tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6359117147306980392024-03-15T18:10:54.273-07:00Occupations & PropertiesAlan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.comBlogger197125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-19490223319375973152023-12-15T08:41:00.000-08:002023-12-15T08:41:04.407-08:00Madrid Anarchist Book Fair: The Sap Is Rising<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIWrpwwR70w8HgJ7OmJ-T2yyOhkDofPF19mptnRVTqO8JtAYUS5aU0ONeE0K5q0aC5KEsJ7PqhSmTJkJ1q9Bbqa5FVQemIzl52eRz2viyziCXlOUZSGCg9bb7Ia3o9u6bk6pBUdo7MXIaiXxn-tGJJS0QeZ7FlvfO5lajjPYLIHq32t6ruQWJKuF5aP_55/s2000/407426264_861341185785196_63633380355804064_n.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="2000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIWrpwwR70w8HgJ7OmJ-T2yyOhkDofPF19mptnRVTqO8JtAYUS5aU0ONeE0K5q0aC5KEsJ7PqhSmTJkJ1q9Bbqa5FVQemIzl52eRz2viyziCXlOUZSGCg9bb7Ia3o9u6bk6pBUdo7MXIaiXxn-tGJJS0QeZ7FlvfO5lajjPYLIHq32t6ruQWJKuF5aP_55/s320/407426264_861341185785196_63633380355804064_n.jpg"/></a></div><br>
<i>Your blogger tables at another book fair, this one at the popular school La Prospe in Madrid. All my stock is old, but I’m planning new research and reporting on the new ‘commonsing’ (open, assembly-run, not publicly administrated) citizen action spaces which are sprouting anew in the Spanish capitol. This post discusses some of these new initiatives, and gets into the library with some recallings of Chicago hobo eggheads and Surrealists.</i><br><br>
</i>After my fun experiences at the Pichifest zine festival (blogged previously), I was primed for the Madrid anarchist book fair at La Prospe. That self-organized place is a libertarian free school which is celebrating their 50th anniversary this year.<br>
I felt a basic elation to be again in the middle of this kind of cultural action in autonomous space. My Spanish is poor. I understood about 20-30% of what was going on. But everyone was polite, even friendly to this old man with his small spread of radical books on squatting.<br>
I’d received no response to my request to join. “We had so many proposals,” the woman hosting said when I arrived as the doors opened. “But I can give you this little bookstand.” She dragged it into the front room and I plopped my stuff down. I set up the “House Magic” zines on the chalk shelf of a blackboard, the pages resting in the white dust of past writing.<br>
Those zines are old stuff: “House Magic: BFC” (Bureau of Foreign Correspondence), my project from 2009 to 2016. Along with this blog, those zines fed into <i>Occupation Culture: Art and the City from Below</i> (Minor Compositions, 2015), and <i>Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces</i> (JoAAP & Other forms, 2015), the anthology that SqEK research group members contributed to. (Both are free PDFs online.)<br>
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<i>House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence working research office, Produced by Alan W. Moore and the ABC No Rio Visual Arts collective for the University of Trash, Sculpture Center NYC, 2009. Photo by Jason Mandella at michaelcataldi.com.</i><br><br>
All of that work is ancient in internet time; Google has demounted the original “House Magic” site with PDFs of the zines. (They are scattered around elsewhere.) That site was built when the ABC No Rio visual arts collective put up the exhibition in 2009 that began my researches.<br>
But after a long interregnum I am back at it. The time is ripe. A revitalized commonsing movement is rising again in Madrid. When the right took over city government in 2019 with the help of the neo-fascist Vox party, they immediately began a campaign of eviction against citizen-run spaces across Madrid, both squatted and permitted.<br>
They cancelled contracts for several permitted centers which had been many years in operation, thereby greatly annoying neighborhood organizations that were not radical left. They evicted a roster of <i>okupas</i>, which are always vulnerable, climaxing with the centrally located Ingobernable. (The building has remained empty despite government promises, which is quite typical.) With the Covid virus fear and lockdown in full swing, it was hard to muster crowds to defend these spaces, although people did come out in hundreds on the streets against some of these moves.<br>
So Vox got their red meat: The centers of Venezuelan- and George Soros-inspired communist indoctrination were closed. And the neo-fascists march on with a culture war agenda targeting any LGBTQ representations. Vox pols are mounting a concerted attack in the cultural arena across Spain, a complement to De Santis' crusade in Florida, and radical Christians throughout the small towns of provincial USA.<br>
But true to the axiom that repression breeds resistance, the movements have been reconstituting themselves with a strong effective organization. Their sap is rising now, with more motivations, and consequently a broader base of support, than in the past. With rampant gentrification and a debilitated public health system – (both the responsibility of the city and provincial governments) – political imperatives are stronger than ever.<br>
A recent article in <i>ElDiario.es</i>, "La nueva estrategia”, explains the complex organization of the resistance, and the actions that are unfolding. The neighborhood movements are bolstered by organizations based in rented or owned premises -- Ecologistas en Acción, Fundación de los Comunes, and Traficantes de Sueños and others -- which have expanded their facilities and produced programs in support of the commonsing projects. What is new this time is the clearer emphasis on the provision of space for culture and free sociality.<br><br>
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<b>The Cultural Turn</b><br><br>
Groups which have run what we might call “social centers” are renting and buying spaces. How they constitute themselves, their public faces, are also changing. The article notes several projects, including Ateneo La Maliciosa and La Villana de Vallekas. La Maliciosa is a large recently-opened space close to the Lavapiés neighborhood, a collaboration between the above-named groups and the bookstore/publisher Traficantes de Sueños.<br>
Like La Prospe and its innumerable anarchist ancestors in Spain, La Maliciosa is an <i>ateneo</i>, a space for meeting and learning. La Villana is in the peripheral barrio of Vallecas. The space they are working towards was a tavern. It will continue as such, and include a bookstore. Both these places were crowd-funded, with a built-in intention to “generate money that can be put in the service of political ends”.<br>
What clearly links all these projects, almost irrespective of their divergent political positions, is a desire to organize and produce their own cultural and social projects and events without having to engage with and navigate scarce public resources and official administrative apparati. <br>
It is a good moment to pick up the strings of the project I dropped eight years ago – the grail of my SqEK days, a “popular book of squatting”. That is the volume that will life the scales from people’s eyes by demonstrating historically how important the movement of occupied collectively organized social centers has been.<br>
“La nueva estrategia” is just that, the new strategy for a kind of organizing that has been rolling continuously for decades. The March, 2015 document, “Manifiesto por los espacios urbanos de Madrid”, was circulated at a more hopeful moment. I translated and posted it here as “The places where the future is invented”. That post is hyperlinked to many of the projects of that moment, some of which survive.<br>
Quite a lot has changed in the intervening years since that manifesto appeared, and even more since I proposed the “popular book” project to our group. There is change in the overall situation in which the squatting movement finds itself, changes in its public face, and for me, changes in how I think my researches should be reported.<br><br>
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<b>Ontology of Self-Publication</b><br><br>
The general questions around how to go forward with my researches and reportings is somewhat clearer after these two fairs. Writing academic articles does nothing for me; I stopped long ago. I think there’s no point in aiming for finished books, since there’s so little audience and so little response. Still, as with avant-garde art it’s not how many it’s who. Maybe I flatter myself that the “House Magic” zine series 2009-16 helped to animate occupations in the USA during those years of strikes and OWS. <br>
Limited audience means limited editions. I’m going to continue to both blog online and “zinefy” in print. I’ll work myself more closely into the production process of the publications as well as researching and writing. I’ll learn bookbinding.<br><br>
<b>Research Campaign</b><br><br>
I went into the book fair with a boost from the lovely folks at the Archivo 15M who put my call for collaborators on their blog. They also sent along a dossier of documents about the post-15M occupation project Hotel Madrid. I’m not holding my breath that such folks will, like elves, magically appear. The immediate question is how to gather the resources I need to make these zines.<br>
At the Feria, I met an elder from an archive I didn’t know existed. It’s the Fundación Salvador Seguí, which is something of a cousin to the FAL-CNT archive and bookstore. With sites here and in Barcelona and Valencia, the mission of the FSS is “to collect, organize, preserve and disseminate documentation related to the libertarian movement”, which is exactly what I’m trying to do.<br>
I’m confident now I can find the research resources I need to make the project possible.<br><br>
<b>Finally, These Are Book People</b><br><br>
Third day of the anarchist book fair. I'm in the big room, awaiting the presentation of the Grupo Surrealista, “Towards a new romanticism: revolutionary and anti-development while capitalism destroys the world”. It was delivered by the author of a recent pamphlet, and I found it entirely incomprehensible. The discussion began with “the question that André Breton posed to the unknowable just at the moment of his death: ‘What are the true dimensions of Lautréamont?’ ” Hmmm....<br>
As it was with that talk, I was slow to catch the matter of the many titles on display. But after browsing for three days I found several titles to grapple with.<br><br>
<b>A Deeper History</b><br><br>
I was emboothed at the fair next to Pepitas de calabaza, a publisher with a large list and a full table. Almost out of the corner of my eye I spied their Spanish edition of <i>Boxcar Bertha</i>, a novel by Ben Reitman (1937), set in “hobo jungles, bughouses, whorehouses, Chicago's Main Stem, IWW meeting halls, skid rows and open freight cars”. Word is “Bertha” was likely an amalgam of historical personages; Reitman was a lover of Emma Goldman. It was made into an AIP flic directed by Martin Scorsese in the ‘70s. Reitman’s 1937 book is pretty little known, but it’s an important part of hoboing subculture, that is today, the thinking train-hopping crust punk. <br>
As it happened, when I passed through Chicago picked up a copy of <i>From Bughouse Square To The Beat Generation</i> by Slim Brundage, with a foreword by Franklin Rosemont. Brundage came on the Chicago scene later than Reitman, but had similar ways and ambitions. The Rosemonts revived Charles H. Kerr, the IWW’s old publishing house. The Rosemonts are also beloved of the Grupo Surrealista folks. All that long-gone Chicago scene is getting hot again as it was the subject of a chapter in Abigail Susik's recent book <i>Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work</i> (2021).<br>
I was happy to share a copy of that book. I have bad Spanish, and I’m certainly an armchair anarchist, but in the end these are book people, and we all share a love of the ones that excite us.<br><br>
<b>Chicago, the Nation’s Railyard</b><br><br>
The Chicago nexus, the early 20th century U.S. anarchist movement which saw the proliferation of Ferrer schools, named for the murdered Spanish educator – all this harks back to an era of international solidarity and a relatively free movement of peoples across borders which brought these movements into conjunction. The hobo intellectuals whom the Chicago Surrealists loved were of a piece with the Spanish anarchist movement which at the turn of the century launched hundreds of <i>ateneos libertarios</i>, libertarian free schools to educate the laboring classes. Workers in the 19th century in Spain were at the mercy of the Catholic church for what minimal public education was provided. School was – and still is – a drilling in wage labor discipline.<br><br>
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<i>Punk zine table at anarchist book fair. "Every weekend at the Rastro I have a table", said this participant</i><br><br>
To get away, to escape, to reach any wider plain of understanding of one’s own situation together with others, and the burden of the broader human condition needs schooling. Even in many cases <i>un</i>-schooling. This the <i>ateneos libertarios</i> provided.<br>
That this situation is essentially unchanged – that government-provided education remains a contested political terrain – brings us back to La Prospe, the host site for this and last year’s anarchist book fair.<br>
<b>NEXT</b>: La Prospe, the 50-year-old libertarian school in Madrid.<br><br>
<b>LINKS</b><br><br>
<i>A note to fans: Tired of the incessant spam. I've reset comments to "only members", which I think means you have to follow this blog to comment.</i><br><br>
XXI Encuentro del Libro Anarquista de Madrid 1, 2 y 3 de Diciembre 2023<br>
https://encuentrodellibroanarquista.org/<br><br>
“La nueva estrategia de los movimientos vecinales de Madrid: rearmarse en locales autogestionados”
(The new strategy of Madrid's neighborhood movements: rearming in self-managed premises)
A new surge in social center activism in Madrid is taking a cultural focus.<br>
https://www.eldiario.es/madrid/somos/nueva-estrategia-movimientos-vecinales-madrid-rearmarse-locales-autogestionados_1_10709115.html<br><br>
“Manifiesto por los espacios urbanos de Madrid” circulated in 2015, translated and posted here as “The places where the future is invented”<br>
http://occuprop.blogspot.com/2015/03/<br><br>
Ecologistas en Acción<br>
https://www.ecologistasenaccion.es<br><br>
Ateneo Maliciosa<br>
https://ateneomaliciosa.net<br><br>
CIUDAD OKUPA<br>
Derecho a la ciudad, centros sociales, precarias y territorios QUEER. <br>
https://traficantes.net/nociones-comunes/ciudad-okupa<br><br>
My call for Madrid collaborators on the Archivo 15M blog<br>
"Se buscan colaboradorxs para fanzine okupa"<br>
https://archivosol15m.wordpress.com/2023/11/29/se-buscan-colaboradorxs-para-fanzine-okupa/<br><br>
October 2011 “OccuProp” blog post on my visit to the Hotel Madrid "Welcome to the Hotel Ocupa"<br>
http://occuprop.blogspot.com/2011/10/welcome-to-hotel-ocupa.html<br><br>
Rocío Lanchares Bardají, <i>Hotel Madrid, historia triste</i> (2021) a kind of fictional history of 15M and the Hotel occupation. Presentation of the book online; "Hotel Madrid, historia triste"<br>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1topsI-1Sq4<br><br>
Fundación Salvador Seguí <br>
Centro de estudios libertarios fundado en 1986 para recopilar, ordenar, conservar y divulgar la documentación referente al movimiento libertario.<br>
https://www.fundacionssegui.org/<br><br>
Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo - CNT<br>
https://fal.cnt.es/<br><br>
Website of the author of the Grupo Surrealista book presented at the fair<br>
vicentegutierrezescudero<br>
https://vicentegutierrezescudero.wordpress.com/tag/grupo-surrealista-de-madrid/<br><br>
Ben Reitman, <i>Boxcar Bertha</i> <br>
https://www.pepitas.net › libro › boxcar-bertha<br>
En este texto, original de 1937, Ben Reitman narra la vida de Bertha Thompson, una mujer que fue prostituta, ladrona, reformadora, trabajadora social, ...<br>
in English: <i>Sister of The Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha</i>, as told to Dr. Ben Reitman
(AK Press, 2002)<br><br>
Slim Brundage, <i>From Bughouse Square To The Beat Generation</i> with a foreword by Franklin Rosemont
https://charleshkerr.com › books<br>
The writings collected here by the College's founder and janitor, Slim Brundage (1903–1990), chronicle the colorful history of what may well be the oldest ...<br><br>
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Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-82894047100591909392023-11-07T04:10:00.001-08:002023-11-10T04:23:18.161-08:00Art + Squat = Pichifest<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgozRclFSUacnun2Bm67ctGJZcLwot0Xn53v6aJONIulgzPDnMFdbF97vUdSjHmuSt-xpfEzBynE9WLNSTTUbCqV1mgvWYr8UD5jC8GP3Sk1ypx7Zv13-41XwSIX_qJNYuy5pk_9uXn44OBi5QxWywMDhbyCrtVRxfEF-EkGdBgNjRm7RAFaztGCx5yop2H/s2047/1%20cartel_pichiruta.webp" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2047" data-original-width="1448" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgozRclFSUacnun2Bm67ctGJZcLwot0Xn53v6aJONIulgzPDnMFdbF97vUdSjHmuSt-xpfEzBynE9WLNSTTUbCqV1mgvWYr8UD5jC8GP3Sk1ypx7Zv13-41XwSIX_qJNYuy5pk_9uXn44OBi5QxWywMDhbyCrtVRxfEF-EkGdBgNjRm7RAFaztGCx5yop2H/s320/1%20cartel_pichiruta.webp"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFF8SB1cym23eoYNnyBnyXZJenIMffplaViqkoDvHFLEJsrEeemBUAtQZ1TvJ3bYAHzqvzIRwgB79isyHO5gRAyErcmp0S8gvW0hDxgbepiuSm6nKecJ6li1E69ppbodU-ciF7ShOdWSFU_X-7h7HWHs3SkhqcIbp9jnQwnJGZFZAW_Wxs2A-kGPRNOlpq/s1651/2%20at%20ESLA.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1651" data-original-width="1169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFF8SB1cym23eoYNnyBnyXZJenIMffplaViqkoDvHFLEJsrEeemBUAtQZ1TvJ3bYAHzqvzIRwgB79isyHO5gRAyErcmp0S8gvW0hDxgbepiuSm6nKecJ6li1E69ppbodU-ciF7ShOdWSFU_X-7h7HWHs3SkhqcIbp9jnQwnJGZFZAW_Wxs2A-kGPRNOlpq/s320/2%20at%20ESLA.png"/></a></div>
It’s been a busy time above ground these Days of the Dead. I spent those holidays preparing publications and displays for the Pichifest zine fair here in Madrid. I was glad to be in town for this one, and Friday was the day…<br>
First a run to a morning meeting of the assembly of the Archivo Sol (Centro de Documentacion 15M) at the 3 Peces 3 center in Lavapies. Arriving late, I pitched a proposal for a series of zines to the small group of archivists assembled there. The 3P3 storefront is small, and since my last visit it’s been redesigned. It seems much larger. It’s cleaned and clear, with shelved books from floor to ceiling on every wall.<br>
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I made zines out of my blog posts, the ones especially germane to the theme of a zine fest in an occupied space. “Art + Squat = X”, of course, a 2010 text recently translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil; and a couple of talks I gave at the Reina Sofia about New York City art stuff – NYC in the ‘80s, and films of David Wojnarowicz. Those texts were well translated, not by machine. <br><br>
<b>Future Plans</b><br><br>
My proposal to 3P3 is to make a series of zines about famous occupied social centers in Madrid. There have been many, most long since evicted, but these projects are little known today. Recovery work on radical history, is always important since it gets silted over so quickly in the media environment. But this work seems more urgent now since the great break in action which the pandemic and its lockdowns created. <br>
The Black Lives Matter movement arose in the USA from urgency <i>despite</i> the prohibitions on gatherings. Today many of the mass protests against the Israeli bombing of Gaza are proceeding despite government proscription. But the quotidian occupations in Madrid were evicted during lockdown because the activists couldn’t muster the crowds to defend them. There is a need now after some years of the Forgetting to reintroduce the most successful and inspiring projects of the occupation movements to younger people who are its potential activists.<br>
“It isn’t left-wing, Marxist or anarchist,” I declared. “It’s anti-capitalist adventure!”<br>
It’s what folks can do to break the stranglehold institutions and governance have over both culture and politics. There are clear precedents and procedures for squats and occupations of all kinds, “rulebooks” as it were, which have been published. Some have gone through many editions. <br><br>
<b>Interchangeability</b><br><br>
One realization came from a suggestion made by one of the assembly at 3P3 – she’d been a <i>bibliotecaria</i> at the long-evicted CSO Casablanca where Archivo Sol had its first site. She suggested I visit with the group of filmmakers, <i>documentalistas</i> at 3P3, who have made work on the okupas and social centers in Madrid. They have scripts for those moving image projects, and archives, texts and images used in the development of their films which can be the building blocks for publications.<br>
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Blog = zine = film.<br><br>
<b>“Terror/Error" Amongst the Creepers</b><br><br>
This edition of the Pichifest was held at La Enredadera (the Ivy) in the barrio of Tetuán. It's a squatted space, a cavernous delapidated building with three floors. The 1st floor (2nd US) had factory-type skylights, although we couldn't be under them because they leak in the rain. Sorry, no photos – the assembly of La Enredadera prohibited them.<br>
The theme of the fair was "Terror/Error", and the organizers asked presenters to come in costume. I chose gnome (<i>el gnomo</i>), which is a common off-the-shelf costume ensemble here. <br><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL-J238FNqeSqnk3vNXqTopmnAPpAjDSL1H5YwkmAdKfrBAzETwWxCJDX1tlr_zU9W7z2rJ8JXxqj-9tsU-On3m0pwYEpVxf8kxqFi5jnBUf-Zm75D-wGNrDOM5xD_qaMrdL35MCQjJN1RKUUkLYyUw4D0GjGUozC9whW93M0CKyT97Mp6xzpWYfUQKjaA/s800/8%20disfraz-de-gnomo-hombre.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="200" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL-J238FNqeSqnk3vNXqTopmnAPpAjDSL1H5YwkmAdKfrBAzETwWxCJDX1tlr_zU9W7z2rJ8JXxqj-9tsU-On3m0pwYEpVxf8kxqFi5jnBUf-Zm75D-wGNrDOM5xD_qaMrdL35MCQjJN1RKUUkLYyUw4D0GjGUozC9whW93M0CKyT97Mp6xzpWYfUQKjaA/s200/8%20disfraz-de-gnomo-hombre.jpg"/></a></div><br>
The gnome has radical connotations. It was a kind of insignia for the Dutch movement of Kabouters. I read the recent Autonomedia book by Coen Tasman <i>Clearly Kabouter: Chronicle of a Radical Dutch Movement, 1969-1974</i>, when Jordan Zinovich was getting it into shape. “Kabouter” is Dutch for gnome. I also attended a presentation by Major Waldemar Fydrych when he launched his book on the Orange Alternative activism in Poland in the ‘80s. The Orange folk also embraced the gnome identity as they deployed their "socialist sur-realism" in absurd street-painting and large-scale performances comprising tens of thousands of people dressed as dwarves. Fydrych handed out orange gnome hats at the NYC event.<br><br>
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<b>“Lose the Beard,” She Said</b><br><br>
This is pretty obscure. Of course I had to explain it to anyone who even glanced at my table. Actually, the organizers’ suggestion to come in costume was brilliant. It cut the weird vibe in all art fairs of this kind, between the browsing spectator and the anxious artist who is desperate to explain themself to all and sundry. Being in costume takes the edge off that interaction. Folks can just smile at your character without having to engage the material you display.<br>
Prep – preparation of the display – was a lot of work. I cut a stand out of a cardboard box, painted it, put in wooden struts, and draped it with fabric to hold my zines. Most of those are pretty old stuff, principally the “House Magic” series from 2009 to 2016. (The PDFs used to be online, but Google demounted the site, and the mirror site was hacked and never repaired, so… get ‘em in paper or forget ‘em. [That’s not totally true; see links below.])<br>
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<i>My 2015 book was based on the "House Magic" zines. Cover by Seth Tobocman.</i><br><br>
I have some new stuff: “Martin Wong en sus proprios palabras”, with texts in Spanish by Martin Wong, Barry Blinderman, Miguel Piñero, Yasmin Ramirez, et al. Martin’s show is touring Europe – it opened in Madrid, and is now in Amsterdam. And, as mentioned above, several hastily “zineified” blog posts.<br><br>
<b>“Celebrate Peoples History”</b><br><br>
As it turned out the hit of my booth was the venerable “Peoples History” poster series curated by Josh MacPhee of the Interference Archive. I had copies of the first volume of his <i>Celebrate People’s History</i> in book form, and many color printouts of the posters in A3/ledger size. These were left over from the 2019 exhibition of the series at ABM Confecciones in the Vallecas barrio of Madrid. That was a great show, but a <i>fracaso</i> in terms of attendance, with even the jokers from Carabanchel who produced JACA (Las Jornadas de Arte y Creatividad Anarquista de Carabanchel), of which the ABM show was a part, not bothering to attend. (Kvetch, kvetch, but really, you don’t build a scene unless you support it with your body.)<br>
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The Pichifest offered this extraordinary material a second life in Madrid.<br><br>
<b>Text Message Log<br>
<b>Friday, 6:15 PM</b><br><br>
<i>Gnomo</i>: Pretty fantastic space. No fotos allowed, however. [Squatters often prohibit photos of their sites.] I can foto my own stuff I assume.<br><br>
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She: Very good. I like it<br>
<i>Gnomo</i>: There is light enough to read by, but it's not a good "selling environment".<br>
<i>She</i>: Put more zines visible, and the books in the rack. It is difficult to see the house magic stuff.<br>
<i>Gnomo</i>: People are stopping. It's obviously about squatting. I don't think people are that interested in squatting. If they are, nothing will stop them from engaging. Plus most of it's in English. Mostly the stuff here is "arty", about cartooning and the like.<br>
First sale! Martin Wong. And a conversation....<br>
Now it's really crowded – 7:22 pm<br>
A Slovenian guy passed by. He worked in the infoshop in Metelkova! Very political...<br>
[This fellow was wearing a Lenin cap, and didn’t speak Spanish. He didn’t think much of my stuff.]<br>
Mainly I am getting ideas about how to do this again, and better.<br>
[The first “Celebrate Peoples History” sells. It is the “Co-Madres” poster from El Salvador. The young woman who bought it said, “I heard about this from my aunt. She’s going to love this. She is a graphic designer.”]<br>
Another Slovenian passed by...<br><br>
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<i>The zinester in costume, with a house-made poster on the wall in background</i><br><br>
<i>She</i>: Remove the beard please!!<br>
<i>Gnomo</i>: One hour and 15 minutes to go.... this is actually work! – 8:45 pm<br>
The guy next to me arrived late. It seems he has dozens of friends.<br>
[That was a young cartoonist – Miguel, @ekim.comics – The fellow on the other side of him was dressed as a ghost.]<br>
I'm packing up... and along come a couple of archivists! They wanted to buy things I can't sell. One said, "Now I have long teeth for these" [<i>“se me ponen los dientes largos”</i>].<br><br>
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<br>
<i>What I could not sell; only one copy</i><br><br>
<i>Gnomo</i>: La comida de cena fue rico. Tacos veganas.<br><br>
<b>Saturday 12 noon to 20:</b><br><br>
[I amped up the “Peoples History” poster display.]<br>
<i>Gnomo</i>: My neighbor today is dressed like a rock<br>
<i>She</i>: And your display?<br>
I lucked out to be next to the Erededera supply shelves so I could hang up the posters.
