Popular de Serigrafia of Argentina. These are not specific to social centers, but they are lovely things, militant images printed onto various kinds of fabric, and I will hang them around the room for “House Magic.”

Why this begins...

2009-01-23T14:04:00.000-08:00

Greetings, friends and comrades! This blog is devoted to a project that begins its life called “Occupations and Properties.” It is dedicated to representing aspects of the international social center movement through a project exhibition beginning in New York City in April of 2009. This movement is of the left, generally resistant to the state and capital, and often anarchist identified. While the movement has unfolded most clearly over decades in European countries, it has clear counterparts in the United States – including the first venue for “Occupations & Properties,” ABC No Rio on the Lower East Side – and direct implications for grassroots urban development throughout the inner cities of the U.S.
This project exhibition is initiated after my experience as a co-editor on Clayton Patterson, ed., “Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side” (2007). This book began as an anthology of texts on the squatter movement of the late 1980s and ‘90s on the LES, but over a few years evolved into a panoramic look at the radical past of the district. Patterson has been photographing the people and the changes there for decades, and extensively documented the squatter movement.
Many things became clear in the course of working on this book. Among these was that the events on the Lower East Side were heavily influenced by the models of the English, Dutch and German squatting movements. In doing a Lexis-Nexis journalism review for my essay in “Resistance,” I found nothing in the U.S. press that dealt squarely with the movement. It was always treated as crime or riot, and never analyzed or explored by any mainstream journalist I could find.
Before working on the book “Resistance,” I was already very aware of the positive power of direct action occupation activity from our group’s “art squat” of a building on 123 Delancey Street in 1979-80. Called the “Real Estate Show,” this action led to our being given the opportunity by the NYC administration to develop 156 Rivington Street as an art gallery and cultural center.
We in turn had been inspired by the group CHARAS who had occupied a former school building on East 9th Street and called it El Bohio. This group of Puerto Rican activists and literati came from a strong tradition of activist occupations, particularly by the Young Lords Party.
When I emerged from my graduate school bunker years later to survey the Lower East Side squatter scene in the early 1990s, Clayton Patterson and I did an art exhibition at the 13th Street squats where my artist friend Robert Parker, a charter member of the group “Rivington School,” had an outdoor iron forge. Moving through the squats, I discovered nearly every one of them had an art gallery. I met Homeless Higgins, and Andrew Castrucci of Bullet Space, who produced the wonderful tabloid (and silkscreen poster edition) called “Your House Is Mine.” Clayton and I produced the show, and a ‘zine-style catalogue of it – and a group among the squatters produced an angry manifesto critiquing the representation of their struggle…
Just as it ought to be!
In 2006 I returned to Europe, to Berlin, after a 20 year absence. I was delighted to see the squats there – but a little disappointed that they were all kind of moribund… They, like their New York counterparts, had been given a deal with the city, and the whole movement had settled down. As I discovered on subsequent trips, this is not true elsewhere – particularly in Spain, where a radical social center movement has recently held its second annual meeting in Barcelona. “Network is coming,” Krak declares, and I am hopeful that “House Magic” will begin the process of extending it, through the stories, lessons and examples from this movement, to the United States.