You should come! It's very relaxed and fun.<br><br>
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They're pouring in now -- 2PM<br>
I'm fading. I'll try to give it another hour to catch the after-lunch crowd – 5:15pm<br>
This hat actually is pretty warm. Silly but functional. Those gnomes knew a thing or two<br><br>
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<br>
<i>The explanation of the "rock man"</i><br><br>
<i>She</i>: Que tal va todo?<br>
Muy bien. Al final uno de los organizadores pasan y compran. Hablamos y voy a hacer un entrevista con la colectiva<br>
<i>She</i>: 👏👏👏<br>
<i>Gnomo</i>: My neighbor gave up. I squatted his space<br>
"Big rush at the end" he said, and it's true.<br>
Now the posters are selling fast.. -- 7:30pm<br>
Crazy last minute when everything sells... I'm out of here now. -- 8:45pm<br>
<i>She</i>: You must be exhausted<br>
<i>Gnomo</i>Not so bad when there's a lot to do. No customers and the time drags painfully.<br><br>
<b>NEXT: Hopefully an interview with the Pichifest crew.<br><br>
<b>LINKS</b><br><br>
Pichifest linktree<br>
https://linktr.ee/pichifest<br><br>
Centro Social Tres Peces Tres<br>
https://3peces3.wordpress.com/<br><br>
“Art + Squat = X” text<br>
Art + Squat = X (ENG) // Arte + ocupações = X (PORT)<br>
by Alan W. Moore, City University of New York (PhD): NYC, NY, US<br>
Henrique Piccinato Xavier, traductor<br>
Universidade de São Paulo (USP) São Paulo SP, Brasil<br>
Estado da Arte, Uberlândia, Brazil. 3 n. 1p. 345 - 383 jan./jun. 2022<br>
Portal de Periódicos UFU<br>
https://seer.ufu.br › article › download<br><br>
"Arte en Nueva York en los ochenta: Espacio, Permiso, Aspiración" [2 parts; also in English]<br>
http://artgangs.blogspot.com/2014/07/arte-en-nueva-york-en-los-ochenta_25.html<br><br>
"Deathtripping: Filming the East Village"(1980–1989); July 2019<br>
(This talk was not blogged)<br>
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/activities/deathtripping-filming-east-village<br><br>
<i>Clearly Kabouter: Chronicle of a Radical Dutch Movement, 1969-1974</i>, by Coen Tasman<br>
https://autonomedia.org/product/clearly-kabouter-chronicle-of-a-radical-dutch-movement-1969-1974-by-coen-tasman/<br><br>
<i>Lives of the Orange Men A Biographical History of the Polish Orange Alternative Movement</i> by Major Waldemar Fydrych (Author); Gavin Grindon (Editor); Yes Men (Foreword)<br>
https://www.akpress.org/lives-of-the-orange-men.html<br><br>
Google has gobbled up its older sites, like House Magic - Google Sites<br>
Oct 24, 2013 · Bureau of Foreign Correspondence "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence" is an ongoing informational project about the global movement of direct …<br>
maybe try the Wayback Machine? Or… Archive.org, has some --<br>
https://archive.org/details/house_magic_1<br><br>
“Peoples History” poster series<br>
https://justseeds.org/format/peoples-history-poster/<br><br>
<i>Celebrate People’s History: The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution</i>, edited by Josh MacPhee. 2020. 264 pages. This is volume 2.<br>
A visual representation of people's history through political posters. <br>
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/celebrate-peoples-history<br><br>
Art Gangs blogspot, “Interference Archive: de Brooklyn a Madrid”<br>
Una exposicion del autonomo Interference Archive con carteles de la serie "Celebrate Peoples History”, con catálogos y revistas, y otra propaganda gráfica producido por miembros de JUSTSEEDS, una red norteamericano de artistas radicales, trabajando para y dentro de movimientos sociales.<br>
Fue parte de JACA 2019 extendida<br>
http://artgangs.blogspot.com/2019/06/intereference-archive-de-brooklyn-madrid.html<br><br>
Laura L. Ruiz, “La otra cara del barrio de Carabanchel: JACA, la creatividad anarquista,” 06 junio 2019<br>
https://elasombrario.publico.es/carabanchel-jaca-creatividad-anarquista/<br><br>
El Comité de Madres de los Desaparecidos y Asesinatos de El Salvador (Co-Madres) <br>
https://justseeds.org/product/co-madres/
<br><br>
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<i>Poster from Half Letter Press</i><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-4197258492869028132023-07-04T09:18:00.000-07:002023-07-04T09:18:29.316-07:00 In Venice with Marco Baravalle of S.a.L.E. Docks -- Part Two<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsxLI2B-737OqymdBWqLahIVNstQSK-cNlo5iFq7unXqdSX1XFY4JCrbDSYr1PzzMqR5oc6jpEX25RcZkGqeJEdY4YJ2LOzD-ACCMb4dAFh1T5sX6wMK4NtMGvkz7xV5E0Kj_eAr0X4IKh3AMJIhNlQJ28wJkvsAxr-roRhULUmmwtLh3QJ9BB3Okeo2P5/s960/bienalocene%20assembly.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="536" data-original-width="960" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsxLI2B-737OqymdBWqLahIVNstQSK-cNlo5iFq7unXqdSX1XFY4JCrbDSYr1PzzMqR5oc6jpEX25RcZkGqeJEdY4YJ2LOzD-ACCMb4dAFh1T5sX6wMK4NtMGvkz7xV5E0Kj_eAr0X4IKh3AMJIhNlQJ28wJkvsAxr-roRhULUmmwtLh3QJ9BB3Okeo2P5/s320/bienalocene%20assembly.jpg"/></a></div><br>
<i>Assembly of the "Biennalocene" in Venice<br><br>
<i>While in Venice this spring I spoke with Marco Baravalle, a principal in the autonomous art space S.a.L.E. Docks. He told me about the place and its politics, part of the wave of “Occupy”-era commonsing from over a decade ago. In this second part of the interview, Marco discusses the network of social centers of the northeast of which S.a.L.E. is a part; the new governance of Italy by a fascist-descended political party; the resistance to giant cruise ships entering Venice; the relationship of S.a.L.E. Docks to the Biennale; the "Dark Matter" exhibition of 2018, and much more.<br>
Marco and his colleagues are on to other things now. For this biennale summer season, S.a.L.E. Docks has launched a program of discussions and assemblies about precarious labor in the cultural sector.<br>
The "Assemblea di Biennalocene" [#biennalocene] strikes against “the idea of not being able to say no to iniquitous working conditions [because of] the feeling that there is always someone ready to take our place, even in worse conditions…. So let's break isolation, get organized, let's make sure that the other person isn't the one who replaces me, but the one who supports me, stands by me.” <br>
Marco Baravalle and his Milan colleague Emanuele Braga were just in Lisbon to talk about the manifesto of a Universal Basic Income. That’s what they are doing now…<br>
But in this second part of our April interview we talked about the project of the S.a.L.E. Docks itself.</i><br><br>
</i>
<b>AWM</b>: You said, “Sale survived for 15 years because we are part of a city and regional network of other occupied spaces”. How does this kind of solidarity protection work?<br>
<b>MB</b>: It’s more than a solidarity. We are an actual organization, where each social center has its own autonomy, but the general political line that we follow is discussed in an assembly of each social center which gather more or less once a week. And it has been such for many years now. Maybe we have a few differences, but this is our great strength, this network of social centers. It’s closer than a network, it’s not that loose. It’s called Centri Sociali Del Nord Est, Northeastern social centers. And it puts together, it includes six or seven social centers from six or seven cities in Veneto, and beyond Veneto, one in Trentino.<br>
<b>AWM</b>: There have been many attempts to organize social centers in Spain. But the organization fades away, and when the right wing comes to power in a city, they start to pick them off. This is what happened in Madrid, they started to close them, and there wasn’t a strong coordinated resistance; only isolated demonstrations by those affected.<br>
<b>MB</b>: I don’t know what will happen here. I don’t want to lie. We are very united, but the situation in Italy sucks. The political atmosphere is very bad. We have signals that in some of the cities the municipality wants to evict social centers. We will try to be together, and this has been working for the last 20 years. We didn’t have any evictions. No matter what political color was in charge, either nationally or locally, we were able to defend our spaces. That’s why Sale is still there. The mayor of Venice was a right wing mayor, very conservative, an entrepreneur and ultra-neoliberal. So far he didn’t really try to evict us, not because the Sale Docks collective is so strong per se, but because he knows that if he wants to evict Sale Docks he will have to deal with Morion, with Rivolta, he will have to deal with different situations. He will be met with resistance. And that is something we are still able to put on the ground. I think that this municipality is not ready to pay this political price.
I don’t know if it’s going to be like this forever. Things are getting worse on a general level. So we expect, for example, new attacks from the institutions. We expect new attacks from street fascists. Because it’s unfortunate – it’s their time. We are sort of resilient, but the wind is not blowing our way. But so far this unity helps us. We have social centers in Venice, in Marghera, which is part of the Venetian mainland, in Padova, in Vicenza, in Schio, in Trento, and each social center has its own satellite projects. So maybe like a boxing gym, for example, or a beautiful space in Vicenza, Caracol Olol Jackson in honor of a comrade who died too young. They have a peoples’ hospital with doctors volunteering, from dentists to psychologists. They have an <i>osteria</i>, a popular restaurant. They have run a great food bank during the pandemic for mainly migrant families who could not provide food for their kids.<br>
<b>AWM</b>: That is returning to the Leoncavallo social service provision idea.<br>
<b>MB</b>: But all over Italy, one of the few positive things about the pandemic was that it fueled a great wave of mutual aid, which is older than Leoncavallo. It has its roots in 19th century workers mutualism structures. Here in Venice we organized during the pandemic groups which went to buy food for elderly people who could not go out, or financial aid for families who were struggling because they lost their jobs. Or even online help for students – especially women, who were burdened with all this reproductive labor during the pandemic. And this happened all over Italy. This was a great thing to see happen, and it was mainly carried out by social centers, self-organized groups. This was another thing in which social centers were involved. As well, Morion has been involved with the Comitato No Navi (No Big Ships Committee) since it was founded in 2012. [This is the campaign to keep giant cruise ships out of Venice.]<br>
<b>AWM</b>: I got a flag to send to Brooklyn, the Interference Archive. [It was delivered in May].<br><br>
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<b>MB</b>: Fantastic. Since then it was really the place, the engine of the committee. The committee is much larger than simply radical activists. It includes young and old people, people from different classes, from different political orientations, but the energy, the propulsion of the committee really came from Morion and the group of Morion. <br>
<b>AWM</b>: I wanted to roll back to the questions around art. Morion seems to be very much embedded in its role as a center of nightlife. It’s a beautiful space. It’s perfect for that. Wandering around we passed a tiny little hole in the wall which says, “This is the only nightclub in Venice”, somewhere around Dorsoduro. That’s clearly not true. Morion is clearly the nightclub of Venice. With a very strong group of young women, they were all getting ready for Friday night when we passed by. And also Sale Docks, it’s a contemporary art space. It’s beautifully fixtured. There’s such a clear role for these places.
Among the different social centers in Madrid there are some that are historically self-isolating, preserving their subculture. There are others that seem better integrated into their neighborhoods. Historically some social centers in Madrid have had close relations with institutions. The Laboratorio okupas 1, 2 and 3 inspired the program of the institutional Casa Encendida, as an exhibition of their history now acknowledges. On the other hand, La Ingobernable was evicted as soon as the right wing too over city government. And the institution with which it had the closest relation, as well as geographical proximity was dissolved. The Medialab Prado building, purpose-built for them, is now a redundant museum of historic art, one of many such useless, moribund institutions in Madrid.
That question about the relation between institutions and occupied social centers, resistant spaces which understand themselves as resistant to neoliberal market models and top-down institutional governance – that relation with normative cultural institutions is important. In the SqEK research group we talked about institutionalization like it was a dirty word. But sometimes occupations become normative art institutions, like the Shedhalle in Zurich, Metelkova in Llubjana. <br>
I was reading Pierpaolo Mudu, an academic who was involved in the Roman social center movement, and he writes that one thing social centers do in Italy is stand in opposition to mega-events. Like the No TAV movement against the high-speed railway, for example, with which the Catanian centers are deeply involved. And this gives the centers and their activism an international presence, and resonance. So Sale Docks in relation to the Venice Biennale is in a really key analogous position. You did the “Dark Matter Games”.<br>
<b>MB</b>: With Gregory Sholette.<br>
<b>AWM</b>: This project spoke to the issue of labor – the “dark matter” of the artworld. I discussed that essay with Greg when he started it. I was studying artists collectives for my PhD. I looked to the studies of Pierre Bourdieu, Lawrence Alloway, Howard Becker, and before that Alois Riegl, at the field of cultural production to analyze more broadly rather than only to look at the super stars. They of course are market investments. You don’t want them to fail. It’s like a bank failure if suddenly Warhol or Basquiat or Jasper Johns plummets in value. These artists must hold their value. And the “dark matter”, which Greg Sholette analyzes is like the general economy, that is everybody working.
In the Accademia [museum of classic Venetian art] here in Venice they have stuck videos about all the people who maintain the artwork, restore it and so forth. All these people are the “dark matter” of classic art in museums.<br>
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<b>MB</b>: First of all Sale is not against the Biennale. The Biennale is an important part of what Venice is. It helps Venice from falling into provincialism, into localism. The problem with the Biennale is that it has been neoliberalizing itself a lot, at least from the ‘90s onwards. The Biennale is not something that is helping Venice develop its own art scene. It contributes to a model of Venice as simply a touristic city, as a place where people come and consume culture, in this case contemporary art, and then they go away. This leaves nothing in terms of cultural aliveness in Venice, and then the scheme repeats itself year after year after year. It also helps real estate rent to parasite on art. In the Biennale period there are hundreds of exhibitions all around the city. These exhibitions are maybe very radical in content, but they all pay the rent to big real estate owners of the city. Big and small. Art in Venice is a real synonym of rent; it’s all a synonym of renting. Many in Venice present themselves as art operators, but if you look closer what they do is basically renting out spaces.<br>
<b>AWM</b>: One of the top hits on the internet for the Banksy mural in Venice is from a real estate company that says, ‘Hey! It’s our palace that he painted on that is for sale!’<br>
<b>MB</b>: Exactly. The Biennale is a machine which favors real estate rent a lot in Venice. The other problem is the amount of precarious labor involved in the Biennale where you meet all the shades of unpaid, black, gray [market] labor.<br>
<b>AWM</b>: This is not a source of local jobs?<br>
<b>MB</b>: It’s a very important source of local jobs for some. The economy of the Biennale creates firms that work in transportation, in art handling. But at the same time it is also a machine of precarious labor. It is a seasonal event in which young workers get stuck for a few years, and then they are forced to move away. It’s a city where it’s very difficult to make a stable income, to pay for rent, and so on. These are the points of view from which we criticize the Biennale at Sale Docks. We criticize it when it is a multiplier of precarious labor, and when it is an occasion for real estate frenzy. We do demonstrations, and so forth. The other problem, which is more general, is what does it mean, art in Venice? Venice works as a very prestigious place for rich people or rich private foundations to place their spaces, but there are only very rare cases in which they build a constructive relationship with the city. Art is somehow synonimized with big private capital. So Francois Pinault, big French billionaire, tycoon of luxury industry who came here around 2007-08, and first bought Palazzo Grassi, which was previously owned by Anelli family, founders and owners of Fiat factory. With this post-Fordist substitution Pinault bought Palazzo Grassi, and then invested a few millions of euros in the restoration of Punta della Dogana. The city assigned the space for 99 years. So Pinault, Thyssen Bornemiza –<br>
<b>AWM</b>: Thyssen is here?<br>
<b>MB</b>: Of course. The Ocean Space, which is probably the best space in their relationship with the workers, and with the territory, the city. The workers there are satisfiied with the treatment they get. But again, this Ocean Space, which is dedicated to the relationship between art and water, art and the oceans, art and climate change is directly financed by Francesca Thyssen, by the Thyssen Bornemisza foundation. Or Anish Kapoor, who buys a palazzo in Venice to install a permanent foundation. Or, even worse, the VAC foundation. The VAC foundation is now closed because of the war [in Ukraine], but the VAC foundation has a huge building at Zattere, and it’s owned by Leonid Mikhelson, who is a Russian gas oligarch, CEO of Novatech, and very close to Putin. So Venice is this type of place where all these fuckers, these rich global billionaires come and open their own exhibition spaces. Sometimes of course because they are collectors themselves, and they want to boost the value of the things they buy. Sometimes in the case of Mikhelson they want to do some art-washing, because basically he’s a fossil fascist. So Venice is this type of place. And basically Sale Docks is an attempt at –<br>
<b>AWM</b>: [Shows Peggy Guggenheim’s autobiography] I bought this, I couldn’t resist. She’s kind of the original come to Venice and make a big contemporary art thing.<br>
<b>MB</b>: Exactly, but those who followed were much worse. Or at least, many of them. So Sale Docks wants to be an alternative to this equation art equals money which is very clearly present in Venice. We are a self-managed space. We have our own assembly. We don’t have rigid hierarchies. We have flexible programs. We invite people to join the assembly if they want. For us art is a tool to inquire [into] reality, it’s a tool to criticially intervene within, or to participate in the struggles for the right to the city, etc. So exactly the opposite of the idea which is conveyed by these billionaires. <br>
<b>AWM</b>: I was also curious about the Institute of Radical Imagination, and that network of larger solidarity which is sustained by the Reina Sofia museum. I’ve been puzzling on the question of “new institutionality” since I began working here in Europe in 2009, when I talked to Jesus Carillo. He was vague at that point, and as the years went by it became much more specific. And there ended up to be the conference in Malaga to support the Casa Invisible.<br>
<b>MB</b>: “Picasso and the Ciudad Monstro”. <br>
<b>AWM</b>: And I saw also Charles Esche whose institution was very important in early social practice participating in events at Sale Docks. <br>
<b>MB</b>: The Institute of Radical Imagination was an idea that I think comes from the Reina Sofia museum. I was involved since the beginning more than five years ago. The idea was to create a hybrid network between these official institutions, museums like Reina Sofia, and other museums belonging to the network of the Internationale, and social centers around Europe, and dissident scholars or artists, mainly in the Euro-Mediterranean zone, although including Chto Delat in Russia, which is a collective of Russian dissidents now exiled in Berlin since the beginning of the war. And I’d say that is now beginning to work. It is an important tool to break the barriers that separate serious art, high art and activism. Through this strange even asymmetrical alliances with big institutions such as Reina Sofia, we are able to penetrate the institutional field of art and play our little struggle for hegemony there. And we get recognition from institutions. This is another valuable protection for a space such as Sale Docks, to be put on the map of international art spaces. It is also like a very interesting group of people. It creates the ground for common collaborations which otherwise would be difficult to make happen. It is a good ground for collective discussion and collective projects such as Art for UBI [Art for Universal Basic Income], or art for radical ecologies. So these are all results of the IRI. And without this permanent or continuative ground for collaboration these projects would have never seen the light. <br><br>
<b>LINKS</b><br><br>
Part one of the interview with Marco Baravalle is here: http://occuprop.blogspot.com/2023/04/in-venice-with-marco-baravalle-of-sale.html<br><br>
"Art for UBI" is part of the German pavilion of the architecture biennale in Venice this year, part of the series "Peforming Architecture"<br>
https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/category/school-of-mutation/art-for-ubi/<br><br>
S.a.L.E. Docks<br>
https://www.saledocks.org/about<br><br>
In 2015 Marco described the S.a.L.E. Docks project succinctly to the Creative Time Summit audience.<br>
https://creativetime.org/summit/2015/09/01/marco-baravalle/<br><br>
2018 "Dark Matter Games" catalogue PDF<br>
http://www.darkmatterarchives.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/g_sholette_dark_matter-ALL.withnotes..pdf<br><br>
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Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-78096349512193522442023-04-27T07:57:00.002-07:002023-04-27T08:15:27.605-07:00In Venice with Marco Baravalle of S.a.L.E. Docks -- Part One
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<i>Conversations at Dark Matter Games, 2017. Those I know are Charles Esche (short sleeves), Marco Baravalle (center), Gregory Sholette (speaking, holding his book "Dark Matter", and Noah Fischer (top right). Photo posted by Macao, FB macaomilano<br><br>
While I was resident in Venice recently, I had the chance to speak with Marco Baravalle, a principal in the autonomous art space S.a.L.E. Docks. As its Facebook and website tell, "S.a.L.E. Docks is an independent space for arts and politics initiated in 2007 by a group of activists who decided to occupy an abandoned salt-storage docks in the heart of Venice." As well as a principal in that space, Baravalle is an academic and curator. He researches creative labor and the position of art within neoliberal economics. He is a composed, even austere figure, and although I’ve met him a few times – in Madrid, in New York where he was a research fellow at my home institution, and this time in Venice – he remains something of a puzzle.
There’s a lot to unravel with S. Baravalle, not least his extensive writings and work with the Institute of Radical Imagination. And we didn’t get to most of it. But in the first instance, I present here in two parts a transcript of our interview in March where Marco speaks directly to issues around occupation and art. And explains in a nutshell the occupation movement of which he was a part, and its solidarity with the traditions of Italian partisans.</i><br><br>
Alan W. Moore: You gave an interview to an Italian partisan organization recently, and said you began working in the Morion social center in Venice. Were you involved in the original occupation?<br>
Marco Baravalle: I wasn’t involved, because the original occupation is from 1990. Morion has been around for decades now. This was the moment in Italy when this adventure of <i>centro sociale</i> began, in 1990. We are talking a decade [or so] after 1977 when the Italian social movements, especially the movement of 1977 was defeated. [Wright, 2002] It was defeated with this operation led by a judge Calogero. He was linked to the Communist Party. But the CP didn’t have a great relationship with the social movements and with Autonomia in particular. So on the 7th of April 1979 the judge Calogero ordered the arrest of hundreds of militants of the Autonomia movement all over Italy with the accusation that basically the Autonomia was behind the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. And his thesis was that [radical philosopher] Toni Negri was among the leaders of that organization that kidnapped Aldo Moro, a thing that was proved absolutely wrong and totally absurd.<br>
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</i>Image of a demonstration from a portfolio at <a href="https://my-blackout.com/2018/10/23/italy-1977-8-living-with-an-earthquake-red-notes/" target="_blank">my-blackout.com</a></i><br>
But basically after 7th of April 1979, that sy<b>MB</b>olic date for the radical leftist movements of the ‘70s in Italy, it opened up this decade of desert for Italian social movements: the ‘80s. The ‘80s were a period in which the Italian economy was booming. Silvio Berlusconi opened his first private TV channels. It was a moment of market euphoria. And even culturally speaking it was a moment in which post-modernism came to occupy the cultural, philosophical and artistic scene of Italy. Somehow it was a decade that wanted to forget the so-called anni di pio<b>MB</b>o [the years of lead], the years, the decade of the ‘70s which was characterized by armed positions, by terrorism and so forth.<br><br>
<b>AWM</b>: La lucha continua. [Points to poster for relief of Alfredo Cospito, in prison under harshly punitive conditions, an international anarchist cause.] This guy was not a sweetheart.<br>
<b>MB</b>: No, definitely not. But at the end of the ‘80s, early ‘90s, those who were still somehow inspired by radical left social movements – some were anarchists, most were autonomists – mostly young people who wanted to restart the social movements, or restart where Autonomia got interrupted at the end of the ‘70s – began to occupy spaces. This practice of squatting spaces was already present in the movement of the ‘70s, but it became really the core stuff, the engine that made it possible for social movements to restart in Italy, and to have a sort of presence among the youth of Italy in the early ‘90s. The idea was basically the necessity to find free spaces for sociality that were free from market logic, with low prices, independent music, with the possibility to gather around values that were not the usual market values that were affirming themselves so radically in the ‘80s. <br>
<b>AWM</b>: Leoncavallo was from the middle-’70s.<br>
<b>MB</b>: Yes, this was already present as a practice. It started in the ‘’70s. It was interrupted in the ‘80s. And then there was a wave of occupations and social centers in the ‘90s. And Morion is exactly part of that wave. I arrived in Venice in 1989, but I only got really involved with the collective of Morion in 2005. I went to Morion before, but more as someone who went there for concerts and other initiatives that Morion was doing.<br><br>
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<i>I <a href="https://occuprop.blogspot.com/2023/03/inside-helmet-laboratorioccupato-morion.html" target="_blank">blogged my visit to Morion</a> earlier.</i><br>
<b>AWM</b>: There are different generations involved in the social center movement. Leoncavallo starts from a kind of desert of social services. They want very basic things. And Morion is now a fully functional cabaret, a cultural space, with a bar, a beautiful stage, lights and everything. It seems that it comes from a cultural need, not so much from –<br>
<b>MB</b>: I would say that it’s all connected. The ‘80s were a decade that saw the spread of heroin. So many people, so many activists died because of heroin. Social centers wanted to provide a safe space, a space against the sociality led by the market, and also against heroin. Heroin was seen as put into circulation by the system itself in order to destroy the will to rebel of the youth. And it worked. So in these first social centers, the slogans were for free socialization and against heroin.</br>
This was also something that characterized Morion. Morion was also a center for the struggle for housing rights. In Venice the prices of houses are crazy, rents are skyrocketing, and so on. But even then, when Venice was much more populated than now, Venice was undergoing this neoliberalization of housing rights in which you had less and less public housing and more and more houses on the market. Morion was in the struggle for housing rights. Again with this idea is to aggregate around other values that were not market values. Of course anti-fascism was and still is very important. It was and still is a staple of what Morion is. Even militant anti-fascism.<br>
<b>AWM</b>: Compared to Spain, which had a fascist government for 40 years, the anti-fascism here comes out of the partisan movement. <br>
<b>MB</b>: It does.<br>
<b>AWM</b>: And that was armed struggle against first Mussolini, and then the Nazi occupation. The partisan movement in Spain was starving guys in the hills, and expatriate exiles. Then with the return to democracy there was a grand bargain that, although the fascists expropriated all the Republicans’ stuff, and murdered all these people and filled mass graves all over the country, we’re not going to talk about that. It’s coming back now as a return of the repressed. It’s not the kind of continuous thing that I assume is more the case in Italy.<br>
<b>MB</b>: Well, the Red Brigades [Italian armed struggle group of the 1970s] saw themselves as a direct continuation of partisan struggle. They saw themselves as those who had to avenge the resistance that was, according to them, betrayed because fascism wasn’t extirpated as it should have been after 1945. <br>
The partisans of the war era are dead by now. And the ANPI [Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d'Italia, which published the 2018 interview I cited] is a social association of Italian partisans. For many reasons it is a very noble association, and we as social centers like to collaborate with them. They do very important work on memory of the partisan struggle. But their political positions are very mild. They are linked to center left parties in Italy, and dismiss any type of militancy. Even if the situation is different from Spain, Italy is not a nation that has dealt with fascism the way it should have. Otherwise we wouldn’t have a prime minister who is a direct continuation of fascism. She comes from the MSI [Nuovo Movimento Sociale Italiano], which is part – now she founded FdI [Fratelli d'Italia] which is a new party, a new face, but the historical and political roots are within the fascist party. That’s how complicated the situation is in Italy.<br><br>
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<b>AWM</b>: That’s the federal government.<br>
<b>MB</b>: But even the region of Veneto has always been very conservative. Very Catholic, and also somehow very fascist. Also with a strong, nurtured group of right wing terrorists that were based in Veneto or in Venice. People who put bo<b>MB</b>s in the ‘70s, and people who got involved in state killings. Those terroristic acts happened in order to create disorder and to boost the repression against social movements which were very strong in the ‘60s and the ‘70s.<br>
<b>AWM</b>: The fascists now are not so active in that way in Spain. When they stick their head up and start things they get legally sanctioned and resisted on the street. Many Spanish social centers are dedicated centers of anti-fascist activism.<br>
<b>MB</b>: We had to fight on the street in Venice. In 2013, maybe ‘16, I don’t reme<b>MB</b>er, but I will check, when Forzo Nuova, one of these fortunately small, but violent radical neo-fascist parties came here. They had a whole campaign in Venice for a couple of years, to root themselves in Venice. They wanted to open their own space. They organized a years-long campaign to somehow conquer Venice from their point of view. And we had to go very radical. We had clashes with the police that were protecting the fascists in Piazza de Roma and in front of the train station. <br>
<b>AWM</b>: In the U.S. there was a rise of fascists under Trump. They didn’t call themselves that.
<b>MB</b>: Yeah, alt-right, or whatever.<br>
<b>AWM</b>: And the fight against them was led by anti-fascists, anti-fa, which for some reason the news media ended up calling “an-TEE-fah”, so as not to say the “f” word, I guess. This was mostly mobilized in the anarchist milieu. A nu<b>MB</b>er of radical media outlets report on these fights, but the mainstream media did not choose to understand these as battles between fascists and anti-fascists in the way that would be very clear in Europe. They didn’t sympathize, or even report on anti-fascist struggles in the US, even after classical anti-semitic fascist violence in a synagogue massacre.<br>
<b>MB</b>: From what I saw they criminalized the anti-fa movement.</br>
<b>AWM</b>: The U.S. is in denial that they had a big fascist movement during the ‘30s. Even in New York City in the ‘70s you could see Mussolini t-shirts in Little Italy. <br>
<b>MB</b>: Even now. I saw them in the Bronx.<br>
<b>AWM</b>: In Fordham Road.<br>
<b>MB</b>: A market where you had mozzarella, and ham and Mussolini pictures all over. The Italian-American community is pretty conservative, I guess.<br>
<b>AWM</b>: I lived in Staten Island. <br>
<b>MB</b>: So you know.<br><br>
LINKS<br><br>
S.a.L.E. Docks<br>
https://www.saledocks.org/about<br><br>
In this 2015 video Marco described the S.a.L.E. Docks project succinctly to the Creative Time Summit audience.<br>
https://creativetime.org/summit/2015/09/01/marco-baravalle/<br><br>
Salvatore Marchese, “Su fascismo e antifascismo: intervista a Marco Baravalle del Laboratorioccupato Morion”, n.d. ca. 2018. Auto-xlt’d to ENG.<br>
https://www.anpive.org/wordpress/2018/08/03/su-fascismo-e-antifascismo-intervista-a-marco-baravalle-del-laboratorioccupato-morion/<br><br>
Steve Wright, "Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism" (Pluto Press, 2002; pirated at libcom.org)<br><br>
Movement of 1977<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_of_1977<br><br>
Judge Calogero<br>
https://www.infoaut.org/storia-di-classe/7-aprile-1979-teorema-calogero<br><br>
Mike Greco the salami king<br>
https://www.pulselive.co.ke/the-new-york-times/world/mike-greco-salami-king-of-bronxs-little-italy-dies-at-89/b65qyze<br><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-89979522805366674952023-04-23T04:06:00.000-07:002023-04-23T04:06:23.654-07:00More Police, Less Music? “I See That, and Raise You a Marble”<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvH4o3FbTMj0vLalBYBWGnnoCgTvsw9VaLufgcOCYWxpZX-vqC3J0pv5yRqoS4qILsZtaCLLq0WEKNxGvyKGAOU_JnQMwW3AOP4wvP-8pp2zU9Lu8Wd-RPj3Jg5HB8O9pZxmp5VetjYg84VvmQxSRzdJRL1c3pXs20AGdgpoQajHWkpH1qFenBIJeoyQ/s1600/1c147ad4-8472-4ad8-845b-602435c7ac6d.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="900" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvH4o3FbTMj0vLalBYBWGnnoCgTvsw9VaLufgcOCYWxpZX-vqC3J0pv5yRqoS4qILsZtaCLLq0WEKNxGvyKGAOU_JnQMwW3AOP4wvP-8pp2zU9Lu8Wd-RPj3Jg5HB8O9pZxmp5VetjYg84VvmQxSRzdJRL1c3pXs20AGdgpoQajHWkpH1qFenBIJeoyQ/s320/1c147ad4-8472-4ad8-845b-602435c7ac6d.jpg"/></a></div>
<i>I am coming up to Eko now, and the police are out front</i><br>
When does the left become really dangerous? When it starts being interesting and exciting, when it starts to stimulate the imagination in ways threatening to the system. “That’s when I reach for my revolver”…<br>
I’ve been trying to process the Italian experience I’ve recently undergone in Venice and Milan, and to panic-organize for Milwaukee this August, and with all that – and the Covid interregnum – I’ve lost touch completely with Madrid’s social center action.<br>
So, when a great event at a place I know popped up on some social media feed, I rushed out of the house. It headed to the social center ESLA Eko in the barrio Carabanchel for the climax event of a week-long electronic music festival, “Sync! 2023”.<br><br>
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<i>Closing day program of the Sync! festival at ESLA Eko</i><br>
Instagram: @sync_npc // Festival de música electrónica de Carabanchel. 13, 15, 20, 21 y 22 de Abril en E.S.L.A EKO y Nodo de Producción de Carabanchel.<br>
It looked to be great, the many rooms of the enormous Eko social center would be occupied by sound artists and musicians. All of it put together by a group called Nodo Produccion Carabanchel.<br>
So I’m out of the metro and heading towards Eko around 6pm, and I meet a comrade on the street. She’s part of a large crowd heading away from the event back towards the metro.<br>
“Eko has been evicted!” she says. “WTF?! But that’s a building owned by a union! They can’t have asked for that.”<br>
I arrive, and a gaggle of municipal poli are alongside the front, lights flashing. A few of the event organizers, one wearing the event t-shirt, are out front. I start to ask, What’s going on? No one wants to tell me. <br>
“It’s closed now. You can come back tomorrow and drink a beer here.”<br>
“I didn’t come across town to drink a beer, thank you.”<br>
A senior among the officers salutes me. I return his salute – “A mistake,” my ever-critical friend tells me later. “They will think you are with the police.”<br>
When I’ve obviously attracted police attention, I don’t want any further encounter. I’m not a Spanish citizen.<br>
It’s unclear why this event was closed – noise complaints, over-capacity, an allegation of rape. The organizers wouldn’t talk to me. <br>
“Of course it was closed,” says Ms. Critica, “they need permits to do an event like that.”<br>
“But it’s a fucking <i>okupa</i>! They never have permits! This is outrageous!”<br>
There is nothing online yet about why this happened. There may never be anything. But when I look for that report – se = “festival de musica cerrado por la policia en Carabanchel” on Bing, I see the police have been closing down festival events in Carabanchel for years, starting in 1976.<br>
At least I’ve found the group who organized this now. And it seems somehow urgent to talk to them soon. These folks are lineal descendants of the Vaciadoros, the group whose fiesta Bernardo Gutierrez described in his book "Pasado Mańana. Viaje a la España del cambio" (Arpa Editores, 2017).<br><br>
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<br>
A young anarcist artisan writes on her Instagram, in a passage that could have come from Bernardo’s book:<br>
“I'm excited because things are moving in Madrid… From the transformation of @eko_carabanchel into an increasingly self-sufficient space, from which to do endless things on the sidelines of the system, both in values and structures (as in many other self-managed spaces); to ‘The Carabanchel Production Node’ and ‘The Social Currency the Marble [la canica].’<br>
“As a libertarian communist (anarchist) that I am, this is not exactly the end I aspire to, as I do not believe in any concept of "money", however, I currently continue to live in the Madrid-Matrix, and within that context, I find alternatives necessary and great.
I will talk more in depth about these projects. But the key is that they are horizontal, self-managed production and consumption networks by us ourselves, with firm values and practices alternative to slavery and exploitation.<br>
“For example, last year I used to go a lot to the vegan pizzeria of @sr.boniato [Mr. Sweet Potato], in which I paid in "marbles", a virtual currency of our network. I used to get the marbles selling my crafts made from recycled material.<br>
“We now have a new venue, with kitchen, ovens, workshop, tools and collectibles.. and lots of projects, of all kinds, about to start. It's time to get serious about self-management, from farm production to city life.. You can find more info by looking on the Internet about the Carabanchel Node, the Social Currency La Canica, the ESLA eko…”<br>
--#kristinakokoro on Instagram / machine translation<br><br>
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<i>Photo by #kristinakokoro</i><br><br>
So, while the institutional movement towards a realistic future has taken a nose-dive under the current right-wing provincial and municipal administration, and social centers in Madrid have been evicted <i>en masse</i>, there remain burning embers of futuristic hope and striving. Not to sound like a Pollyanna, but we are not all the way down here yet.<br>
Speaking of Bernardo, although he has moved on to other things, he is proud to note on his website that he worked on this book. It’s a token of all that the current mayoral administration has destroyed in its return to the mercantile, its neoliberal absolutism:
“The Laboratory of Collective Intelligence for Participatory Democracy (2016-2019) is a project that arose out of Medialab Prado in coordination with the Government Area of Citizen Participation, Transparency and Open Government of the city of Madrid. Its work has been very connected with the analysis, reflection and innovation found on the digital participation platform Decide Madrid. The project has also organised many workshops and conferences that have brought together hundreds of people from the world of participatory democracy. This publication summarises the project’s core working principles as well as the open activities it has hosted over the course of these three years. These pilot experiences offer a possible vision of the future of democratic governance.”<br>
– <i>Future Democracies: Laboratory of Collective Intelligence for Participatory Democracy</i> (2019)<br>
The social center La Ingobernable, across the plaza was evicted by the right-wing mayoralty soon after their election. Very soon thereafter, the Medialab Prado was dissolved, er, or “relocated” far from the center of the city. I spoke to a worker there who said the staff had been reduced from 15 to 3. Needless to say, there will be no more conferences on the future of democracy.<br>
The end of a festival? The festival is just beginning.<br><br>
LINKS<br><br>
e.s.l.a. EKO – Espacio Sociocultural Liberado Autogestionado <br>
https://eslaeko.net/<br><br>
#nodocarabanchel<br>
https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/nodocarabanchel/<br><br>
La Canica, la moneda anarquista de Madrid<br>
https://rebelion.org/la-canica-la-moneda-anarquista-de-madrid-2/<br><br>
Bernardo Gutierrez<br>
https://bernardogutierrez.net/biografia_en.html<br><br>
Future Democracies ; Laboratory of Collective Intelligence for Participatory Democracy (2019)<br>
https://ictlogy.net/works/reports/projects.php?idp=3849<br><br>
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Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-26241270257214261652023-03-11T08:06:00.000-08:002023-03-11T08:06:17.103-08:00Inside the Helmet: The Laboratorioccupato Morion in Venice
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmPwckrqtxnOJalXEeaFmP-5ocZTA0gjyAArxIkVUy-mjWSmuOOTLpJPOgxq32vCeOkYy4PvEXBsi-CqLQQXWnEXdnJ-9_gtQBJCCWB2P4qhSJBeXNd6Ix5UR_whJ6tIrGorMELO-Xz6gqqGVKZcqA3r34DTgEJR4e2_jb0zGyQXM7lTMIzeuK-vOKWQ/s1600/1%20-%20Malena%202.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmPwckrqtxnOJalXEeaFmP-5ocZTA0gjyAArxIkVUy-mjWSmuOOTLpJPOgxq32vCeOkYy4PvEXBsi-CqLQQXWnEXdnJ-9_gtQBJCCWB2P4qhSJBeXNd6Ix5UR_whJ6tIrGorMELO-Xz6gqqGVKZcqA3r34DTgEJR4e2_jb0zGyQXM7lTMIzeuK-vOKWQ/s320/1%20-%20Malena%202.jpg"/></a></div><br>
<i>Third report from Italy – the OSC Laboratorioccupato Morion in Venice, the Venice Climate Camp, cruise ship resistance, squatting boarded-up public housing, the Transfeminist march – “as long as we scream together, we are free” – and, of course, Banksy.</i><br><br>
It’s dreamy to be in Venice, as a resident at the Emily Harvey Foundation. I’d hope the late great promoter of the Fluxus art movement would approve of my project – a renewal of the program of research on the autonomous occupied social centers of Europe.<br>
The form of this political activism may be said to have originated in Italy in the wake of the Autonomist communist organizing of the 1970s. It is Italy, as we saw in the recent post from Milan, where the largest examples of occupied social centers are to be found.<br>
So it’s unsurprising that there are long-established occupation projects in Venice. They have issues, fights and struggles, and they have culture, music and art.<br>
We visited Laboratorioccupato Morion the first week we were here. The 30+ year old Venetian social center is open Friday evenings for bar and concert events.<br><br>
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<i>LO Morion when it's jumpin'. A pic from Restaurant Guru website</i><br><br>
Morion is a big open high-roofed space decorated inside with masses of posters on the walls. It’s on the site of a 14th century hospice for poor women, popularly named for the helmet-shaped sign of a nearby shop in those days. Outside the walls are painted with colorful murals done in the style of Black Panthers artist Emory Douglas. A crew of some half dozen young women were bustling about preparing for the evening’s events when we arrived, a bar at 7pm; musical acts, a DJ, were planned for later that night. <br>
We sat down with Marta, an activist of the Lab and a fluent English speaker. She explained a bit of the history of the place, and the engagements Morion has with both local and international issues and movements.<br>
Morion is in a vacant city warehouse. The first occupiers of the space in 1990 were evicted, but they camped out in a garden in the center of town until they got an agreement to use the present building.<br>
The most recent big movement effort in Venice was the third September ‘22 Climate Camp in the Lido. Marta was an organizer. She works on the Morion’s environmental committee. The Climate Camp welcomed activists from around Europe, and was organized through the network of social centers throughout the region of Veneto, working with the German movement, Ende Gelände.<br><br>
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<i>An assembly at the Venice Climate Camp, 2022</i><br><br>
“We are fighting for the city itself,” Marta said. The famously perilous condition of the city of Venice is aggravated by rising sea levels, making climate change a vital issue.<br>
The environmental movement in Italy began in earnest with industrial disasters in the ‘70s and ‘80s – a toxic dioxin cloud, the Chernobyl meltdown. The movement is strongly inflected with eco-feminist ideas; the Venice Climate Camp was “in dialogue with” another meeting on the theme of degrowth.<br>
The city’s second occupied space, the Sale Docks, is focussed on art (more on this place soon). Sale Docks organized a session at the Climate Camp in which Austrian artist and filmmaker Oliver Ressler showed excerpts from his climate video project “Everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart”.<br>
The fragile city in the lagoon is trampled into a theme park every summer by massive influxes of tourists, most egregiously the thousand-people loads from mega-cruise ships. A popular campaign led by Morion activists saw a puny attack by small boats on the mammoth cruise ships, under the slogan "La Laguna paura non ne ha" [the lagoon is not afraid; I got the t-shirt]. The Climate Camp featured a session of networking with other places that are suffering cruise ship overloads.<br><br>
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<i>Fabulous quixotic attack on a cruise ship in the Venice lagoon</i><br><br>
Venice has always been a great place to visit. But, more even than most other touristic cities, Venice has been distended by its reliance on and obeisance to the hospitality sector. The population has actually shrunk. <br>
Marta also works with the ASC – Assemblea Sociale per la Casa, an assembly of people in public housing. Affordable housing for Venetians is a major issue, and Morion is involved in squatting actions to preserve public housing. There are over 1000 empty public housing units in Venice, and little will in government to renovate and allocate them. Social services, both housing and public health are cut. In the authorities’ view, “It’s to be a tourist center, period,” Marta said. The Morion activists work against this kind of logic, maintaining that “the city is alive”.<br><br>
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<i>The public housing committee of the Morion</i><br><br>
There are some 25,000 students in Venice, both from the public university and the art academy. The university owns much property in the city, and they are working with the city to create hotels.<br>
We trotted out to the Dorsoduro barrio of Venice for the March 8th Transfeminist march, the Morion-organized event for International Womens Day. We saw the assembling of groups, including Queer We Go, who marched that day in cities throughout Northeastern Italy.<br>
In the spirited words of the Padua center Pedro CSO: "We are women, whores, indecent, ugly, fat, lesbian, trans, farts, dirty, blasphemous, disabled, bisexual, activists, mothers, anti-capitalists, abortionists, anti-fascists, transfeminists, but most of all, as long as we scream together, we are free."<br>
Walking around our barrio of San Polo – one <i>must</i> walk around in Venice – we paused in front of a shop of beautiful bags made from recycled plastic signage. It turned out to be the shop of #Malefatte the #MadeInPrison program. On the door jamb was a possible Banksy stencil of a jaunty Venice carnival rat.<br><br>
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It turns out the UK artist was here to crash the Venice Biennale in 2019, engaging with his work precisely the issues the Laboratorioocupato Morion and its fellow OSCs are concerned with – cruise ships and climate change, and the failure to rescue migrants and refugees at sea. One is a mural of a migrant child holding a distress flare painted in a canal; the second was a kind of performance of art vending. Banksy set up shop in a plaza where painters put their easels. The multi-panel “Venice in Oil” reveals a cruise ship plowing through a medley of gondolas. The police shut him down.<br><br>
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<i>Banksy performance, "Venice in Oil"</i><br><br>
The mural of the migrant child was “claimed” by Banksy in an Instagram post. It is poignant again after the February 26 shipwreck in Calabria. Just as we arrived in Italy, 72 (at least) failed to do so. <br>
The angry, mournful words in a statement from the Pedro Centro Sociale Occupato in Padua cast the blame on the Italian political leadership, which has made hay like Trump over the issue of migration: "The massacre of Sunday 26th February was determined by a delay of the rescue operations cynically wanted, politically wanted. People could very well have been saved if rescue operations had been activated in a timely manner. The boat had already been reported by Frontex but the authorities did not move, despite the weather conditions and the 200 people on board.... We immediately demand the freedom to sail for every ship dedicated to rescuing people in the Mediterranean."<br><br>
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The image is also a reminder that this new “middle passage”, with its thousands of deliberated deaths, will not be forgotten by generations to come.<br><br>
<b>LINKS:</b><br><br>
The Emily Harvey Foundation<br>
https://www.emilyharveyfoundation.org<br><br>
Laboratorioccupato Morion | Venice - Facebook<br>
Instagram – @cso_morion<br><br>
VENICE CLIMATE CAMP | 3nd edition - 7th-11th Sept. 2022<br>
Rise Up 4 Climate Justice and Fridays for Future Venice/Mestre are pleased to invite you to Venice Climate Camp! Five days of camping for climate justice<br>
https://www.veniceclimatecamp.com<br><br>
Ende Gelände<br>
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ende_Gel%C3%A4nde<br><br>
Rachele Ledda, "Women’s presence in contemporary Italy’s environmental movements, with a case study on the Mamme No Inceneritore committee", <i>Genre et Histoire</i>, Autumn 2018<br>
https://journals.openedition.org/genrehistoire/3837<br><br>
A resource website on the theme of Degrowth notes that "’la decrescita' in Italian refer to a river going back to its normal flow after a disastrous flood" -- which we might think of as capitalism itself.<br>
https://degrowth.info/en/events<br><br>
“Everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart”, A 6-channel video installation by Oliver Ressler,
2016-2020<br>
https://www.ressler.at/everythings_coming_together/<br><br>
Simone Fierucci, “Presente e futuro delle navi da crociera nel Mediterraneo. Il report del dibattito al Venice Climate Camp”
Domenica 25 Settembre 2022 17:23 <br>
https://www.deapress.com/ambiente/26563-presente-e-futuro-delle-navi-da-crociera-nel-mediterraneo-il-report-del-dibattito-al-venice-climate-camp.html<br><br>
"La Laguna paura non ne ha" [the lagoon is not afraid]: i manifestanti lasciano il canale della Giudecca <br>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PtIwQI4Sac<br>
A brief video of a 2019 demonstration, an ‘attack’ on cruise ships by small boat<br><br>
Assemblea Sociale per la Casa – A 2014 discussion of the ASC’s work on behalf of occupiers of social housing<br>
https://www.globalproject.info/it/in_movimento/venezia-lassemblea-sociale-per-la-casa-ottiene-gli-allacciamenti-dellacqua-per-le-case-occupate/16363<br><br>
Global Project report on transfeminist marches in the Northeast of Italy: “8 Marzo: la marea tranfemminista è il grido collettivo di chi vuol cambiare il mondo”, 9 March 2023<br>
https://www.globalproject.info/it/in_movimento/8-marzo-la-marea-tranfemminista-e-il-grido-collettivo-di-chi-vuol-cambiare-il-mondo/24363<br><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-79907422212828290042023-03-08T01:51:00.004-08:002023-03-08T01:55:37.107-08:00"Art of the Cancelled": Stalker's Sites of Internal Displacement and Decolonialization<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9CmJrYOMkYWn1-ZkwLusu_38LSFS3AqKV2ilmoGOHdPii_WiPKXZVzRIHLnlMXVFGWn5U8VoQ1eHCXD0vXc2TxwgmFoneZaGcDHvOENmyhYu6xV9Bda00mlYc6opGSwnuGEV_F1VTHWiuFirLAKSSp76dvIPUpSN-tQyKF_4sP1sH-BJxXuU7wMFpTA/s1280/stalker%20at%20work.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="668" data-original-width="1280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9CmJrYOMkYWn1-ZkwLusu_38LSFS3AqKV2ilmoGOHdPii_WiPKXZVzRIHLnlMXVFGWn5U8VoQ1eHCXD0vXc2TxwgmFoneZaGcDHvOENmyhYu6xV9Bda00mlYc6opGSwnuGEV_F1VTHWiuFirLAKSSp76dvIPUpSN-tQyKF_4sP1sH-BJxXuU7wMFpTA/s320/stalker%20at%20work.jpg"/></a></div><br>
<i>Forgotten historic evictions, massacres and “sudden lakes” are explored in the performative works of the Stalker group in Rome. Using a wide variety of aesthetic social practice tactics, the group resurrects historic memory, agitates for biodiversity, and enacts solidarity with evicted migrants.</i><br><br>
John Halpern and Emily Harris set up an online interview with a Roman architects' group called Stalker. Their work in aid and solidarity with community groups and migrant squats in Rome is inspiring, important and fascinating work. The entire talk is online [all links are below]; what follows are my notes.<br>
The two interviewees, Giulia Fiocca and Lorenzo Romito, work under the name of Stalker, Giulia since 2007 and Lorenzo since the beginning in 1995 when he and five friends founded the group and named it after the Tarkovsky film of 1979. The story of that movie is about the Zone, an area that is forbidden to enter – maybe polluted, radioactive – it’s never made clear. The <i>Stalker</i> is a kind of guide who regularly goes into the Zone despite the peril. In the film he leads an artist and a scientist.<br>
Giulia and Lorenzo are both trained as architects. They became politicized in 1990 with the occupation of their university. This talk reminded me of the important role architects of all kinds have played in supporting squatters, and adapting guerrilla occupation tactics directly into their work.<br>
The duo presented three projects: one a recovery of historic memory about a Roman shantytown of left persons evicted from the city during fascist rule; the second on support for the public appropriation of a “sudden lake”, the result of illegal property development; and the third support for a big-building squat of migrant persons in Rome.<br><br>
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The first project was presented in the form of a film, “Borghetto Prenestino” made by collaborators Myrice Tansini and Pierre Kattar. That was "La Zattera" (the Raft), in January 2021, This complex project was an investigation and animation of a piece of waste land in Rome which had been a shantytown, cleared in 1980. It was built as the outcome of a 1939 fascist law against Italian migrants which was re-animated by Berlusconi in 2009 to use against foreign migrants. The "La Zattera" project, then, was conceived as a "time warp, linking present and past".<br>
A bit hard to follow, the project began with a newspaper, informing participants – residents nearby, relatives of the families from that time – about the place. This education, part of a School of Nomadic Urbanism founded in 2018 by Giulia and Lorenzo as the educational tool of Stalker activity, has as its brief to surface the "invisible and forgotten memory of the city of Rome”.<br>
The film includes an elder who speaks of his mother who suffered this law in fascist times, who was bussed to this "clandestine zone" to live in the shadows of fascist Italy. His grandfather arrived in Rome in 1927, then was internally deported as a resistant to fascism, a "dissident to the state".<br>
I transcribe throughout this text very roughly from the speakers:<br>
<b>Lorenzo Romito</b>: These situations we organize we call them "circumstances". We get out, choose a site, and then we work on it, through a schooling process, the school is open. We gather researchers in different disciplines, but also inhabitants, migrants, very diverse people, with diverse knowledges and competences on spaces, on stories. We put together different time frames, memories that are forgotten, or have been cancelled. They're not part of a main narration. Then we entangle them, with a moment that is social but also performative. <br><br>
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The idea, he said, is “to create a dimension of co-existence by exploring memories…. to create a rite, a myth, to reconnect people to the place”.<br>
The second project, was done in support of a state appropriation of ecologically significant land, the Lago Bullicante, or Lago ex-SNIA Viscosa. This is a newly arising lake created by an illegal development in 1992. It’s called "ex" for the SNIA Viscosa factory which produced rayon. They closed in 1956; the area was abandoned until bought in 1990 by enterpreneurs. After numerous corporate title transfers, an ill-advised shopping center construction project began. Excavation for a parking garage broke into a buried river <i>and</i> an ancient geological acquifer, flooding the site and creating a “sudden lake”.<br><br>
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Said Giulia, "nature stopped" the developer. Since then, nature has had the time to retake this space as a “spontaneous ecosystem”. The lake area is tremendously biodiverse, with over 500 plant species, and 72 counted birds. The water is pure enough for swimming.<br>
A local agitation for the lake as public domain began in 2013, and Stalker joined in the fight to preserve this new urban wilderness for public use. In 2014, the local agitation led to a small expropriation by the government of part of the land. The developers, however, didn’t stop their work.<br><br>
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<i>Rome as terra incognito</i><br><br>
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<i>Rome seated above Chronos is a cave in a 17th c. image</i><br><br>
In 2021, together with the Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie, community groups, schools, and other institutional actors, Stalker launched a campaign to preserve more of the land. They produced a kind of “rite”, a procession to the government center walking across the city carrying branches that had been cut down by the developer. This was the “walking forest”, an allusion to the play <i>Macbeth</i>, in which an advancing army camouflaged with trees signals the end of the usurper king.<br>
Another project of historic memory coincided with an exhibition about the famed film director Pier Paolo Pasolini.<br>
<b>Lorenzo Romito</b>: The issue, the unsaid, the cancelled was Italian colonialism in Africa. In Italy we didn't have to go through the Nuremberg process, because the Allies decided, we don't want to get rid of all these right-wing fascist people because then the left could take over. So a lot of criminals in the colonial times, the fascist times, never had to pay for their crimes. We didn't go through a process of decolonization, where the colonized claimed their independence, we simply lost the war and lost the colonies. So there is this idea that Italians are good people.<br>
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Forgotten is the massacre of 1937, called "Yekatit 12". This followed a failed assassination attempt on an Italian general, viceroy of Italian East Africa (present-day Ethiopia).<br>
A 2017 history estimates the dead at 19,200, a shocking 20 percent of the population of Addis Ababa.<br>
<b>LR</b>: So we wanted to share the knowledge, starting again with the school of the city. Sometimes the knowledge of the past is terrible. But we also want to discover the beauty of the present, Ethiopians in Rome. So we made up this new ethnic group, the Ethio-Romans, to understand what happened then and why we never talk about it.<br>
This project was also about a building occupied by 800 Ethiopians that was evicted in the middle of the night.<br><br>
<b>LR</b>: So we linked the different questions, the massacre of the '30s and the eviction of the migrants today. But we also had the pleasure to share rites, and ways of living, and we brought in the issue of Pasolini. At the site of an exhibition about Pasolini, we made a collapse and overlap with the colonial exhibition of the '30s at that site which was inaugurated by Mussolini himself.<br><br>
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<i>After the eviction of 2017</i><br><br>
We called this a scene from a movie never made about the past, present and future of Africans in Rome. We placed a plaque in the Piazza dei Cinquecento (the square of the 500, commemorating Italian soldiers killed in the invasion of Ethiopia), a central crossing of stations of Rome. We renamed it Piazza delle Cinquecetomila, the 500,000 estimated victims of Italian colonialism in Africa.<br><br>
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<b>Giulia Fiocca</b>: In the same moment that we act on this memory, we act in the public space, and we become an archive of ourselves, leaving it to the future.<br>
John Halpern asked if the actions were permitted by the authorities.<br><br>
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<b>GF</b>: We don't ask permission. It is our city. This is public space. We are not dangerous. We are in Rome, we are not in the United States. [Blush.]<br>
Rome as a civilization was founded on the idea of including the other, in a wide sense, Lorenzo said. He cited the Asylum, a site in ancient Rome which gave the word to the idea of hosting foreigners. He read an image of Rome (allegorized as a woman) atop Saturnus or Chronos (time) in a cave, and recounted a dense mythological background of the city.<br>
The work they began in 1995 took this idea of the Zone from the movie "Stalker" to stand “for us, and for all the territories in this geographically enormous wide city which we don't know…. Rome emerged like a new planet" from their analysis.<br>
John Halpern asked about the group’s relation to the squatting movemet. (The question I would have asked if I’d been able to stay awake.) <br>
They replied:<br>
Our work is an intellectual expression of squatting. We explore contemporary ruins, seeing through mythology how Rome regenerates itself, how it is inhabited by excluded communities, from Aeneas of Troy forward.<br>
We work with abandoned areas taken over by nature that we put in contemporary position. We link the community to the genius of the site [in the ancient pagan sense it seems], and create a gathering. <br>
We are 20 years at this, following the narrative that nature is giving, rather than the explanation of the situation by human society. The territory can change your perception; that nature is doing.<br>
In Rome there are a lot of occupied structures. It's one of the few places in the West where the Occupy movement didn't die out, but survived, and then found new energy through the presence of migrants. We are working in a squat next to our house where there are 26 languages spoken. There's 450 people living. At the same time it's a public building, squatted in 2013. It has a lot of spaces. And these spaces started to be spaces for social and cultural activities, so this brought in a link between the squatters and the community. <br><br>
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For us it was most interesting. We've been in the years past promoting this kind of action, and then we saw it taking place, and we started to participate there. In the basement of this building we have this space which we call MAd'O, the Museum of the Act of Hospitality. So there we were able to expose and share the incredible co-existence of people from 26 different languages in an informal settlement. That is something that public housing never achieves, but it works there because they're self-organized.<br><br>
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We proposed the MAd'O museum after Sébastien Thiéry, fellow at the French Academy’s Villa Medici in 2020, proposed including the act of hospitality in the list of UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. We staged a procession to promote the application. Among the projects for this initative, We worked with visiting African young artists to make images that contest the Italian restrictions on citizenship. There is no birthright for migrant children born in Italy; that is only available after age 18 upon application.<br><br>
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Their conceptions are actualized in their teaching. Lorenzo is teaching in Linz, Austria, where he has asked the students to occupy a space and figure out what to do. Giulia is teaching in Rome, asking students to pick a place like the lake ex-SNIA where nature is redefining the space.<br><br>
<b>LINKS</b><br><br>
Episode 38: Stalker, Tuesday February 28th, 2023<br>
https://www.instituteforculturalactivism.org/episodes/episode38-stalker<br><br>
I talked to Emily and John about my own researches on squatted social centers a couple of years ago.
Episode 16: Alan W. Moore, Tuesday, January 26th, 2021 <br>
https://www.instituteforculturalactivism.org/episodes/episode-16-alan-w-moore<br><br>
website of journalist and filmmaker Pierre Kattar<br>
https://www.pierrekattar.com/<br><br>
the "sudden lake" -- Lago ex-SNIA Viscosa<br>
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lago_ex_SNIA_-_Viscosa<br><br>
Pier Paolo Pasolini<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pier_Paolo_Pasolini<br><br>
Yekatit 12 [massacre]<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yekatit_12<br><br>
The last edition of the newspaper done for Circostanza Pasolini- yekatit is linked here, together with the other editions:<br>
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1s2gG7yBLccRGMsX3g7sM5z8ZgZo_4cOR?usp=share_link<br><br>
<i>The Guardian</i> was among the news media which covered the massive 2017 evictions of migrants and struggles in Rome –
Italian police evicted 800 Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees...
https://news.cgtn.com<br>
25 ago 2017 —Police use water cannon as refugees evicted from Rome square<br>
https://www.theguardian.com<br>
24 ago 2017 — Police in riot gear clash with refugees near main train station after about 800 were evicted from office building on Saturday. 'I love Rome, but Rome doesn't love us’...<br>
https://www.theguardian.com<br>
19 feb 2018 — A building which used to be squatted by refugees on Via Curtotone in ... Violent evictions of refugees in Rome reveal inhumanity<br>
https://theconversation.com<br><br>
No way to find home: common stories of Eritreans in Italy and the Netherlands; Refugees cannot start a new life if they are not allowed to create homes for themselves.<br>
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/no-way-find-home-common-stories-eritreans-italy-and-netherlands/<br><br>
Asylum<br>
"The area remembered as the site of the sanctuary established by Romulus to attract new settlers"
https://www.digitalaugustanrome.org/records/asylum/<br><br>
I was in Rome 10 years ago with SqEK. I told the story in the book <i>Occupation Culture</i> (2015). since this blogger was last in Rome. At the time, I posted “Squatters of Rome” in 2014. In poking around online, I see that Stalker is involved with some of the projects we saw then, which, like Metropoliz, continue.<br>
http://occuprop.blogspot.com/2014/06/squatters-of-rome.html<br><br>
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<i>The cafe in Metropoliz, with its science fiction themed mural, recently photographed by an artists group installing in the museum</i><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-50825795736468535672023-03-03T00:29:00.002-08:002023-03-04T01:53:29.551-08:00Un-Fashion Week in Milan: Calusca City Lights<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkB6_f1CkapY3CY0zllflPLWu6OcrEWLcm5rJYWEgGbxkDl8A6Zos-oy6TxEhhax2sv2NjBGBCBRwWnp_UAUlyNlExawCrLIZsmynGBXoaRZVllUEUMXcM2cuPvROrZnfkmicPSiqV05pHxoJ8lHE1IPuSagunLK66SlfpwM3w2QGszWtZU-RSYu-gMw/s2048/Gucci%20for%20fall.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1311" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkB6_f1CkapY3CY0zllflPLWu6OcrEWLcm5rJYWEgGbxkDl8A6Zos-oy6TxEhhax2sv2NjBGBCBRwWnp_UAUlyNlExawCrLIZsmynGBXoaRZVllUEUMXcM2cuPvROrZnfkmicPSiqV05pHxoJ8lHE1IPuSagunLK66SlfpwM3w2QGszWtZU-RSYu-gMw/s320/Gucci%20for%20fall.jpg"/></a></div>
<i>Gucci for Fall, 2023<br><br>
<i>First post from our Italian trip recounts a visit to Cox 18's bookstore, a failed excursion to Leoncavallo, some New Yorkers who've been to Milan, and the overwhelming presence of Kim Kardashian. Regrets, the ghost of Bostik, and the many many times before. And a nice short movie!</i><br><br>
</i>I’m back on the squatting trail this spring with an intensive period of work in Italy. It’s aimed at a publication on social centers, the large form of occupation, along the lines of a “popular book” I proposed to our SqEK group years ago.<br>
<br>On this trip, we first visited Milan, the city of 7 million which was a hotbed of Autonomist militancy in the 1970s. We arrived at the central train station, a 1931 fascist construction which is gargantuan in scale. This nearly ludicrous steroidal classical structure matches the Brobdingnagian late 19th century galleria Vittorio Emanuele alongside the Duomo cathedral, one of Europe’s first and surely biggest shopping malls – gallerias, or arcades.<br><br>
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That plaza, with the Duomo cathedral alongside bedecked with over-sized writhing Baroque figures, the soaring shopping arcade, and massive crowds, among them a knot of dancing singing Ukrainian protestors, was an experience to be forgotten. An ecstasy of authority and consumption<br>
That's the city. Now to the squats. We made it to the famous Archivio Primo Moroni and Libreria Calusca in the squatted social center Cox 18, and loaded up on books on the Milanese squatting movement to study during a month in Venice. Toto showed us around the place, including the murals NYC artists Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper had made there nearly 20 years ago.<br><br>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7hrCI9Mtxj5VwIvCUGPm9TQ_LeomuCRtXGiU4LdTQchCpwHST2UNjVsviDddyOIcwgOY_--X7FUrMA3GAD5wzjHf1hv6o1_c-qjTWGoPrWoMnONqYGMzuLaw97IWLkjAlzvZgorFLUNtSOYB5e0YQDEPDh1dHgSlLgI02T2Y1nfG1ax6gbuRzadqf2g/s2219/Cox%2018%20bar%202.JPG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2219" data-original-width="1508" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7hrCI9Mtxj5VwIvCUGPm9TQ_LeomuCRtXGiU4LdTQchCpwHST2UNjVsviDddyOIcwgOY_--X7FUrMA3GAD5wzjHf1hv6o1_c-qjTWGoPrWoMnONqYGMzuLaw97IWLkjAlzvZgorFLUNtSOYB5e0YQDEPDh1dHgSlLgI02T2Y1nfG1ax6gbuRzadqf2g/s320/Cox%2018%20bar%202.JPG"/></a></div><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeCb2YtCYUlprBCDJgazagRreIDZ_46e5qEdfG3dxEE2C-q8V0EO60aR6iSf9tirOTAu6Dj456BlXkJnO3urNnwVRbyEtmWJf4IOS2JW7PXXtqL9RWwfaWz-Jd-YG7AdzG4jPkJV_nzoMVsjibE9e4nAVbQffOlbI_cXX-DGq3Y1ag__AjG-JKvfsjzg/s2592/Peter%20Kuper%20Cox%2018.JPG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1944" data-original-width="2592" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeCb2YtCYUlprBCDJgazagRreIDZ_46e5qEdfG3dxEE2C-q8V0EO60aR6iSf9tirOTAu6Dj456BlXkJnO3urNnwVRbyEtmWJf4IOS2JW7PXXtqL9RWwfaWz-Jd-YG7AdzG4jPkJV_nzoMVsjibE9e4nAVbQffOlbI_cXX-DGq3Y1ag__AjG-JKvfsjzg/s320/Peter%20Kuper%20Cox%2018.JPG"/></a></div><br><i>Murals by Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper</i><br><br>
Later we trucked out to the venerable Leoncavallo CSOA for the pop kitchen, announced on the website and the often mal-informing Google. It was closed. Comments from "local guides" on Google express disappointment over the deteriorated atmosphere at evening concert events there. Closed, streets deserted, the compound Leoncavallo encloses is huge – very Milan.<br>
I could not return at night for one of the concert events. I don’t have the energy anymore to bomb around EU cities to squat spots, which are usually remote. We’d even intended to return to Archivio Primo Moroni the next day to look at posters, but a visit to the Pinacoteca Brera beforehand destroyed us. Old bones.<br>
The Archivio and Calusca City Lights bookstore is in a fairly normal-looking Milan neighborhood. From the Metro stop you walk past big apartment blocks, rather bleak-looking in the fog on the day we went. Cox 18 is on a pretty street with low houses, and a cool art deco bar on the corner. It's rather tight for a social center, with the library, archive and bookstore (two stories) and a courtyard and a concert space. <br>
It was bigger in the past, Toto told us, but parts have been demolished. Cox 18 has been there for many years. Originally squatted in 1976, it was evicted, and resquatted, evicted and resquatted yet again. The bookstore dates from 1992, when the activist bookseller and publisher Primo Moroni and partners put their store there.<br>
That story is told in an informative text on the website by Jacopo Galimberti.<br>
For a "cold call" visit to an archive, it was very productive. I loaded up with some half dozen books and looked at a few more. I have plenty now to digest at leisure in Venice, together with many leads to follow up online. {Digestion can be slow, as I don’t read Italian, and auto-translate is cumbersome.}<br>
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The next day we launched our ineffectual try for Leoncavallo, which of course has no regular hours. I say "of course" because that's how it is with social centers; you can't expect regularity. They aren’t businesses; they’re volunteer operations. Maybe unless you know one of the cooks, you wouldn’t know when that Cucina Pop was really open. We did not have any contacts in Milan. Emanuele Braga, a principal in Macao, and member of the Institute of Radical Imagination which has met before in Madrid, was out of town.<br>
Emanuele recommended Torchiera, a rural site which looks fantastic online -- check out the painted walls! They were having a presentation of a new Wu Ming book "UFO 78" on the day we arrived. But again, the place was too far away for us to make it in time.<br>
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<i>The Torchiera bird sweeps away a fascist helmet and dreams of water (the commune gets theirs from a public fountain some distance away)</i><br><br>
"Did you eat at Il Brutto Anatroccolo trattoria?" asked comrade Matt in a Facebook comment. (That's the "ugly duckling".) Well, no. Shuttling around on a rather opaque and over-crowded (in February!) transit system limited us. Beautiful century-old electric trams would rumble by, but it was impossible to catch one going where we wanted to go. (Google maps and transit signs in Milan frankly suck, BTW.)<br>
Matt traveled in 2019 with 1960s revolutionary Ben Morea an authentic anarchist celebrity on his book tour. <br>
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Radical Milan was in hiding from me, though. Besides the Archivio, I didn’t see any signs of radical life on the streets at all – no stickers, no posters, no graffiti, nada. No radical books in the bookstores. Was it only the districts we were in, the touristic center, with its architectural gargantuanism? It was Fashion Week, and enormous billboards of insolent looking models were hanging everywhere, even on the churches. A 20-story high Kim Kardashian!<br><br>
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We were only three days in Milan. And it’s clear a deep soaking is needed to find the personal and material traces of the powerful social movements in that city.<br>
So I’ll “hit the books” – both materially and virtually. I’ve just now started looking through the books Toto sold me. Almost the first one I picked up was Adriano BK Bostik Casale, “L’Edificio Occupato: le centoventigiornate” (Autoproduzione/Agente Provocatore, 2016). Bostik turns out to be an important Napolitano activist and artist.<br><br>
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I corresponded with him briefly in 2016. The artist known as Fly was with our group SqEK in Rotterdam, before traveling on to Naples for a conference recalling the CSO Tienament (named for the Chinese square where students were massacred, and Neapolitan dialect for “remember” or "keep in mind"). That meeting was three days to “remember the history of the antagonistic movement” in Naples. (Jim Fleming of Autonomedia publishing and theorist Franco "Bifo" Berardi also attended.)<br><br>
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<i>NYC artist Fly in Naples, 2016</i><br><br>
I thought “I’ve got to meet this guy Bostik”, DJ and animateur, before I realized that wasn’t going to happen. He only recently died. You can watch a short movie he made online, "La Comune di Berlino" (2006; 32 min.; ENG subs).<br>
It’s beautiful, very atmospheric. It’s about a Berlin of the recent past, seen as a commune, of "existential refugees" fleeing the "sane society" of the capitalist west. "The Wall was the commune's walls." But it ended, and “I was driven away. Now I have returned to rediscover what remains” -- 1989 + 15.<br><br>
The principal in the short is a taxi driver, windshield hung with Italian symbols. He drives around the city talking voiceover, cruising in the night life of Berlin, especially Italians in Berlin. He delivers a singer to her show. Talks to all kinds of deviants, "I met them at their headquarters, Kotbusser Tor, the square which was the summary of all deviances". Visits with junkies, whom he romanticizes as Rimbauds.<br>
Images of carnivalistas, festive bodies. Thumping trance music. He visits Wagenburg, the travelers who live in house-wagons (since evicted; the subject of a show I saw in Hamburg), and a very punky club. He explores this "laboratory of life". He talks to Italian people, and overlays fragments of their talk. Q's implied: "How long have you lived in Berlin?" and "Why did you stay?" -- “For women!” A photographer in the taxi snaps them out the window. A woman with her baby gets in the taxi. <br>
"Squatter moms" managed the squatted zones and spaces for children [called "kitas" auf Deutsch]. In these, he tells us, one experiences "essential emotions", "incommunicable". Finally, "What I was looking for had taken on another form." Where now is the Berlin Commune? The taxi driver parks, gets into a bicycle taxi and is pedalled off.<br>
"Tu wat", he says. "Do something".<br>
The allusion is to the Tuwat-Kongress of 1981, a key moment in the history of the German social movements.<br><br>
<b>LINKS</b><br><br>
SqEK, or Squatting Europe Kollective, or Squatting Everywhere Kollective, has a kind of website, and has published several books. My own book <i>Occupation Culture</i> tells of my time with them<br>
https://sqek.squat.net/about/<br><br>
Cox 18<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_18<br><br>
Leoncavallo Spazio Pubblico Autogestito<br>
Il Leoncavallo SPA (Spazio Pubblico Autogestito) è un centro sociale occupato. Nato nel 1975 a Milano, svolge attività politica e culturale.<br>
https://leoncavallo.org<br><br>
The Agency of an Activist Archive. The Primo Moroni Archive<br>
Jacopo Galimberti, 2016<br>
https://www.inventati.org/apm/index.php?step=jgalimberti<br><br>
Cascina Torchiera<br>
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascina_Torchiera<br><br>
The archive at Torchiera<br>
https://torchiera.noblogs.org/bibliotork-interzona-caronia/<br><br>
"Nella controcultura anni Sessanta: intervista a Ben Morea" di minima&moralia pubblicato mercoledì, 7 Aprile 2021 <br>
https://www.minimaetmoralia.it/wp/interviste/nella-controcultura-anni-sessanta-intervista-a-ben-morea/<br>
Fascinating; auto-xlts clearly. He delves into "into the question of 'becoming bandits'" after the failed revolution of the 1960s and before.<br><br>
Adriano BK Bostik Casale, “L’Edificio Occupato: le centoventigiornate”<br>
Autoproduzione/Agente Provocatore, 2016<br><br>
"La Comune di Berlino" (2006; 32 min.; ENG subs). on YouTube<br>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlXjQ6Xohns<br><br>
Tuwat-Kongress – Wikipedia<br>
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuwat-Kongress<br><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-60812376048343213682022-12-30T10:35:00.000-08:002022-12-30T10:35:21.862-08:00Germany in Autumn #3: The “Trout Farm” and the Free Party Scene in the ‘90s
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<i>Image from the anti-gentrification street opera "Laura Tibor"</i><br><br>
<i>Third post from my recent German trip to research the effects of the squatting movement in Berlin and Hamburg. What matters now is archival stuff – the famous “Queeruption” squat of the Tuntenhaus, the epochal free party scene in squatted East Berlin after the fall of the Wall. All of it well remembered decades after its end in museum exhibitions and books. As always now, links are at the bottom of the post.</i><br><br>
Repression has capped the squatting movement in Germany. Nothing like the 2021 mini-wave of squatting in Amsterdam seems possible in Berlin or Hamburg. A simmering rage exists against the continually rising price of housing. Recently it was expressed in a protest opera, “Laura Tibor”, a highly produced street production that envisions a socialist utopia… which is definitely not coming to pass.<br>
The exhibition “Tuntenhaus Forellenhof 1990: Gay Communism’s Short Summer” was easily the best recollection of Berlin’s squatting history I saw during this trip. A multinational labor of love, this show at the Schwules Museum recalled the several-month occupation of buildings by gay activists (called “Tunten”, roughly ‘queer’). The brochure (link below) sets the squatting action in the context of the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall – called <i>die Wende</i>, when East German anarchists and their Westie comrades squatted in the Friedrichshain district. <br><br>
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<i>Tunten at play, 1990. Photo by Michael Oesterreich</i><br><br>
1990 was a moment of hope for the left – (Nelson Mandella was freed, the US-backed Nicaraguan “contras” surrendered) – and growing fear among gays – (Keith Haring died of AIDS in February; retroviral treatments don’t come along until ‘96). Berliners were seized by a sense of euphoria at the possibilities. Adventures began.<br>
The Tuntenhaus occupations grew to 12 buildings on Mainzer Strasse after May 1st of that year. The squatters named it the Forellenhof (“Trout Farm”). Predators lurked; Nazi skinheads squatted buildings as well, and carried on a lethal gang war against the Tunten.<br>
During this wild interregnum, before the two Germanys were integrated, Tunten met and breakfasted in a common room recreated in the exhibition. This heart of communal life was built as a set after a few moments in the documentary film. “The Battle of Tuntenhaus” (1991) was made by queer US filmmaker Juliet Bashore. The film shows the strong community of differently loving people, and the threats they face, including “everyday fascism”, the hatred of many neighbors. And street fights.<br>
The era is evoked in the Schwules installation: “to ward off the expected nazi attacks, there were homemade shutters of fine-mesh chicken wire…. A typewritten telephone tree was stuck on the wall, for the ever-menacing emergency.” Details were added by participants who remain alive. (Among them is the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, recently celebrated at the NYC MoMA.)<br><br>
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<i>Tuntenhaus dining room reconstructed at Schwules Museum</i><br><br>
Library, bookstore, cafe, bar, communal houses – definitely Autonomen. What in the end was an entire squatted street with a dozen houses was evicted in an epic street battle. The state, as predicted, had ended it.<br><br>
“It” was a realization of communist ideals by a bunch of queers. Curator Bastian Krondorfer writes, “communism – queer or otherwise – is like a shy deer. Sometimes it appears in a lonely clearing at dusk, before we pick it up, it has disappeared into the thicket of the forest.”<br><br>
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For the exhibition, discussion events returned Juliet Bashore to Berlin. SqEK comrade Andrej Holm, onetime Berlin city housing minister. The “trout farm” and the many other squatted communities throughout Berlin during the late 20th century is a history taken very seriously today.<br>
After the evictions, many Tunten moved to Kastanienallee 86, with its metal "facade exhibition" reading "Capitalism standardizes, destroys and kills”. The Tunten met again in the cellar nightclubs of former East Berlin. It was in these dives, holes and palaces that techno dance music arose, another key outcome of the culture of the squatting movement. <br><br>
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In considering the after-effects of squatting in Berlin, a broad view of the movement culture is needful. So I’ll back up now to theory, and say that just as in the time of the Happenings in the 1960s, the form of the art event itself became a creative medium during this period. <br>
In a 2014 interview Neala Schleuning, author of <i>Artpolitik</i>, a book on "social anarchist aesthetics", spoke of Theodor Adorno’s concern that artists stay “aloof of any kind of capitalist aesthetics.” In Adorno’s notoriously twisty conception, the social context of creative production is embedded in the form of art. “The liberation of form,” Schleuning quotes, “...holds enciphered within above all the liberation of society…. form… represents the social relation in the artwork”.<br>
The artwork’s autonomy – its freedom from spectacular capitalist culture – carried “the dream of revolution into art and into the confrontation with contemporary society”.<br><br>
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<i>Book cover ("Dream and Trauma") shows the aftermath of the Mainzerstrasse evictions</i><br><br>
This became clear for me in reading artists’ texts from the catalogue of the 2013 show “Wir sind hier nicht zum Spaß!” (We’re not here for fun), focussed on collective and subcultural structures in Berlin in the ‘90s. (I copied the English translations from the book at the NYiB library; artists weren’t identified in those, so I give the page numbers.)<br>
The Tuntenhaus was the more raucous and spectacular part of a vast and variegated cultural landscape in <i>Wende</i> Berlin. For the animators of that free party scene, Berlin was an urban landscape in which authority was temporarily confused. Suddenly and unexpectedly unified, Berlin was “two very strange halves” (p. 128). With so many abandoned buildings in the East ripe for inhabiting, there was a feeling that this city was where it was happening in western Europe. <br><br>
Crews of artists began to throw psychedelic parties in industrial wastelands, working with music, light, images and more. Their tactic was, “we throw an illegal party somewhere.” “It was the summer when almost anything seemed possible. The Western system wasn’t yet imported in the East, and the Eastern system had fallen apart completely”.<br>
There were huge empty apartment buildings open for squatting, most with public spaces. Allowed to continue, the squatted streets “could have evolved into something like Christiania in Copenhagen – or perhaps something completely different” (p. 129). <br>
As state-run factories closed down, immense stores of materials and machines became available. One artist scored 50,000 glass lamp tubes and made “techno chandeliers”. They later opened a shop with all their scavenged booty, the Glowing Pickle (p. 130).<br>
One U.S. artist present during those days, Christine Hill, applied the same procedure to the residues of a business in Soho,NYC. Her “Volksboutique Small Business” took up the remaining inventory of my favorite classic old stationery store, Joseph Meyer. She then ‘inhabited’ the stuff in art gallery installations.<br>
‘Shebeens’ and impromptu bars popped up all over Berlin during the ‘90s. “This attitude of squatting places,” one artist wrote, “of not using an already available location but transforming some unknown place by improvising a bar and a PA for just one night – that was the mixture that electrified us. Our motto was: ‘Pop up and vanish!’” (p. 132).<br><br>
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“At the same time, money was not an issue at all. It was always spent for the cause – to keep the luxury alive, which we ourselves have created” (p. 133).<br>
<i> Photo by Mattia Zoppellaro from an article on the free party scene of Berlin in the '90s at huckmag.com</i><br><br>
This isn't the "fully-automated luxury communism" of accelerationist "Lenin-goes-to-Silicon-Valley" types. It's a no-rent utopia that actually existed in a momentary vaccuum of capitalist control.<br><br>
With the turn of the century the free party scene, like the squatting scene, came to an end with a return to order along Western capitalist lines. Squats were evicted. Buildings were sold off and flipped, and stiff rents imposed. Big business started to sponsor the free parties. “From a group functioning without money it changed into who’s important in the new game? Who should you kiss up to in order to become important, to finally make money with what you’re doing?” (p. 142). <br>
Profiteers can’t keep their fingers off of fun. (Are nightclubs even possible without mobsters?) This is the same dynamic of appropriation Aja Waalwijk reported happened to the free festivals organized by groups in Amsterdam in the early 1970s. (See "On Nomads and Festivals in Free Space", <i>House Magic</i> #4 Spring 2012).<br>
Perhaps the fate of the commercialized techno music rave culture is symbolized by the Love Parade. It began in Berlin's open space in 1989, became massive, and ended in 2010 with a crowd crush disaster in Duisberg. Just this year it has partially returned in July with the Rave the Planet parade in Berlin. <i>Billboard</i> reported that long-time organizer, the DJ Dr. Motte, “called for an unconditional basic income for artists and for Berlin’s club culture to be listed as intangible heritage by UNESCO, the U.N.’s cultural agency”.<br>
UBI for artists only? Why not for everyone? To unleash widespread popular creativity and civic consciousness, free from the enforced discipline of labor, aka wage slavery. The Institute of Radical Imagination, based in Italy, has proposed just that in their "Art for UBI (Manifesto)”. For when parties become free again in a post-work world.<br><br>
<b>LINKS</b><br><br>
“Oper über Gentrifizierung in Berlin,” 2021 – performed on the street<br>
https://taz.de/Kunst-gegen-Gentrifizierung/!5774848/<br><br>
Der Protest Oper film, 2022<br>
Die Oper gegen den Ausverkauf der Stadt! <br>
https://www.lauratibor.de/<br><br>
Michael Oesterreich(?), "Tuntenhaus Forellenhof 1990: The most anarchic summer Friedrichshain has ever seen", 19 October 2022; by a participant<br>
https://www.exberliner.com/berlin/tuntenhaus-forellenhof-1990-anarchic-summer-friedrichshain-schwules-museum/<br><br>
PDF of the Schwules Museum’s comprehensive “Tuntenhaus” brochure (ENG & GER):<br>
Broschuere_Forelle_A5_44c_32S.indd – Final_Broschuere_Forelle_A5_44c_32S<br><br>
Juliet Bashore, "The Battle Of Tuntenhaus Parts I & II" (1991; 45 min.)<br>
https://archive.org/details/BattleOfTuntenhausPartsIII<br><br>
Geronimo, <i>Fire and flames: A history of the German autonomist movement</i>, 5th edition, 1997/translation PM Press, 2012<br>
https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=310<br>
free download – https://libcom.org/article/fire-and-flames-history-german-autonomist-movement<br><br>
Christine Bartlitz, Hanno Hochmuth, Tom Koltermann, Jakob Saß, Sara Stammnitz, <i>Traum und Trauma. Besetzung und Räumung der Mainzer Straße 1990 in Ost-Berlin</i> (2020); this is not the only book on the subject<br>
https://www.christoph-links-verlag.de/index.cfm?view=3&titel_nr=9104<br><br>
<i>Tuntentinte</i> (queer ink) blog, named for the ‘90s zine<br>
https://tuntentinte.noblogs.org/wtf-is-tuntentinte<br><br>
Blog of the Tuntenhaus at Kastanienallee 86<br>
https://www.kastanie86.net/<br><br>
catalogue of exhibition, “Wir sind hier nicht zum Spaß! Kollektive und subkulturelle Strukturen im Berlin der 90er Jahre”, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, 2013.<br>
https://www.kunstraumkreuzberg.de/publikationen/wir-sind-hier-nicht-zum-spass/<br><br>
Aja Waalwijk, "On Nomads and Festivals in Free Space", <i>House Magic</i> #4, Spring 2012<br>
Online as: house-magic-4.pdf – [Squat!net], and elsewhere<br><br>
Love Parade<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Parade<br><br>
"Art for UBI" (Manifesto) is a platform around on the role of art and art workers in the struggle for social justice and a transition towards post-capitalist forms of life<br>
https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/2022/09/17/art-for-ubi-manifesto-book-launch/<br><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-85457491942450176782022-12-12T08:58:00.000-08:002022-12-12T08:58:08.206-08:00Germany in Autumn #2: Picking Amongst the Textual Ruins<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdIGc9-_Ee-QIw-fJcMKti7yOQZIL-YoIg7UrvI2VZc421PRd4zE5okS4Tk-d_Cr0fqM5lxfKHX33hbr9a-DMcFjAP8dZnqIrmXkKcdGDsTeRonNQ2kIcZuPB6Fn5otVZkqkHArboGDvxCzCyNmqk0_-7qG4Kzco2zrqlbqok37b0RpV9dLoeipD7Hig/s598/ton%20steine%20song%20book.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="598" data-original-width="438" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdIGc9-_Ee-QIw-fJcMKti7yOQZIL-YoIg7UrvI2VZc421PRd4zE5okS4Tk-d_Cr0fqM5lxfKHX33hbr9a-DMcFjAP8dZnqIrmXkKcdGDsTeRonNQ2kIcZuPB6Fn5otVZkqkHArboGDvxCzCyNmqk0_-7qG4Kzco2zrqlbqok37b0RpV9dLoeipD7Hig/s320/ton%20steine%20song%20book.jpg"/></a></div><br>
<i>"No Power for Anyone" -- cover of the Ton Steine Scherben songcomic<br><br>
This is the 2nd post in the account of my visit to Germany in Fall of 2022. I’m looking for the traces of squatting in EU cities, returning to the trail I followed in my work with the SqEK group from 2009 to 2016. In this I tell of my visit to a squatted institution in Berlin, the search for Peter Missing, and rave geek Tobi’s big new book “Please Live”. I connect with old artist comrades Wolfgang Staehle and Philip Pocock, and ruminate about others.</i><br>
<br>
For my second day of research in Berlin, I visited a comrade living in the old Bethanien hospital complex. Among its several projects, NYiB houses a Collective Library and poster archive. There I learned of some important recent books and historical exhibitions that have come along since I last paid attention.<br>
New Yorck im Bethanien adjoins the Georg Rauch Haus, one of the earliest Berlin squats. They have their own song – "Hau ab: Rauch-Haus-Song" ("Get lost”; “Das ist unser Haus!") by the band Ton Steine Scherben. The band is beloved, and I picked up a graphic comic book done around their lyrics. When I passed by, the Rauch Haus was still very colorful with its graffiti slogans and encrustations of political posters. <br>
It’s tricky to get hold of comrade X. He asked me to install Signal, an encrypted messaging app. This wasn’t so easy, but it was worth it, an excellent meeting in which X showed me several important sources.<br>
“Comms” in general on this trip turned out to be quite a problem. Expat U.S. artist Peter Missing only uses Facebook messenger. I don’t have FB on my cel phone. We set up an appointment to meet, and Peter wasn’t there. “Something came up…” It was a trek out there, and fruitless. I tried to catch him on the swing back from Hamburg to the airport in Berlin. Again, no dice. “Today I realized I have to be at a funeral.”<br>
Peter Missing is the squatter artist <i>par excellence</i>. He was in the thick of the movement in NYC in the ‘90s, fronting a band called Missing Foundation notorious for a graffiti slogan of an upside-down martini glass and the epigram “Party’s Over 1933”. Later he moved to Hamburg, where he also squatted. (I saw his martini-glass tag there in 2010.) I last saw him in the yard of Kunsthaus Tacheles, the giant Berlin art squat before it was evicted in 2012. Ten years on, Peter Missing is painting large-scale murals in his dense colorful jigsaw puzzle style. He did one recently for the Berlin Urban Nation street art museum. Finally, he said, “mail me your questions”.<br><br>
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(A recent screed of his is stuck at the end of this blog post.)<br>
Comrade X showed me his recent essay in <i>Rebellisches Berlin: Expeditionen in die untergründige Stadt</i> (Gruppe Panther, 2021). He also had the book <i>Tacheles: Die Geschichte des Kunsthauses</i> by Stefan Schilling (2016), which is o.p.. The Urban Nation library couldn’t find their copy when I visited in spring.<br>
The biggest book find at NYiB was <i>Bitte Lebn</i> (Please live), a new fat tome edited by Tobias Morawski. I met Tobi when he did <i>Reclaim Your City</i> in 2014, a slim book on political graffiti in Berlin. Tobi then was involved in a party-production group called Mensch Meier. I got the idea that he’d given up working on political graffiti and was down for making music business money, like that guy in Amsterdam.<br>
But it looks to be more than that – “We are a venue,” MM write, “A platform. A collective. We are all about grassroots democratic solidarity. We are Mensch Meier. And you are, too, when you are here.” Yes, they do music, and more. The name seems to come from song by the Ton Steine Scherben group, a talkin’ blues about an Everyman. The MM gang is mostly into techno & rave. Their website is splendidly designed.<br>
Rave people and culture played a central role in squatting during the 1990s, a story which, unlike anarcho-punk, remains still to be told. ETC Dee, another SqEK comrade, was a DJ with a free party tribe which roamed Europe during those years.<br>
I had a visit in Berlin with expat Canadian artist Philip Pocock. He’s been posting photos from the early 1980s squatting scene (see my last “Occuprop” post). Philip is still hiding from Covid, but he emerged into the open air for a while to talk. Philip recalled his days amongst the squatters. Some of their buildings fronted directly on the Wall, and they would ‘entertain’ the East German border guards in their towers with public sex acts and rooftop jazz concerts.<br>
Philip is a photographer who has burrowed deep into technical processes. He regaled me with his past art adventures, which included a globe-trotting expedition to survey the equator. One of collaborators he worked with was Wolfgang Staehle, founder of the early online community The Thing.<br><br>
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<i>Image from "AI Realism Qantar" by Almagul Menlibayeva in "The Thing Is" exhibition</i><br><br>
When I caught up with him, Wolfgang was in the midst of a new Thing exhibition, “The thing is…”. He and Caspar Stracke hosted me for a book talk about my new memoir (see the related blog: “Art Gangs”). The best part of that was a video jam of old ‘70s and ‘80s cable TV work rescued by the XFR Collective and posted on archive.org. Viel spass!<br>
Berlin buzzes with a multitude of art projects, many riding the border of starkly present political issues. It’s a serious town. In addition to the multi-sited Thing exhibition (I only had time to glance at one of them), I caught a book talk by Jacopo Galimberti on the artists of the Autonomia movement. The meat of his talk was strictly art historical. He had interviewed artists who worked on Autonomist journals, examined their archives, etc. His iconographic analysis connected radical grahics with classical themes, much like the "many-headed hydra", an emblem for the people – the rabble – in revanchist 18th c. discourse. <br>
So far as a classic art historical analysis of the squatting movement artists goes, I can't follow that path, although I hope someone does. Nearly all of the artists who paint in and on the exterior walls of squatted buildings are anonymous. Of course they all have names. This work builds rep for street artists, but it's an underground I don't know. <i>Bitte Lebn</i> may open some doors on this question when I get around to studying it.<br>
For my "Occupation Culture" book (2015) I recounted direct experiences with squatters and squat researchers. This trip I focussed on remnants. There are quite a number of anniversary publications of squat projects which I have yet to sort through. Berlin, like NYC, has been about processing its radical pasts for quite a while now. Opportunities for experiment and innovation when foreclosed still become archival products and events. And tourist attractions.<br><br>
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As for literal remnants of the period – (even exactly what is that? i.e., how to periodize, another classic historical question) – I saw one last giant steel sculpture still standing in Goerlitzer Park. In ‘86 there were many of these monstrous metal constructions to be seen, rising like transformers throughout the park. Where did they go? Were they "squatter art"? <br>
I was told that Josef Strau was set to make a history about them for a show in Berlin in '04 (“Now and Ten Years Ago”, Kunstwerke, Berlin) but he decided against it. That show was also intending to draw a line between NYC and Berlin in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I loaned ABC No Rio materials to it. But the focus shifted (curatorial shit happens), and the catalogue remained unpublished. <br>
Some textual remains sit on Stephan Dillemuth’s rabbit-hole of a website, “Society of Control”. He and Strau worked together on the important artists gallery project Friesenwall 120 in Cologne in the ‘90s, laying the ground work for the genre of the artists research exhibition.<br>
Christine Hill, an artist with Ronald Feldman Gallery, had one of her first shows at Kunsthaus Tacheles, called “Hinter den Museen” (Behind the museums), in 1991. She was an early “services” artist She told me of wandering with her little red wagon amongst the Berlin squats in those days when I sought her advice at her ‘office’ in the gallery.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtgE7Fw_lok63rfHB4w38JQZ6ONJx0DnOCngIzk-VpCJylNJpw9N1km7xuXVpLCzbS-JUFKNxxjKVwBHFaC9Kp_VCz_CdDzaFM-hv9VGLB5D1TrJPAXllRrZHHLzJKzmXIuNTrGNMyAp2muw1-vlkO2PiWD7Qdl--dxPTqjnzp8YLqh3sEFW_UCzC4wg/s788/tachels%20via%20PM.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="788" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtgE7Fw_lok63rfHB4w38JQZ6ONJx0DnOCngIzk-VpCJylNJpw9N1km7xuXVpLCzbS-JUFKNxxjKVwBHFaC9Kp_VCz_CdDzaFM-hv9VGLB5D1TrJPAXllRrZHHLzJKzmXIuNTrGNMyAp2muw1-vlkO2PiWD7Qdl--dxPTqjnzp8YLqh3sEFW_UCzC4wg/s320/tachels%20via%20PM.jpg"/></a></div><br><i>Tacheles in ruins</i><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0XsNtxcX0IXdbo7waEBYUoV0vQQFBJcVGrV6dIJjHWXI__qqB_Lp85cHtVX9RCJ8ksxbudJ1U9QmKGckObFTqHHfp8kteijd5KktfKifCKTKYcfhA6JRRRz70sintXWX7tnZtNvZLd_KLNmZzLMfVdU8PbVNxSs24D46TAM1rd2rKQawf3NwuMwpr3w/s2592/Tacheles%20under%20constn.JPG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1944" data-original-width="2592" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0XsNtxcX0IXdbo7waEBYUoV0vQQFBJcVGrV6dIJjHWXI__qqB_Lp85cHtVX9RCJ8ksxbudJ1U9QmKGckObFTqHHfp8kteijd5KktfKifCKTKYcfhA6JRRRz70sintXWX7tnZtNvZLd_KLNmZzLMfVdU8PbVNxSs24D46TAM1rd2rKQawf3NwuMwpr3w/s320/Tacheles%20under%20constn.JPG"/></a></div><i>Tacheles when I passed it in October. Artists long gone.</i><br><br>
On this trip, both Philip Pocock and Wolfgang Staehle told me they knew artists who’d been closely involved in the Berlin squats. More work to do, in my follow-up visits.<br>
This is pulling up threads from a pile of rememberings, like digging through my boxes and coming upon scattered notes that seem to hang together. Artists have taken inspiration from squats, have worked and lived in them, but it’s a thread of art history which hasn’t been picked out – in fact, it’s been suppressed.<br>
Which is why I go on.<br><br>
<i>NEXT: Tutenhaus and the “Communism of Love”; Hamburg, the “Dangerous Neighborhood”. <br><br>
<b>LINKS</b><br><br>
Collective Library and poster archive at New Yorck im Bethanien<br>
https://kollektivbibliothek.noblogs.org/?p=1894<br><br>
Tobias Morawski, “Reclaim Your City” (2014) - PDF Free Download<br>
https://docplayer.org/211613562-Tobias-morawski-reclaim-your-city.html<br><br>
Mensch Meier<br>
https://menschmeier.berlin/en<br><br>
“Rave”<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rave<br><br>
Rave culture: “My city: Berlin with Andreas Schneider”, who runs the analogue synth mecca Schneiders Büro in the city. The post includes a video about Schneider's analog synthesizer shop<br>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/10/berlin-m99-hans-georg-lindenau-corner-shop-revolutionary<br><br>
Josef Strau<br>
http://vilmagold.com/artist/josef-strau/<br><br>
NYC texts on Stephan Dillemuth’s website “Society of Control”<br>
http://www.societyofcontrol.com/pmwiki/compstudies/compstudies.php?n=Main.TextsOnline<br><br>
Martin Beck in conversation with Stephan Dillemuth about
the Cologne gallery project Friesenwall 120<br>
http://societyofcontrol.com/outof/sdwiki/pmwiki.php/FW120/BeckDillemuthEn<br><br>
Christine Hill<br>
https://feldmangallery.com/artist-home/christine-hill<br><br>
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<i>Stephan Dillemuth, "Shnitzelshanke back from storage", image from Society of Control website. The yard of Tacheles is visible in lower left.</i><br><br>
“IN THE DEAD CENTER OF BERLIN =oranienburgerstr ==== the old berlin is gone circa 1990 - present ; but the memories are burned into our subconcious / tacheles kunsthaus (photo} /===== and the new berlin is set up to kill culture / and force people into submission / the rents will be the final nail in the coffin .........in this'' capital ''city ....as we all knew in 1990 this time would circle around ...# unfreindly place # dead energy # babies puppies & yuppies # unliveable prices # a place to waste time # only tags survived # sitting in cafes for no reason”<br>
– Peter Missing, Facebook, December 2022<br><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-7028764098720465662022-11-25T09:57:00.001-08:002022-11-25T09:57:36.534-08:00Getting Popular: Back to Berlin, Part One<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMdNF_HRNbVCe32nvXSZsVqt1GwzOnVwPDytYJxHSlyUKL8feH2CElFKobeexkG-OMqaPJ3pLufRuKBqJgbsYmLz679SLwSR5zxFtz9s55Qudrg_Owe7DHzUMz_Pkw9PygfPrAaVKSvXNKng8n83UsfGXsPVoDGRkCD0aKQLQkfgPhRm1p1FwhdF5PVw/s841/frieden%20den%20hutten.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="841" data-original-width="595" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMdNF_HRNbVCe32nvXSZsVqt1GwzOnVwPDytYJxHSlyUKL8feH2CElFKobeexkG-OMqaPJ3pLufRuKBqJgbsYmLz679SLwSR5zxFtz9s55Qudrg_Owe7DHzUMz_Pkw9PygfPrAaVKSvXNKng8n83UsfGXsPVoDGRkCD0aKQLQkfgPhRm1p1FwhdF5PVw/s320/frieden%20den%20hutten.jpg"/></a></div>
<i>Poster from Rebel Disorder store -- "Peace to the Huts, war to the Palaces", with an image of Georg Rauch, for whom a famous squatted house is named</i><br><br>
Like everywhere these days, the German cities of Berlin and Hamburg were unseasonably mild in early November. I came there after a long time gone to pick up the trail of squatting for a new book project, a dream deferred.<br>
The squatting movement is pretty low now, and nearly sunk in Berlin. You have to sniff like a hound to catch a whiff of the acrid flame of its spirit smoldering beneath the rubble of bourgeois consumption society.<br>
I have in mind now a book on the after-effects, the leavings, the important accomplishments of the European squatting movement in some of its major sites – most of which are long gone.<br>
My first stops on this trip were archives – the Papier Tiger Archiv in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, and a library in the New Yorck im Bethanien. Moving on to Hamburg, I visited Park Fiction and Gaengeviertel, and failed to find the Rote Flora and its Archiv der Sozialen Bewegungen open. I met a few folks and chatted, and lit the lamp for the German part of my project. A lingering ideology of revolutionary resolve is part of that.<br><br>
<b>Gone, Gone, Gone</b><br><br>
The most salient thing about the famous Berlin squatting movement of the 1980s and ‘90s is its near total invisibility today. <br>
The extent of the old movement can be grasped in the map of <a href="about:invalid#zSoyz" target="_blank">“Berlin Besetzt” (Squatted Berlin)</a>, which locates and briefly describes most of the Hausbesetzung (squatted house) projects in Berlin in the last several decades.<br>
It was vast. Our research group SqEK (Squatting Everywhere Kollective) was toured through its then-quite-evident remains over 10 years ago.<br><br>
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<i>Squatters in Berlin, 1981. Photo by Tom Ordelman</i><br><br>
The streets of Kreuzberg tell the story of today. Great tall kiosks are covered top to bottom with the same commercial posters, <i>kiez</i> after <i>kiez</i> (i.e., barrio). Corporate monoculture and its wage slaves are winning against the ragged hordes of volunteers of yesteryear. And the artists who aren’t stadium-commercial seem to have largely checked out of street communication. Graffiti is plentiful, but it’s aimless pointless name tags.<br><br>
<b>“When Kreuzberg was wild” (title of an article on a tourist website)</b><br><br>
Now, besides colorful stories and the memories of old folks in their co-op apartments, what remains of the movement?<br>
An enormous revaluation of property is what. The <i>Guardian</i> wrote in 2016 that “rents in Kreuzberg were on average the highest in the German capital.” Exactly the same thing happened in “Loisaida rebelde”, NYC. David Harvey was right – rent-seeking is the new basis of capital accumulation in cities today. And first come the squatters and the artists, then come the speculators and developers.<br>
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<i>When developers were afraid. "Fire and Flame" in 1981. Photo by Paul Glaser</i><br><br>
I began in Berlin by retracing some steps from our SqEK meetings there of long ago. In May I had launched my new book <i>Art Worker</i> in Berlin, and passed by the Regenbogen Fabrik (Rainbow Factory). This early squatted complex celebrated their 40th year in 2021. One can never get a room in their hostel as I’d hoped, but I could see that the principal projects in this live/work complex were still active:<br><br>
<b>What Is Still Going On at the Fabrik</b><br><br>
– A wood workshop, established soon after the occupation of 1981, when the urgent task of restoring squatted buildings was uppermost.<br>
– A bicycle workshop, at one time the largest in Berlin. (The city was a bicycle heaven a decade ago, but that seems to have changed a lot. There's still a morning commute, but bikes on the streets are much less common today, and the many rental spots for tourists have vanished.)<br>
– A cafe, which I was told is open now only one day a week, although on Facebook they say it is reformulating yet again, with migrants as cooks;
– A movie theater, the most unusual aspect of the complex, which continues to host regular events.<br>
– the children’s care center – the “kita” – was a key early project, and they still describe themselves as a “childrens, cultural and neighborhood center”.<br><br>
– I spotted a bookstore setup in a window there, but that was closing and I could not see it clearly.<br>
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The Regenbogenfabrik was and is committed to concepts and organizational forms of a “solidarity economy”, a way of living that is proactively anti-capitalist. It’s a public micro-utopia, an important vestige of the squatting movement of the 1980s.<br><br>
<b>The Papier Tiger Archiv</b><br><br>
I had an appointment to visit the renowned Papier Tiger Archiv. This Berlin archive of left movements is where Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald collected scans of German political posters for their important 2008 “Signs of Change” exhibition at Exit Art. That show preceded the couple’s founding of the Interference Archive, an active autonomous archive in Brooklyn.<br>
The PT Archiv also houses the library of Kukuck, the Kunst- und Kulturcentrum of the 1980s, but I forgot to ask about it. Although Sarah Lewison contributed photos and a brief text on it from her time there to our anthology <i>Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Space</i> (2015: PDF online), what Kukuck was is still vague to me.<br>
“Punx”, who was sitting the archive that day, didn’t seem very jazzed by my project. I wasn’t well prepared. There’s a lot online I haven’t processed, and secondary books which I’ve yet to see.<br><br>
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<i>Philip Pocock's photo of a Berlin squat, 1982</i><br><br>
I explained I’m on a search for the residues, the important outcomes of major squatting projects in different European cities. Besides the enormous raises in rent, which I recall led radical Baltimore housing activists to call for the houses of squatters to be attacked, I proposed that bookstores are important cultural artifacts of the squatting movement in Berlin. I got that flash from a photo by Philip Pocock of a Berlin squat from 1982 posted which shows a newly squatted building with an incipient bookstore announcing itself with a banner.<br><br>
<b>Fumbling Around</b><br><br>
We spoke about places like Oh21, where I later ordered the <i>Autonome in Bewegung</i> book which was stolen from me in Philadelphia. I’d bought that a decade ago from a weird street fighters’ gear shop run by a guy in a wheelchair – Hans-Georg Lindenau. He’s a Kreuzberg character, it turns out, whose M99 shop was evicted around 2016.<br><br>
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<i>Oh21 bookshop in Kreuzberg today. Note the posters hanging above the display of books. Posters and other propaganda is distributed via movement bookstores.</i><br><br>
The PTA is an important repository of radical left documents. A young woman arrived as I was there to work on the Autonomen.<br>
An artist in our Colab group, Diego Cortez visited Germany in ‘77. He went with Anya Philips to Stammheim prison to try to meet Holger Meins, an imprisoned member of the RAF. Meins had been a filmmaker. He studied alongside Harun Farocki. Diego wanted to interview him for our <i>X Magazine</i>. I learned later that a film was made about Meins – <i>Starbuck Holger Meins</i>, which includes some of his film footage. “Starbuck” because he was the helmsman like in <i>Moby Dick</i>, the strategist of the RAF group.<br>
This is a cross between art and the most extreme left activism. German Autonomen were famed for their fights with cops. Still the book of their history has an oddly whimsical cover image – a masked street fighter seated in a shopping cart – “in movement”.<br>
Joseph Beuys’ engagement with the German Green party before he was purged was also a moment when art and politics crossed strongly. Punx suggested the Green Party archives could illuminate that. That may be a little too far for me to go; the recent epic biography of Beuys is still untranslated.<br>
We talked about the Tutenhaus, the mythical squatted street. And he pointed me to an exhibition <a href="https://www.schwulesmuseum.de/ausstellung/tuntenhaus-forellenhof-1990-gay-communisms-short-summer/?lang=en" target="_blank">“Tuntenhaus Forellenhof 1990: Gay Communism’s Short Summer”</a> still up at the Schwules Museum. I made it there some days later (details in next post).<br>
Social centers, I suggested, were places where working class young people could become involved with cultural activity. Punx laughed at that. He said squatters were middle class people. <br>
That’s something of an open question, I think. I wonder also about alternative kids, commune brats. To what class do they belong?, since their upbringing and schooling etc. removes them a little from the normal runs of class reproduction. Is that a small thing? Miguel Martinez is the only person I know who has interviewed enough squatters to give some kind of answer to this question.<br><br>
<i><b>NEXT – New Yorck im Bethanien, Georg Rauch Haus, “Bitte Leben”, Peter Missing and Hamburg-- Gängeviertel and Park Fiction, Vokü at the Haffenstrasse.<i><br><br>
LINKS</b><br><br>
“Berlin Besetzt” (Squatted Berlin) map of squatted house projects in Berlin<br>
https://www.berlin-besetzt.de/#!id=6<br>
PDFs of my zine, “House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence” from 2012 and 2013, with records of our German visit can be found here:<br>
https://sites.google.com/site/housemagicbfc/<br><br>
"launched my new book"<br>
It's a memoir of my years in the NYC artworld: <i>Art Worker: Doing Time in the NY Artworld</i> (Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, 2022)<br>
in paper and e-book at: INS BITLY<br><br>
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<br>
“rents in Kreuzberg“<br>
Philip Oltermann, “'State enemy No 1': the Berlin counter-culture legend fighting eviction”, Wed 10 Aug 2016<br>
theguardian.com<br><br>
Regenbogen Fabrik<br>
https://rbf.otteweb.de/<br><br>
Papiertiger Archiv<br>
https://archiv-papiertiger.de/index.php<br><br>
“Signs of Change” exhibition at Exit Art. The full program of this show is on an Italian website:<br>
http://1995-2015.undo.net/it/mostra/75575<br><br>
Philip Pocock<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Pocock_(artist)<br><br>
Lily Cichanowicz, “M99: Berlin’s ‘Corner Shop For Revolutionary Needs’”, 20 December 2016<br> theculturetrip.com<br><br>
AG Grauwacke, Assoziation A e.V., , "Autonome in Bewegung: Aus den ersten 23 Jahren" (2003; reprints up to 2020)<br>
http://www.assoziation-a.de/buch/autonome_in_bewegung<br><br>
buchladen oh*21 - oh21.de<br>
https://www.oh21.de/<br><br>
"Tuntenhaus Forellenhof 1990: Gay Communism’s Short Summer" at the Schwules Museum, Berlin<br>
https://www.schwulesmuseum.de/ausstellung/tuntenhaus-forellenhof-1990-gay-communisms-short-summer/?lang=en<br><br>
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<i>The M99 shop before its eviction in 2016</i><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-70188857853732438912022-10-12T03:11:00.002-07:002022-10-12T03:11:54.504-07:00“Like Ivy Climbing the Walls”: “Giro gráfico” in Madrid
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<br>
A review of the <a href="https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/graphic-turn" target="_blank">“Giro gráfico” exhibition at the Reina Sofia museum</a>. (Closed in Madrid; next venue Mexico, D.F.)</i><br>
The long dark deep pain is unimaginable, near-geological in its duration, the loss of lives, lands, knowledges and futures produced by the colonization of the Americas. Indigenous American civilizations were erased and their existence later denied. All of this we now must recognize and answer for. <br>
Columbus, who started in slaving and massacring as soon as he arrived is the anti-hero of October 12th. A new children’s book features him accurately as an ogre. The unmaking of this hero of Italian-Americans began in earnest during the quincentennial year of 1992. See this pedagogical guide “HOW to '92” produced by the Alliance for Cultural Democracy and <a href="http://www.darkmatterarchives.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/HOW-TO-92-small-file.pdf" target="_blank">posted in full</a> at Gregory Sholette’s “Dark Matter Archives”. The work of de-education continues.<br>
Columbus killed for gold. His crimes, and those of other early colonists, were famously called out in the first decades of colonization of the Americas by the 16th century priest Bartolomé de las Casas.<br>
Today Native Americans are being killed for land, and for fighting to conserve its resources. Over the last ten years, it’s been at the rate of one every two days according to Global Witness. Columbus’ crimes live on in a repetition compulsion of inhuman greed.<br>
In response to that report, Carolina Caycedo writes of these crimes, and their remembrance:<br>
“<i>La siembra</i>, or ‘the sowing,’ is an expression used by communities in Latin America when one of their members, leaders, or elders is killed for their activism in defense of territory, water, or life. They refer to the violent act of killing as the sowing, in order to turn around their loss and understand it through the abundance of the legacy it leaves. The murder of an activist sows a legacy, because the person who is buried—planted, in a manner of speaking—becomes a seed for the ongoing political and organizational processes of the community.”<br>
On the last day of the exhibition “Giro gráfico” at Reina Sofia museum – (“Graphic Turn: Like the Ivy on the Wall”) – I returned with the intention of writing about it. I’d been a few times before to this massive display of political art curated collectively by the <a href="https://redcsur.net/" target="_blank">Red Conceptualismos del Sur</a>, in which André Mesquita played an important role. I was out of town when first Andre, and then Caleb Duarte (more of him and them later) arrived to work on the show in May.<br>
The show is overwhelming, as are so many of the Reina Sofia shows. I honestly couldn’t handle it the first times I went. The cumulative effect on me was so sad and desperate it frightened me. It was a ‘walk among the tombstones’. But this must be observed and reported. Such a depth of pain, such endless unrequited struggle. Sure, progress has been made, but long, long and so very hard, and it doesn’t end, as figures like Bolsonaro recur and insist. The ruthless greedy “fever of Columbus” continues to rage and consume indigenous lands. Nothing seems to stop the plague of killings. <br><br>
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<i>Plan drawn up by Andre Mesquita of the "Gira" exhibition</i><br><br>
To think of all this artistic memorial work climbing, as the title has it, like ivy on the walls, ivy a plant that never quits but always climbs – and to think of the dead as seeds planted which grow new generations of resistors is the only comfort available. But comfort isn’t what is needed. Resolution – determination – a firm promise that this struggle be kept always in mind and not forgotten.<br>
For those who fight, it is “ ‘namakasia’ [meaning] both ‘ever strong’ as well as ‘ever forward’ in the Yaqui language,” writes Caycedo (cited above). “It is a tribal cry of encouragement, a collective call to never give up” which she learned from Tomás Rojo Valencia, a Yaqui leader “sown” in Sonora, Mexico, in 2021. He was murdered for demanding the tribe's legal rights to half the water which the governments of Sonora state and federal Mexico were diverting for the needs of corporate clients.<br>
“Giro gráfico” winds through gallery after gallery, in a plan of display that André Mesquita images with a central form of a dragon. The crew from Red Conceptualismos del Sur have been developing this show for years. <br><br>
[I note here a text that describes the show and that collective process from the inside – Cristina Híjar González, "Giro Grafico: Como en el Muro la Hiedra", 6 junio, 2022, “Breve e incompleta crónica de la exposición internacional de acciones gráficas y visualidades de la RedCSur en el Museo Reina Sofía”. ENG readers can put it into machine translation as I did and it comes out pretty good.]<br><br>
I entered the Madrid show from the back, past the giant "Mapamundi" made by the mapping collective Iconoclasistas (2019), in which multi-armed god-like peasants illustrate a map of global land ownership. <br><br>
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<i>Detail of the Iconoclasistas "Mapamundi"</i><br><br>
The next room is crammed with graphic reminders of the Argentinian dictatorship’s infamous crimes (1974-84). Exiled leftists organized resistance abroad, especially the Paris campaign of AIDA for the “100 Argentine artists disappeared”. That was indeed the ‘tip of the iceberg’, since the killing is estimated to have caught up some 30,000 unfortunates. The demonstrations in Paris went on weekly for 320 weeks, over six years. Since 1996 there has been an annual March of Silence in Argentina for the dead/disappeared. <br>
A great stack of signs dominated the room, each a photo of a murdered person. A documentary film, “Where Are They?” from the archives of Simone de Beuvoir played on a monitor. That is an eternal cry, since, as with the Mexican Ayotzinapa 43, the bodies of the dead are rarely given back. The post office of official death makes no returns, and has no dead letter office.<br><br>
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<i>Ana Longoni explains the show in a brief museum video with ENG subtitles</i><br><br>
I discussed all this with a friend who is closely involved with what is called “historic memory” in Spain, i.e., the exhumation of mass graves of people killed during the fascist dictatorship. Like the Ayotzinapa 43, quite a number of them were teachers.<br>
For its colonialism, and later support of dictators, Spain has a lot to answer for, and doesn’t want to face up to this, I said. <br>
“No, no,” she said. “That’s the Black Legend.” The “black legend” of Spain originated among Protestant propagandists in the 17th century to defame the Catholic colonists.<br><br>
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<i>Image by Protestant artist DeBrys illustrating the "Black Legend"</i><br><br>
Don’t fret, I replied. The English have plenty to answer for in their own colonial times, since their Royal African Company, chartered and owned by the crown, imported more slaves to the Americas than any other enterprise.<br><br>
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<i>Logo of the English Royal African Company</i><br><br>
I pass through that grim gallery to one hung with t-shirts. There’s a video of a woman putting on one after another of them – it’s a bit of comic relief. “Graphic bodies”, it’s called, “matrices for a street choreography”. I love radical movement t-shirts and collect them for Interference Archive in Brooklyn. <br>
They’re important in Spain. They cohere and mark out masses of demonstrators. And in other contexts t-shirts make individual statements amongst the throngs of ‘normals’ dressed as corporate billboards. During the 15M encampment in May of 2011, there was a guy who photographed everyone’s he could find. <br>
“Giro” shows also the street stencils of artists like the Chilean Luz Donoso. Often these are just faces, or pared-down abstract images which furtively convey a message everyone understands. (Similar brief crypto-significations are happening today in Russia and Iran.) <br>
Uruguayan photographer Juan Angel Urruzola’s wide murals recall those who should be seniors now walking the streets of their cities, but instead are merely ghosts.<br><br>
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An installation titled “Malvenido Rockefeller” (not “welcome”, bienvenido, but its opposite) documents posters and paintings from 1969. They were put up on the streets to greet the VP’s tour of South America. During that same year, the Art Workers Coalition in NYC was protesting Nelson’s family control of the MoMA, a tiny issue compared to the partnership of the US government and Standard Oil in exploiting Latin American countries.<br><br>
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Change has happened over the intervening 50 years. Still, today, can you imagine this exhibition at any NYC museum?<br>
Large parts of “Giro” are given over to LGBTQ groups and movements, like the humorous Lesbianos Fugitivos map of the “coño Iberoamericano”. And, like the massive “Perder la Forma” show (2012) before it, “Giro” features archival zines which show the long struggle of LGBTQ peopls in America Sur.<br>
“Cuir Library” is a pink-walled reading room with two giant tit-like cushions to recline on, and dozens upon dozens of fanzines to browse. (“Cuir” is where the zine energy is these days, as the recent Pichi Fest at the ESLA Eko in Madrid showed.)<br><br>
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An installation of vintage queer publications complemented the library.<br>
On one wall is Chilean artist César Valencia’s painting, <i>Producción Gráfica Medicina Emocional</i> (2018-22), an attempt to come to grips with all of this history. It’s like a mechanical metaphor for the “Giro” show itself. Valencia’s diagrammatic reflection on the pasts of Chile and Argentina is part of the show’s “In Secret” ensemble.<br><br>
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Reason breaks down in the room of relics of the Ayotzinapa massacre of 43 teachers in training in Guerrero, Mexico in 2014. The agitation behind these killings has rocked the country since then with the slogan, “Alive they took them, alive we want them”. <br>
43 needlework remembrances of each of these young men, stitched with iamges of turtles, corn, and childhood things are hung across the space in a room the curators call “The Delay”.<br><br><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjsHFszZcq8nEn1NSHtBN4c_CHMLd9BIq5jvzaVVkUe4rVtKKOdjdAuHSqFf5idVGNCrEXksdzHySDJFepo0AD3IV62kJdBE_aWzBwL69H3ismg0IQ5tLZodsKADN9g-YE9wvJsvSHwp9u2-HhahpzwLbvClTV5chLpAb6qNo54TmlM6ngw6n4GCrRvA/s1683/11%20bordados%20on%20parade%20MX.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1683" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjsHFszZcq8nEn1NSHtBN4c_CHMLd9BIq5jvzaVVkUe4rVtKKOdjdAuHSqFf5idVGNCrEXksdzHySDJFepo0AD3IV62kJdBE_aWzBwL69H3ismg0IQ5tLZodsKADN9g-YE9wvJsvSHwp9u2-HhahpzwLbvClTV5chLpAb6qNo54TmlM6ngw6n4GCrRvA/s320/11%20bordados%20on%20parade%20MX.jpeg"/></a></div><br>
<i>Parading embroideries in Mexico</i><br><br>
These are “actions performed in slow time over a long duration”. Besides the Ayotzinapa 43, embroideries from Brazil recall Marielle Franco, the assassinated trans legislator.<br>
Stitchings by the Fuentes Rojas collective (2011-19) recall the murdered of Mexico, most of them femicides. “Una victima, una panuela”; there were curtains of these kerchiefs that were also carried in the streets.<br>
Imagining a whole string of these murders is the hard work Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño undertook in his great book <i>2666</i>.<br><br>
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These embroideries by collectives of women are “an interpellation that passes more through the senses than the reason, by marking the loving manual work that builds a visuality that informs, denounces and shares. Love as a political concept in action” (“Gira” catalogue, p. 107).<br>
My artist friend said that when he saw them he cried.<br>
Things get a little more proactive in the part of the show called “Territorios insumisos”, insubordinate territories. Here is a (comparatively) tiny version of the giant pedagogic map the Beehive Collective used to draw “parallels between colonial history and modern-day capitalism”. <br>
“Capitalism,” the poster declares: “Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.”<br>
We move into America Norte through a room of material about Nicaragua which repeats the epochal political art installation form of Group Material in 1984, their “Timeline: The Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America” installed at P.S. 1. The installation, by [Experimental Graphics Collective?], concludes with a sad image of opposition politicians being arrested by the government of the corrupted Sandinista Daniel Ortega.<br><br>
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In the gallery dedicated mostly to work from America Norte we find Standing Rock posters by U.S. graphic artists familiar from the work of JustSeeds and the Interference Archive in Brooklyn – #NoDAPL!. <br>
Most spectacular is the tipped-up long house relatinig to the <a href="https://www.calebduarte.org/zapantera-negra" target="_blank"><i>Zapantera Negra</i> project</a>. This construction, with painted murals outside and hung inside with tapestries made by Zapatista women, was installed for the show by California artist Caleb Duarte. He’s part of the team of artists in solidarity with the Zapatista movement working out of an occupied building called EDELO (En Donde Era la ONU / Where the United Nations Used to Be). <br>
Between 2012-16, the Zapantera Negra project brought together the artist Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party, and collectives of Zapatista women resulting in remarkable syncretic works linking the two movements.<br><br>
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Both the Zapatistas of Chiapas and the Black Panthers before them were/are armed liberation movements which had to deal in the face of overwhelming state power arrayed against them. Yet they persist – in Chiapas as a <i>de facto</i> autonomous zone, and in the “KKK USA” in the form of a powerful and influential historical example, and direct inspiration for present-day projects of black autonomy like Cooperation Jackson.<br>
The Zapatistas continue to be a blacklight beacon of possibility. They inspire many, as evidenced in the the 2021 anthology <i>When the Roots Start Moving</i> produced by Alessandra Pomarico and Nikolay Oleynikov of Free Home University and Chto Delat respectively. (Their project was the subject of a post last year on my increasingly related blog “Occupations & Properties”.)<br><br>
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<i>Emory Douglas in Chiapas</i><br><br>
For them the Zapatistas represent “a home (or a homecoming) for our hopes and political imaginaries, providing a praxis to learn from and with.”<br>
This is a long way from hippies wearing beads and taking peyote, i.e., an essentialist romantic identification with indigenous peoples and struggles. This is the evolved position of left cultural actors and thinkers in solidarity with anti-capitalist anti-colonial native-led movements. #IdleNoMore <i>en soli con</i> #ExtinctionRebellion<br>
All in all, “Giro” is a deeply thought profoundly complex political art exhibition. The subtitle comes from a song lyric, the chorus, by Violeta Parra, “Volver a los 17”, just as the earlier related show “Perder la Forma” title came from a poem – <br><br>
Se va enredando, enredando<br>
Como en el muro la hiedra<br>
Y va brotando, brotando<br>
Como el musguito en la piedra<br>
Ay sí sí sí<br><br>
(It gets entangled, entangled<br>
Like the ivy on the wall<br>
And goes sprouting, sprouting<br>
Like the moss on the stone<br>
oh yeah yeah yeah)<br><br>
“Here,” as written on the wall text, “the graphic turn is understood as a recurrent political matrix.” The “hut” of the Zapantera Negra project, posters from the Chicano movement of 1969-72, graphics from Pasofronteras/border crossings activisms, classics from the OSPAAAL anti-imperialist project est. in Cuba in 1966, #BLM “my life matters” martyr-portrait images – all of this activism is transversal, and increasingly networked.<br>
As always with the Reina Sofia exhibitions it’s too much – but seriously, it’s never enough for not just memorializing but inspiring ongoing activism and agitation. <br>
The “Agora of the Present” tries to be that, a zone of rabble rousing. Three screens fire up sequentially, the most unignorable black-clad troupes of women shouting in unison at the “rapist in your path” (Sandi Bachom, 2020) – a spectacle of unity and accusation. <br>
We sprout on.<br>
Next stop for the show:<br>
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo de la Universidad Autónoma de México (MUAC), Ciudad de México (noviembre, 2022 - julio, 2023)<br><br>
<b>LINKS& REFERENCES mentioned in the text</b><br><br>
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<i>Pinochet's troops round up people on the streets in Chile, September 11, 1973</i><br><br>
Graphic Turn: Like the Ivy on the Wall <br>
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/graphic-turn<br>
exhibition handout in English<br>
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/exposiciones/exhibition_information_sheet_graphic_turn.pdf<br><br>
See this pedagogical guide “HOW to '92” produced by the Alliance for Cultural Democracy and posted in full at Gregory <br>Sholette’s “Dark Matter Archives”<br>
http://www.darkmatterarchives.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/HOW-TO-92-small-file.pdf<br><br>
Bartolomé de las Casas.<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas<br><br>
Environmental Defender Killed Every Two Days Over Last ...<br>
https://www.commondreams.org › ...<br>
29 sept 2022 — The report—entitled Decade of Defiance: Ten Years of Reporting Land and Environmental Activism Worldwide—underscores how land inequality and ...<br><br>
One minute video presents the report<br>
https://twitter.com/Global_Witness/status/1575366478483841025<br><br>
Carolina Caycedo, “La Siembra – The Sowing”, e-flux online, #129, September 2022<br>
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/129/484604/la-siembra-the-sowing/<br><br>
Red Conceptualismos del Sur<br>
Plataforma de investigación, discusión y toma de posición colectiva desde América Latina. Fundada en 2007<br>
https://redcsur.net/<br><br>
The “Mapoteca” of the Iconoclasistas collective<br>
https://iconoclasistas.net/cartografias/<br><br>
Black Legend (Spain)<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain)<br><br>
Royal African Company<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_African_Company<br><br>
Cristina Híjar González, "Giro gráfico. Como en el muro la hiedra", Posted on 6 junio, 2022 <br>
"Breve e incompleta crónica de la exposición internacional de acciones gráficas y visualidades de la RedCSur en el Museo Reina Sofía" on a Mexican blog<br>
https://piso9.net/giro-grafico-como-en-el-muro-la-hiedra/<br><br>
Fotos de camisetas en ANIVERSARIOS del 15-M: – Kaos en la red<br>
https://archivo.kaosenlared.net/fotos-de-camisetas-en-aniversarios-del-15-m/<br><br>
Pichi Fest (@pichifest) • Instagram photos and videos<br>
https://www.instagram.com › pichifest<br>
Festival de fanzines transfeminista y autogestionado en Madrid <br><br>
Iguala mass kidnapping (2014) – the Ayotzinapa inicident<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iguala_mass_kidnapping<br><br>
Fuentes Rojas. Bordando por la paz y la memoria. Una víctima, un pañuelo <br>
includes 13 minute video interview<br>
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/coleccion/restauracion/fuentes-rojas<br><br>
citation from "La Demora" (the delay), by Cristina Hijar, Elva Peniche and Sylvia Suarez
in the catalogue of the show, p. 107. O.P. Assisted machine translation.<br><br>
“Mesoamérica Resiste”, from the Beehive Design Collective<br>
https://beehivecollective.org/posterViewer/?poster=mr<br><br>
Timeline: The Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America. 22 January – 18 March, 1984.
on Doug Ashford's website<br>
http://www.dougashford.info/?p=581<br><br>
<i>Zapantera Negra</i> (Updated and Expanded Edition)<br>
https://www.commonnotions.org/zapantera-negra-updated<br><br>
Caleb Duarte’s website with material on the Zapantera Negra project<br>
https://www.calebduarte.org/zapantera-negra<br><br>
Blog post on t“When the Roots Start Moving” book with editor interview, October 19, 2021
“On Learning and Un-learning” <br>
http://occuprop.blogspot.com/2021/10/on-learning-and-un-learning.html<br>
see also a Canadian appearance by those two at:<br>
https://musagetes.ca/news/when-the-roots-start-moving/<br><br>
Next stop for the “Gira” show: <br>
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo de la Universidad Autónoma de México (MUAC), Ciudad de México (noviembre, 2022 - julio, 2023)<br>
https://muac.unam.mx/<br>
<br>
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<i>Warriors waiting at Wounded Knee, 1973</i><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-39709762295395587102022-10-01T07:38:00.000-07:002022-10-01T07:38:22.381-07:00A Visit to the Watchtower<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJIAbToKztbNw1DCNRLaLIMZnNLFoNuK3FZWPaRdHiuXI7EQuLxIjmVt8UKUzRu9LmAr9-tSVJtxPnPXJ_o_cw5Y9nbqyDdmqlynYaX-HDCrk4cICdyjk4P5mCRfZsLU-oKicRL6cABL6mGJxuASijYS1muP0hstPiBhnaIn8GoKES2FLDK1s87MFU2w/s2592/DSC03775.JPG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2592" data-original-width="1944" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJIAbToKztbNw1DCNRLaLIMZnNLFoNuK3FZWPaRdHiuXI7EQuLxIjmVt8UKUzRu9LmAr9-tSVJtxPnPXJ_o_cw5Y9nbqyDdmqlynYaX-HDCrk4cICdyjk4P5mCRfZsLU-oKicRL6cABL6mGJxuASijYS1muP0hstPiBhnaIn8GoKES2FLDK1s87MFU2w/s320/DSC03775.JPG"/></a></div>
<br>
<i>The assembly at La Atalaya</i><br><br>
The pandemic seems to have let up, or at least the sky is clearing. I got the ‘Rona at last. It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t severe. Definitely a new disease. But in Madrid, folks are walking around and interacting without masks, although on public transit most people still wear them.<br>
Recently I was invited to a fiesta at CSO La Atalaya in Valekas. It’s something of a trip out there. I missed the play of the "marionetas subversivas", but I had some paella at the “comida popular”.<br><br>
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<i>Heading to the fiesta</i><br><br>
The <i>okupa</i> La Atalaya is an abandoned school, and the fiesta took place in the expansive playground. I can't say when it was first occupied, but the blog starts in 2015.<br>
Vallecas is a peripheral barrio of Madrid. It began as a "chabola" or "favela" in agricultural land decades ago as laborers came from the Spanish countryside to work in Madrid's factories. They were organized by the Communist Party to demand proper housing, and the struggle was a hard one. Finally public housing was built. The barrio remains solidly working class. <br>
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<i>Undated photo, 1960s? Vallecas was called "little Russia" in the last century</i><br><br>
Atalaya means "watchtower". In their occupation statement, they said: “We want to be the engine of cultural recovery and sovereignty for Vallekas, returning to being what we should never have ceased to be... As we said the first day we started, paraphrasing Pablo Neruda: “It is forbidden not to smile at problems, not to fight for what you want, to abandon everything out of fear, not to make your dreams come true”.<br>
"Alegría para combatir, organización para vencer". "Joy to fight, organization to win."<br>
The center is where the "pirate ship" of the annual July Naval Battle of Vallecas is ‘launched’ – built and rolled out to the streets. This construction plies the local ‘waters’, the crowds that gather to drench each other with water in the annual July event in the streets of the barrio.<br><br>
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<i>A mural recalls the 'pirate ship' of the annual 'naval battle' (giant water-gun fight) in the barrio</i><br><br>
In May, when an order of eviction came down, La Atalaya called a press conference. <i>Publico</i> reported that by then the old school had a climbing wall, a skate park, sports teams, and a “pole dance” project. I think this is more likely an aerial silk project, since they performed in that way at the fiesta. A long hanging fabric is used as a performance armature for twisting and climbing movements.<br>
Atalaya was founded as a youth center. <i>Publico</i> quotes a young man, Daniel, "We have allowed young people to have free activities in an area with few resources”. During the pandemic, some residents of the neighborhood ran a solidarity food pantry, Somos Tribu, which served 200-300 people weekly.<br>
"These spaces help create community,” He said. “We are isolated in our homes and we believe that we have no help or alternatives, but the social centers help us understand that problems are collective, and that we have to find solutions together."<br><br>
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<i>Climbing wall in La Atalaya</i><br><br>
After a judicial order to vacate, delivered in May of this year, <i>La Marea</i> made a video which reveals what an extraordinary project this CSO is.<br>
In this “day-to-day” video, produced for <i>El Salto</i> magazine, you can see the climbing wall, a boxing club, a skate park, with hands-on guided instruction, and a solidarity food pantry. The place even has a library with language classes and events. The narrator speaks of youth at risk in an educational system that isn’t adapted to their realities.<br>
The food pantry is for people with “renta minima”, an income of 700 Euros a month. An organizer notes that there are many ideologies in the neighborhood, Christians, Muslims, atheists, and those “who wave the flag” (nationalists). This is a “human project”, he says, during a time when many social services are closed.<br>
La Atalaya was not evicted in May. They recently won another court victory, as activists up on criminal charges were acquitted. Still, like all the <i>okupas</i> of Madrid, regardless of the important services they provide to citizens, the fate of La Atalaya is highly precarious.<br><br>
#CSOAtalaya<br><br>
LINKS<br><br>
CSOA La Atalaya represents itself, with bulletins and a rad short video<br>
https://www.facebook.com/CSOJAtalaya<br><br>
about CSOA La Atalaya <br>
https://vallecasviva.com/espacio-kult/cso-atalaya-vallecana/<br><br>
Irene Gonzalez Rodriguez, “Madrid acorrala aún más a los espacios sociales: el centro La Atalaya se enfrenta a un nuevo desalojo”, <i>Publico</i>, 05/12/2022<br>
https://www.publico.es/sociedad/madrid-acorrala-espacios-sociales-centro-atalaya-enfrenta-nuevo-desalojo.html<br><br>
A May, '22 tour video by Oriol Daviu of <i>La Marea</i>, narrated by young woman organizers<br>
"El día a día del CSO Atalaya, de Vallecas, obligado a desalojar el centro"<br>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVCy8Z6Zkhw<br><br>
Instagram <br>
Eli Lorenzi (@elisabeth.lorenzi)<br><br>
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<i>In the plaza at La Atalaya. Lucio Urtubia was a famous Spanish anarchist<br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-65570995541987195022022-09-24T12:39:00.000-07:002022-09-24T12:39:24.296-07:00La Quimera Flickers Out<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsTRy6e50sJJHMf1onRkrgpuimXMoBSKaeupXo2Pn1Pfle5a8na7bk8w2438uckWxrUs2uZL8srh2-w4x1Ue_ATWbseFxLg0VWaS1FFN-ZHAggN3AOpB-9LWq75t6VA78GRls0oPL7kr8PGtbHLOkih_dT09eI3ZyS3TcgCS05jmFSuMlw3IvjKujExQ/s1278/1%20-%2021%20sept%2022%20again.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1278" data-original-width="1024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsTRy6e50sJJHMf1onRkrgpuimXMoBSKaeupXo2Pn1Pfle5a8na7bk8w2438uckWxrUs2uZL8srh2-w4x1Ue_ATWbseFxLg0VWaS1FFN-ZHAggN3AOpB-9LWq75t6VA78GRls0oPL7kr8PGtbHLOkih_dT09eI3ZyS3TcgCS05jmFSuMlw3IvjKujExQ/s400/1%20-%2021%20sept%2022%20again.jpg"/></a></div>
<br>
[NOTE: If you just want the news of the eviction, and a short primer on the history of La Quimera – go to <a href="https://madridnofrills.com/the-eviction-of-la-quimera/" target="_blank">“Madrid No Frills” new post</a>. What follows is a rumination on the eviction and the past of the place, a ‘long read’.] References are below the text.<br><br>
So Wednesday morning the occupied building called La Quimera in the Lavapies barrio of Madrid was evicted. It had been tagged as a “narcopiso” – a drug-dealing and -taking occupied flat – by the rightwing press. For sure the giant apartment building on Nelson Mandela plaza had plenty of problems. <br>
“Narcopiso” in U.S. English is a “shooting gallery”. It is a slur on a complex social situation in a building with a deep history in the Madrid <i> okupa</i> movement.<br><br>
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What was really going on in this building? 70 people were living there, mostly African migrants. There was a bar on the ground floor, likely non-alcoholic since the clients were mostly Muslim.<br>
Leah Pattem, the English language Madrid journalist who runs “Madrid No Frills” (her reporting is referenced above) tweeted “This morning, around 70 unofficial residents of #LaQuimera in Lavapiés were evicted without any solution. Police walked a dozen men down calle Mesón de Paredes, out of sight of the press, then left them to disappear into the streets.” @LeahPattem<br>
<i>El Pais</i> reported that neighbors had asked the owner to demand the removal of the squatters so that the police could act to clear out the building. Everybody is happy that it’s closed, they say.<br>
The rightwing mayor, elected with a minority of votes by a process I still don’t understand (get ready USA) crowed how happy he was that this “agujero negro” (black hole) had been cleaned up.<br><br>
Destroying Citizen Participation in Madrid <br><br>
The rightist coalition beat Manuela Carmena in the elections for mayor. Manuela’s party, Mas Madrid, was expected to win, but the left split and the right came to power in both the city and the province. Part of the split was because Manuela didn’t support the social centers. At least she didn’t launch an eviction campaign. She was the least worst option to vote, but too few people think that way.<br>
Mayor Almeja has evicted many legalized contracted citizen-run spaces, and several <i>okupa</i> social centers in his policy of “zero tolerance” for ‘squatters’. That intolerance extends to any place where citizens might organize outside of normative state channels. The campaign is accompanied by the usual scare-lies in the press about junkies taking over your country house.<br>
Directly after their electoral triumph in the city of Madrid, the right went on a revanchist rampage of closures. It began with La Gasolinera (@LaGasoli) in 2019.<br>
La Gasolinera was an innocuous place, full of parents and kids. But they showed a film that the neighborhood councilman didn’t like, and that Vox man, the neo-fascist political party with whom the Partido Popular “center right” has allied, demanded the place be closed. Thereafter they didn’t give any excuses. They just evicted places and cancelled contracts. I’ve lost count, but it must be close to a dozen citizen-run spaces closed. Madrid is becoming a desert for open-door places.<br>
This campaign, which is hardly finished, gets petty: Most recently in the Lavapies neighborhood agents of the city tore up a tiny patch of land – Replantamos Plaza Lavapiés – that had been planted with flowers and vegetables. The activists replanted it. <br><br>
Impromptu Homeless Shelter<br><br>
In her report of that day, @LeahPattem tweeted that La Quimera had become “an informal shelter for homeless people, many of whom are undocumented migrants, and some have mental health issues and PTSD from their journey to Spain. Today, these people are back on the streets and La Quimera is empty.”<br>
There’s no question that the place was troublesome for the neighbors. The grand plaza that La Quimera faces, named for an African hero, is ringed by stores, cafes and other apartment buildings. When there’s screaming, fighting, fires and ruckus, everyone gets upset.<br><br>
So What Happened? We Don’t Yet Know<br><br>
For years, even decades, La Quimera was a useful social center. In the late ‘90s, the partly-constructed abandoned building was occupied as part of the famous series of Laboratorio <i>okupas</i>. A Vallecana activist told me she had lived there then. But it wasn’t congenial – no water, no power. A hard place to be. <br><br>
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<i>Happier days for La Q. The bar in 2016, @largarder81</i><br><br>
According to the movement wiki 15Mpedia (at: https://15mpedia.org/wiki/CSROA_La_Quimera), the CSROA La Quimera is – was – a <i>re - squatted social center</i>. ("CSROA" they call it. CSOA is Centro Social Okupado Autogestionado; "R" for "recuperado").<br>
<br><br>
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La Quimera was re-squatted in the spring of 2013 during the “Toque a Bankia” campaign, a coordinated hacking and squatting wave that responded to the corruption of a major Spanish bank, corruption that finally sent the ex-finance minister, Rodrigo Rato, to jail.<br><br>
La Quimera Feminista<br><br>
When I came upon it, La Quimera was run by a radical feminist collective. They had a bar, held events, made posters and t-shirts – normal punky <i>okupa</i> stuff. They’d given keys to a group of African migrants who were attempting to organize a union of street-sellers, the Sindicato de los Manteros. An arts agency, Hablar en Arte, funded a public art project wherein two artists, Byron Maher and Alexander Ríos Pachón, worked together to support the formation of this nascent group. I was asked to write about it.<br>
Byron and Alex made banners, took photos, and organized an event at La Ingobernable, a social center next to Medialab Prado. (La Ingob had water and power, so people could cook.) A former health center squatted in 2017, the place, like La Quimera, was also a strongly feminist <i>okupa</i> project, was. It was evicted in 2019, directly after the election of the rightwing Mayor Almeida.<br><br>
When La Ingobernable Was Still in Play<br><br>
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<i>La Ingob's doorway can be seen in the distance; in foreground, the "green wall" of the Caixa Forum exhibition space.</i><br><br>
La Ingobernable was also a player in this story. Like the Laboratorio before it, Ingobernable was a long-term project with several occupations and evictions. Writes Leah Pattem: “La Ingobernable began in 2000 with the aim to fill the support gap caused by Madrid’s shrinking public services. This independent collective provide[d] information, advice and support in housing, mental health, gender violence, immigration and more, depending on the skills of the volunteers involved.” <br>
As a key center of organizing for things like the massive 8M feminist march, the rightwing city government needed to evict them. That was also vengeance. Followers of this blog will have read of La Ingobernable’s key role in partnership with the official city project Medialab Prado, as a nerve center of social movement alliance with the short-lived municipalist government. <br>
(The municipalist platform of Manuela Carmena, however, did not give La Ingob a contract of tenancy when they could have. Not that a contract would have protected them from the revanchists; it would have delayed them.)<br><br>
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A Union for Migrant Street Vendors<br><br>
I attended numerous meetings at La Quimera of the prospective sindicato of <i>manteros</i>, which was also supported by activists from SOS Racismo. Occasionally the artists would attend. (I was the old white guy taking notes in the corner, who didn’t understand much of what was going on.) The collaboration of the artists with the <i>manteros</i> unfolded during the brief warm progressive thaw of governance in Madrid as institutions and foundations began to stretch out their tender tentacles towards social movements. <br>
Finally I submitted a long text on the process of Byron and Alex’s complex project with the <i>manteros</i>. The text was first edited, then cut from the book published by the Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme (CAPP) “an ambitious transnational cultural programme focusing on the dynamic area of collaborative arts” at: https://www.cappnetwork.com/.<br><br>
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<i>Meeting of manteros' assembly at La Quimera, ca. 2018</i><br><br>
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<i>Major meeting of manteros and Afropean speakers from Madrid and other cities at Medialab Prado, ca. 2018</i><br><br>
It always stings when a text is rejected. I intended to post the text, but life intervened, and other projects. (I have a new book! https://alanwmoore.net/memoir/ ) It’s four years later, and a new epoch after the major threats of Covid virus have lifted. So I’ll soon try to post the finished unpublished text to my page at academia.edu – https://independent.academia.edu/AlanWMoore. <br><br>
A Store for the Union<br><br>
I didn’t follow this story after the fracaso with HablarenArte. The Sindicato de Manteros seems to have done okay. They are constituted, with a website, and there is now a store, opened last year, called “Pantera”. They sell the clothing brand Top Manta, produced by the Barcelona street vendor initiative.<br>
After the social and economic trauma of the virus and its lockdowns, everything has become more unstable. Government repression and violence, however, has continued unimpeded. A delicate project like La Quimera – volunteer, ideologically motivated, rough material conditions – became corrupted. Crime never sleeps, and it doesn’t wear a face mask. <br><br>
A Loss for the Autonomous Movements<br><br>
I don’t know what happened, and I don’t know who does. I can only say this is a failure of autonomous management. No one in governance has an interest in the success of autonomy. It's not a hard thing for police undercover operations to destabilize volunteer projects. Both Swiss and NYC activists have noted how cops directed narcos and dealers to their occupied places, told them they wouldn’t be arrested if they worked there. Did the same happen at La Q? Without a diligent assembly, it easily could have, since the virus broke the organization in many places. And "easy" is what cops like to do.<br><br>
In a Utopic City, it Coulda Been Different<br><br>
Solutions can be found to the problems that beset La Quimera. "Narcopisos" can be eliminated by providing addicts with safe injection spaces. In effect, “narcopisos” are privatized safe injection spaces run by criminals, complete with illicit pharmacies. Drugs can be legalized, regulated and taxed. Desperate migrants eager to work can be absorbed into the workforce by giving them papers so employers can hire them. (They do so anyway in the agricultural districts, for slave wages, papers or no.) <br>
But solutions aren’t what politicians seek. Here they still cut off the power for months to the peripheral barrio of racialized people called Canada Real on the pretext that the district is full of marijuana plantations. ‘Look at the fancy cars parked there,’ say the supposed leaders of Madrid. (The UN charged that the situation was a violation of childrens’ rights; but you know, George Soros?)<br><br>
Punks + Crooks + Useful Fears<br><br>
The national police here still crow on TV about hauls of marijuana and hashish they’ve confiscated. As Colombian president Gustavo Petro recently said, drug prohibition “will leave us Latin Americans with one million more dead and the mafia organizations will be ten times more powerful than they already are”. <br>
In Spain? The mafias are also getting stronger, and linking up with their foreign cousins. Prohibition suits them fine. Crime rises. People lose hope. It suits authoritarian-curious governance too; it’s a good pretext for increased repression. Like the long-term punishment the rightwing has meted out to Cañada Real.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAzEiGnS5Wb6JjXimf9GgPuUo9jDTM_NjL8NjusS-e1fQNjdv-t6rnHytzjEPWAnYvmoyV447DJUqXYdMgdRo6FiOYPRk8UQcCunpDP3Y3_RFmA5EV0EZYm369lZemT5M0FIelXquk3HDIgabbGv0grNypHjguarY54RIf5P0QRxcz3xjjnjQk8CWLsQ/s3264/No%20Racism%20Madrid%20Nov%202017.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1836" data-original-width="3264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAzEiGnS5Wb6JjXimf9GgPuUo9jDTM_NjL8NjusS-e1fQNjdv-t6rnHytzjEPWAnYvmoyV447DJUqXYdMgdRo6FiOYPRk8UQcCunpDP3Y3_RFmA5EV0EZYm369lZemT5M0FIelXquk3HDIgabbGv0grNypHjguarY54RIf5P0QRxcz3xjjnjQk8CWLsQ/s320/No%20Racism%20Madrid%20Nov%202017.jpg"/></a></div><br>
<i>Anti-racist demo in Madrid, 2017</i><br><br>
When La Quimera was closed I tweeted that it was a “racist attack”. Did the officers barge in with flash-bang grenades, screaming racial epithets like in USA? Likely not. (The courts send an official witness, a <i>letrado de administracion de justicia</i>, to such events, but their report is not public record; it can only be accessed by parties <i>interesado en este proceso</i> – lawyers for the arrested persons, for example.)<br>
I’m not a reporter. I’m a shy reader and direct observer. But I did wander a bit, watching the police that day, parading around in front of La Quimera. Everyone standing around the plaza was studiously disinterested in them. No mobilization. The community accepted this action without complaint. I found the offices of SOS Racisme closed.<br>
I chatted with a black man on the street whom I saw scribbling in his notebook. He was writing poems. He was a rapper, “Bey Uno Bey”, he said (B1B?). He was sitting on the sidewalk outside a park on calle Lavapies where Africans usually congregate. It is gated up “for renovations”, By this, and now the eviction of La Quimera, I can see that African migrants in this barrio are being denied every place in public space where they might organize, socialize, and have a life together besides aimless hanging out.<br>
So yeah, a racist attack.<br>
And it’s happening to everybody all over the city. As Ruben Bermudez asks in his brilliant photo essay book -- <i>‘Y tú, ¿por qué eres negro?’</i> / And you? Why are you black?. It's a question as well to a white person, on the same order as that posed by Norman Mailer's infamous 1957 essay "White Negro". We’re all being deprived. Some much more than others. So where is our “army of hipster revolutionaries who can bring about an urban utopia”? <br>
They’re around, hanging in the shadows. Perhaps they all have long Covid. But they’ll be back.<br>
<i>La lucha continúa.</i>And I’ll blog it as I can.<br><br>
LINKS<br><br>
After her tweets, Leah Pattem posted the first English language report on the eviction on her blog.<br>
https://madridnofrills.com/the-eviction-of-la-quimera/<br><br>
Patricia Peiró, “Desalojado uno de los mayores edificios ocupados del centro de Madrid: ‘Era el gran hostal de la delincuencia’”, 21 sept 2022<br>
https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2022-09-21/desalojado-uno-de-los-mayores-edificios-ocupados-del-centro-de-madrid-era-el-gran-hostal-de-la-delincuencia.html<br><br>
I haven't blogged continuously on the eviction of occupied and legalized citizn spaces, but it's been a continuous campaign. I last posted on "Flxible Batons and Social Unions" in May of 2021).<br>
http://occuprop.blogspot.com/2021/05/flexible-batons-and-social-unionism.html<br><br>
Early fightback attempts to the eviction campaign. I must investigate their status now.<br>
Susana Albarrán Méndez, “Nace la red de espacios de Madrid autogestionados”, 28 ene 2020 16:30
@SusiQiuMad<br>
https://www.elsaltodiario.com/centros-sociales/nace-red-espacios-madrid-autogestionados<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHPaOwN_yGWMk_0XkRRUGavD0MaFiM46rOxpF0gDdp0uGFczG4cDytwbEUM7LLbHtHKj2LoslssQZqzz-2qEWKQgtVkdLiJqkiCzRxTOy71-p7tyETRzokKHhUJT9utZUekVAN5lTKJ_3O17oPAAQjt0gq7SJSTTH-a39rEeKQ0IfxTZYr7lWqLZ5aoA/s1351/ruben%20bermudez%20book.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1351" data-original-width="1080" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHPaOwN_yGWMk_0XkRRUGavD0MaFiM46rOxpF0gDdp0uGFczG4cDytwbEUM7LLbHtHKj2LoslssQZqzz-2qEWKQgtVkdLiJqkiCzRxTOy71-p7tyETRzokKHhUJT9utZUekVAN5lTKJ_3O17oPAAQjt0gq7SJSTTH-a39rEeKQ0IfxTZYr7lWqLZ5aoA/s320/ruben%20bermudez%20book.jpg"/></a></div><br><br>
Toque a Bankia / Touching Bankia<br>
Portada » Toque a Bankia<br>
http://marnunez.art/trabajos-de-arte/arte-colaborativo/toque-a-bankia/<br><br>
alexander ríos, artist<br>
https://alexanderrios.wordpress.com<br><br>
Byron Maher (@byronmaher) / Twitter<br>
The Daily Edit – El Salto: Byron Maher - A Photo Editor<br>
https://aphotoeditor.com/2021/04/06/the-daily-edit-el-salto-byron-maher/<br><br>
Sindicato de manteros de Madrid<br>
https://www.sindicatomanteros.org/<br><br>
URL for the PDF “Narrating Collaborations” English and Spanish version<br>
This book does not include my text, but it does document the artists’ collaboration with the <i>manteros</i><br>
https://www.cappnetwork.com › uploads › 2018/07<br><br>
Jose Carlos, "El Sindicato de Manteros de Madrid acaba de abrir Pantera, su primera tienda de ropa para escapar de la criminalización y la precariedad."<br>
https://www.madridlowcost.es/el-sindicato-de-manteros-de-madrid-abre-pantera-su-tienda-de-ropa/<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbxVHIAFcE5CwzcLu-yEbDo7eo4WUTFBqS6uQltnLOow_bUc4VUobHnxypFUzveIV2w_InmNaEW8qKdT700bD1FDAg4QTIU2ZKWGbrphakfpMrK7kYBacacUkuE2VPUQxtNcLR_Da1jVm9_LLXFN5euQwm3uenpxOSCvNyia84S8aiN_hMsyy_f4OQsQ/s960/Sindicatos-de-Manteros-de-Madrid2.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbxVHIAFcE5CwzcLu-yEbDo7eo4WUTFBqS6uQltnLOow_bUc4VUobHnxypFUzveIV2w_InmNaEW8qKdT700bD1FDAg4QTIU2ZKWGbrphakfpMrK7kYBacacUkuE2VPUQxtNcLR_Da1jVm9_LLXFN5euQwm3uenpxOSCvNyia84S8aiN_hMsyy_f4OQsQ/s320/Sindicatos-de-Manteros-de-Madrid2.jpg"/></a></div><br><br>
Sandra Moreno, 04/08/2021 - 05:00, "Salir del 'top manta' para vender 'merchandising': el proyecto para alejar a los manteros de la calle"<br>
https://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/2021-08-04/top-manta-merchandising-economia-negocio_3195115/<br><br>
Sam Jones, “‘You kind of die’: life without power in the Cañada Real, Spain”, Wed 27 Oct 2021 <br>
Little has changed in Europe’s largest shantytown since the UN said the lack of electricity ‘violates children’s rights’ in 2020<br>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/27/you-kind-of-die-life-without-power-in-the-canada-real-spain<br><br>
Kyle Jaeger, “‘Democracy Will Die’ If World Leaders Don’t End Drug War And Pursue Different Strategy”, September 20, 2022<br>
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/colombias-president-tells-un-that-democracy-will-die-if-world-leaders-dont-end-drug-war-and-pursue-different-strategy/<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8-9TBOw--3b8k6dAMpJ-JHaQrz3H5R6YjbcJOWXJUpv544rzzkVlca5UHK0CN3LuamU4sq4pBx6ToUuSIwv_A40LAO9LRDD0jTowiMXBJhU-TauylZzAZ5KqASVX9bBYRC9TQi1EBk10Cn0q6R6RPLoZSLSi7RqbZOJ1v1MgzxFNf3gyiT1G0aIsQyQ/s2592/anti-tourist%20graf.JPG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2592" data-original-width="1944" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8-9TBOw--3b8k6dAMpJ-JHaQrz3H5R6YjbcJOWXJUpv544rzzkVlca5UHK0CN3LuamU4sq4pBx6ToUuSIwv_A40LAO9LRDD0jTowiMXBJhU-TauylZzAZ5KqASVX9bBYRC9TQi1EBk10Cn0q6R6RPLoZSLSi7RqbZOJ1v1MgzxFNf3gyiT1G0aIsQyQ/s320/anti-tourist%20graf.JPG"/></a></div>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-76578495962931797092022-05-18T03:54:00.001-07:002022-05-18T03:54:33.222-07:00NYC -- Online Squatter Zines in Shop/Museum Collab<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtWld94sd58-VrgyycJEaJVpjIVBe_SaZ40H3YSZxHRxiyEzqr8Di5Nxw43kseu2G2d78ntlvbaAQZN93o6v8Dvv-AjCYVEcANL_XQ4fP7y210h3uUz-1hgg13nZI_-plPUxr9hPybjlv4ZNXoKaZzguElzuQSki_ZTmuvskHkbi6vyamPJQ7a0YU1rg/s656/squatter%20zines.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="656" data-original-width="492" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtWld94sd58-VrgyycJEaJVpjIVBe_SaZ40H3YSZxHRxiyEzqr8Di5Nxw43kseu2G2d78ntlvbaAQZN93o6v8Dvv-AjCYVEcANL_XQ4fP7y210h3uUz-1hgg13nZI_-plPUxr9hPybjlv4ZNXoKaZzguElzuQSki_ZTmuvskHkbi6vyamPJQ7a0YU1rg/s320/squatter%20zines.jpg"/></a></div>May 17—June 3, 2022<br>
38 St Marks Place<br><br>
In celebration of Lower East Side History Month, Printed Matter / St Marks asked the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) to organize a window installation of zines and ephemera from the MoRUS archives. Self-published zines are a cultural mainstay of the Lower East Side, allowing diverse subcultures to document their scenes, as well as to share new music and writing, and distribute political literature and propaganda.<br><br>
You can find copies of displayed zines inside Printed Matter / St. Marks or in MoRUS’s virtual zine library at moruszinelibrary.org/.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVzmXNdMn12LvPJAtV2npv7tdF_QYtGiacb2S89ioYxdBsiJdGksKZ7WYwktOp83FJ-8TEe6mPq0fpzIk6nfZNW0lN-IC3Q_ysc71xaWltxcIPjnA2w2sMgrtgaBhL4PHia-WYjESbx0wGCRFCKKTJeW34Rrh5pBdmQoryFA04Ges6lXgjxWRQtm3nGw/s2862/Morus%20online%20Zine%20Library.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1488" data-original-width="2862" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVzmXNdMn12LvPJAtV2npv7tdF_QYtGiacb2S89ioYxdBsiJdGksKZ7WYwktOp83FJ-8TEe6mPq0fpzIk6nfZNW0lN-IC3Q_ysc71xaWltxcIPjnA2w2sMgrtgaBhL4PHia-WYjESbx0wGCRFCKKTJeW34Rrh5pBdmQoryFA04Ges6lXgjxWRQtm3nGw/s320/Morus%20online%20Zine%20Library.png"/></a></div><br>
A zine by Frank Morales, NYC member of SqEK<br><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-89684228133816882292021-10-19T02:44:00.011-07:002021-10-23T08:13:51.294-07:00On Learning and Un-learning
Autonomous self-organized education, mutual aid learning, is a cornerstone of radical organizing. Institutions – the creatures of the state, of churches, and of immoderate wealth – cannot be trusted..<br>
In addition to <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-i8cZTEkUc0eVLbshD8fW9UdpYLLH3uJjpCMIz7Kjjxrm2iXOfcC6lJtFbApXQ9I7rcCCMcyuxiLbVMGLmfT4PHbEJC-gfs2FfH3_XUCB3pWdIPlh5PJ90f-NlncDYujlSe9B4dXOaBDk/s626/zapatistas+sailing.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="626" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-i8cZTEkUc0eVLbshD8fW9UdpYLLH3uJjpCMIz7Kjjxrm2iXOfcC6lJtFbApXQ9I7rcCCMcyuxiLbVMGLmfT4PHbEJC-gfs2FfH3_XUCB3pWdIPlh5PJ90f-NlncDYujlSe9B4dXOaBDk/s320/zapatistas+sailing.jpg"/></a></div>the historical examples of leftist workers self-education, a staggering number of autonomous learning projects have been launched in the last 20 years. (<i>See note below for a precis of some of them.</i>) The main initiators of more recent ventures have been artists. As constant learners, of new processes and new ideas, and as a special class of precarious workers, artists need to socialize seriously – and learn things together.<br><br>
<b>From Across the Sea</b><br><br>
This year European anti-capitalist movements received a morale boost from the visit and tour of a group of Zapatista activists. They call it the 500 year “reverse invasion” from Chiapas. The anniversary is Cortez´s conquest of Mexico in 1519-21. The company crossed the ocean on a sailing ship, and arrived in Madrid this summer. Since then the Zapatistas have been touring the European continent, meeting with activists all over Europe. Their strength comes from their long experience of organizing their largely indigenous communities and battling for autonomy against an angry state in the province of Chiapas. The poetic language of their statements is especially influential, as it is articulated by their principal interlocutors to the non-indigenous world, most notably Subcomandante Marcos.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGi_rI_jhnXrYUfO_MGn1ErBWxFfBE-5rMbOPcpi6fFWPrzA52yTctjI0Z1sr1dJN93Putl4APlXsHet94O-zeiEUgSI3tNk-qjUrkEzGZggZBm8qIt7gsnqTokxQ9LpOKwdPiH_wCRUEQ/s1020/Pintura+de+un+zapatista+identificado+como+Camilo+a%25C3%25B1o+2013.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1018" data-original-width="1020" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGi_rI_jhnXrYUfO_MGn1ErBWxFfBE-5rMbOPcpi6fFWPrzA52yTctjI0Z1sr1dJN93Putl4APlXsHet94O-zeiEUgSI3tNk-qjUrkEzGZggZBm8qIt7gsnqTokxQ9LpOKwdPiH_wCRUEQ/s320/Pintura+de+un+zapatista+identificado+como+Camilo+a%25C3%25B1o+2013.jpg"/></a></div>
<br><i>Pintura de un zapatista identificado como Camilo año 2013</i><br><br>
<a href="https://hemisphericinstitute.org/es/su10-tourism/item/879-su10-brief-historical-background-zapatista-movement.html" target="_blank">The Zapatista movement</a> announced itself in 1994 at the same time as the notorious NAFTA free trade treaty came into effect. They opposed themselves specifically to this neoliberal dreamworld which has since blighted working class prospects on both sides of the border, and especially devastated Mexican campesinxs. In the mid-90s the Zapatista movement inspired activists in the USA with the idea of “counter power”, exodus, and the need to set up alternative institutions. Anarchists opened <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infoshop%3Cbr%3E" target="_blank">infoshops</a> and <a href="https://we.riseup.net/neanetwork/skillshares-and-trainings" target="_blank">skill shares</a> all over the country. In time, the practical drain on scarce resources closed many of these early places, but many remain and new ones opened. In Europe, the Zapatista example boosted left movements, together with the powerful mobilizations of the Global Justice Movement against the World Trade Organization ministerial meetings which spread free trade agreements across the world. <br>
Unlike the hapless US anarchists, who had to pay rent, radical left movements in Europe occupied and maintained large building social centers which served as centers for organizing the demonstrations in the different cities where the WTO meetings happened.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyMKS2k6CQvt3PiyLBuKrT0YLaj38utLOjorT4no8Od4tAXsbp_hv_O8cZ9dB5DC1Sq747bxEBGi-0V-A89aRcMDldVh-ZrmWftnVBHt7DPs_7_DsHWvPheJihM7SwxkTNBmFIQvqLZRad/s1024/Zapatistas+invade+Italy.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyMKS2k6CQvt3PiyLBuKrT0YLaj38utLOjorT4no8Od4tAXsbp_hv_O8cZ9dB5DC1Sq747bxEBGi-0V-A89aRcMDldVh-ZrmWftnVBHt7DPs_7_DsHWvPheJihM7SwxkTNBmFIQvqLZRad/s320/Zapatistas+invade+Italy.jpg"/></a></div>
<br>
<b><i>Un Encuentro</i> in Madrid</b><br><br>
In September of this year, the Institute of Radical Imagination hosted a four-day program to coincide with the arrival of the Zapatista contingent in Madrid. <a href="https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/activities/precipice-time" target="_blank">“On the Precipice of Time: Practices of Insurgent Imagination”</a> involved both activist groups and institutions, among them the Reina Sofia Museum, Hablarenarte, Centro Cultural La Corrala, and the social center La Villana in the barrio of Vallecas.<br>
Among the many participants, I had a chance to meet with Alessandra Pomarico from the alternative learning platform <a href="https://www.fhu.art/" target="_blank">Free Home University</a> (Italy) and Nikolay Oleynikov, part of the <a href="https://chtodelat.org/" target="_blank">Russian group Chto Delat</a> (“what is to be done”, the title of a famous tract of Lenin). I took notes on our talk, and include them below. <br>
As well as participating in the <i>encuentro</i>, the two had set up part of a related exhibition with the poetic title <a href="https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/category/somos-fragmentos-de-la-luz-que-impide-que-todo-sea-noche/" target="_blank">Somos fragmentos de la luz que impide que todo sea noche"</a> (We are fragments of the light that prevents everything from being night). That show, curated by Natalia Arcos and Mao Mollona, took place in a floor of La Corala, a charming obscure museum of popular culture, in a restored antique Madrid housing block.<br>
The <i>Somos fragmentos</i> installation was a low-budget magical passage into a “Zapatistic” world, starting with video bits from Vietcong and Bruce Lee movies – “what the Zaptistas watched in the jungle” – and others of the campesinos chatting in the fields, raising schools and such. These videos, many by indigenous filmmakers from Chiapas, among them Liliana K’an Lopez, Delmar Penka Méndez-Gómez, Maria Sojob – engaged themes of women’s struggles against extractive capitalism (e.g., mining), ancestral knowledge, and the tensions between memory, tradition and historical change. A special guest video was by Francisco Huichaqueo, a Mapuche from southern Chile who also worked in Chiapas.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLkNwKwZ-4G36aIMq1NuGf4Le_P52OKd4Lg86nZz_5pEig5U_yew6cfIwYP0RMZPtza-boxHjgW30LFpC3X_4nSlnAOv-TAhyr-okuqSYNhui1yEGkNZMIQweH4qfF7YQ8tO8ckHNbsXXh/s365/Liliana+Kan+Lopez.webp" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="243" data-original-width="365" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLkNwKwZ-4G36aIMq1NuGf4Le_P52OKd4Lg86nZz_5pEig5U_yew6cfIwYP0RMZPtza-boxHjgW30LFpC3X_4nSlnAOv-TAhyr-okuqSYNhui1yEGkNZMIQweH4qfF7YQ8tO8ckHNbsXXh/s320/Liliana+Kan+Lopez.webp"/></a></div>
<i>Still from "U Madre Luna" by Liliana K'an</i><br><br>
(The Reina Sofia museum showed a concurrent program of indigenous filmmakers, called <a href="https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/activities/tomorrow-light-will-be-others" target="_blank">
"But Tomorrow the Light Will Be for Others: Film and Indigenous Lives".</a>)<br>
After the numerous screens of videos, some rooms in the show at La Corala, artisanally spangled with tiny lights, recalled the brutal Acteal massacre of 1997 with impromptu altars on the floor. <br>
Alessandra and Nikolay installed a “Provisory Learning Station” in the show. Their effort began with a long wall of printouts of collages, a timeline of Zapatista history enhanced with sinuous painted lines, map collage works done with migrants’ histories, and posters from the “Zapantera Negra” project of 2017, which brought Emory Douglas of the Black Panther Party to Chiapas. There was a library, and the last room was occupied with a table and chairs for a “Provisory Learning Center” open to groups to convene and discuss the content of the exhibition.<br>
The show includes artifacts of the processes of learning and un-learning that the Zapatistas, Free Home University and Chto Delat have been using. What is exciting about this way of learning is that it is politically situated – built on a concrete set of social demands, and highly creative – using a combination of artistic processes and poetic story-telling.<br>
<br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMcZNteHXQu2F0i-pr6zhSHSa6_c6Sy2mdcoM1h9W86tIUG_Rmkp7ZJb8h56WUhHfCThr7ppfDfE47Xt53f_vXfc3QAeAdQXFWqOoBxZ4ms35soHk7XuwRKEVRiNNkjn-tfkfeToNs_S4j/s525/Zap+Negra+in+Chiapas.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="525" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMcZNteHXQu2F0i-pr6zhSHSa6_c6Sy2mdcoM1h9W86tIUG_Rmkp7ZJb8h56WUhHfCThr7ppfDfE47Xt53f_vXfc3QAeAdQXFWqOoBxZ4ms35soHk7XuwRKEVRiNNkjn-tfkfeToNs_S4j/s320/Zap+Negra+in+Chiapas.jpg"/></a></div><br>
<i>Emory Douglas in a replica tent, 2014</i><br><br>
<b><a href="https://leftturn.org/%E2%80%9Cwalking-we-ask-questions%E2%80%9D-interview-john-holloway/" target="_blank">“Walking We Ask Questions”</a></b><br><br>
How in a group to recognize, hear and honor diverse experiences, and how to bring them together so all can benefit from the learning? These are classic problems of education – not how we master a curriculum, but how we learn from each other. And further how that learning together can build a movement of struggle. This can seem platitudinous – but finally to make this happen is not so easy.<br>
I talked with Alessandra Pomarico of Free Home University and Nikolay Oleynikov of Chto Delat and FHU at a cafe inside the Reina Sofia museum courtyard. They have just produced a book, <i>When the Roots Start Moving</i>, which records in detail their and others’ experiences engaging with the Zapatistas and their ways of working.<br>
A key event in the book and in the exhibition described above was the film Chto Delat made in Italy with FHU. The making of the film was the way to “build the learning session”, Alessandra said. Together with invited artists and activists, they worked with migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, and activist farmers using natural methods to reclaim the land.<br>
“So this film takes place in this very place where these farmers live and work. We went there. We were always living together. And the film emerged by these relations that we were building. There was no script. There was a process.”<br><br>
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<i>Chto Delat in country</i><br><br>
Another “Zapatistic film” was made in Greece with the School of Solidarities, a school maintained by voluntary teachers that started to help migrants learn Greek, and the basics one needs to navigate a new place.<br>
In both places they read the fables of Subcomandantes Marcos and Galeano. These were used “a little bit like icebreakers. We read the fables. We see how they respond to all these very basic demands of the Zapatistas.”<br>
These demands are universal. They ask for a roof, for education, for freedom, for democracy, for health. “So through the fabulation, the prefiguration that Marcos transfers in this beautiful novel we activated conversations.”<br><br>
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<i>Chto Delat and Free Home University, “<a href="https://www.archivebooks.org/" target="_blank">When the Roots Start Moving</a>: First Mouvement: To Navigate Backward, Resonating with Zapatismo,” edited by Alessandra Pomarico & Nikolay Oleynikov</i><br><br>
The engagement of European activists in these processes brought up the question of going beyond solidarity, an idea and a vision that “empowered the movement in Italy at a moment when so much shredded apart”.<br>
The coincidence between the Zapatistas’ basic proposals and the demands of the Black Panther Party was the core of the earlier Zapantera Negra project. Emory Douglas, minister of culture for the BPP and Caleb Duarte Piñon of EDELO set up an artists’ residency program in Chiapas to connect and be in service with the <i>caracoles</i> of the Zapatistas.<br>
The Zapantera Negra project generated beautiful works, posters and murals, that superimposed two iconographic sytems, the propaganda of the Black Panthers and the embroidery work and corn-centered imagery of the Zapatistas, like Huey P. Newton surrounded with corncobs. <br>
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The Zapatistas, Alessandra said, “have this incredible capacity to self-reflect, and to build an archive and a process of research that is transmitted for everyone, not just the intellectual, not just to those that govern us, but to everyone…. We are not revolutionary as they are, we can only activate initiatives that make gestures toward something that we aspire to become. But the idea was to call a space of reflection about how we learn together, what is an autonomous space of learning, how we deploy them, each time maybe differently.”<br>
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<i>Migrant journey collage</i><br><br>
“So what we call space of learning is learning this, how we can un-learn all this necropolitics, this whole disruptive paradigm, and how we can learn with communities of struggle, how we can up-learn, from the bottom up, how we can produce different imaginaries so we enable ourselves to live different ways of living that are not so transactional…. Capitalism is based on the profit out of debt, the profit out of disposable bodies, disposable resources. We have to compost this paradigm. Maybe we are getting close to that. Our claim is we need space where we can learn that, collectively, horizontally. Sometimes it’s very painful, because to unlearn all our comfort zone, and all our way of living is very painful, but maybe it’s really necessary.”<br><br>
Links<br><br>
The Zapatista movement<br>
https://hemisphericinstitute.org/es/su10-tourism/item/879-su10-brief-historical-background-zapatista-movement.html<br><br>
The impact of Zapatista political thought on the west was exemplified by John Holloway’s book <i>Change the World Without Taking Power</i>. Here is an interview with the author:<br>
“Walking We Ask Questions”<br>
https://leftturn.org/%E2%80%9Cwalking-we-ask-questions%E2%80%9D-interview-john-holloway/<br><br>
<br>
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<br>
infoshops<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infoshop<<br>br>
skillshares<br>
https://we.riseup.net/neanetwork/skillshares-and-trainings<br><br>
On the Precipice of Time: Practices of Insurgent Imagination<br>
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/activities/precipice-time<br><br>
Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy<br>
http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/ccra<br><br>
milpa<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milpa<br><br>
Institute of Radical Imagination
https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/
Russian group Chto Delat <br>
https://chtodelat.org/<br><br>
Free Home University<br>
https://www.fhu.art/<br><br>
“Zapantera Negra” project<br>
https://www.commonnotions.org/zapantera-negra<br><br>
Acteal massacre<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acteal_massacre<br><br>
<b>Note on autonomous learning projects</b><br><br>
Autonomous education goes back a long way in the 20th century and before. Workers’ education circles abounded, most famously those run by anarchists in Spain and abroad under the influence of martyred educator Francisco Ferrer. Anarchist <i>ateneos</i> exist to this day in Barcelona. <br>
In the 1960s, well-known auto-education centers were set up in London and New York – the London Free School
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Free_School <br>
and the Free University of New York<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_University_of_New_York<br>
At the turn of this century, numerous other self-education initiatives were launched in Europe, many in response to the Bologna Process of regularizing curricula and university management in the European Union. A standout among them was Copenhagen Free University<br>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Free_University<br>
whose co-founder Jakob Jakobsen ahas continued investigating the history of self-organizing education, etc.<br>
http://www.jakobjakobsen.net/<br>
A sample of more recent initiatives must include the Public School, Los Angeles, California and beyond<br> (http://www.tpsla.org/) – an online platform for self-organizing classes of all kinds.<br>
16 Beaver Group (https://16beavergroup.org/), New York City and beyond – an early 21st century space that convened regular assemblies of discussion and learning, which has recently revived an online assembly.<br>
The rigorous investigations of groups like the Forensic Architecture group require learnings of a different level, more along the lines of new journalistic skills<br>
https://forensic-architecture.org/ -- NGOs step up to do this for citizens, e.g.<br>
https://tacticaltech.org/<br><br>
Although I missed the 4-day <i>encuentro,</i> discussed in the text above, one of the featured speakers was Manolo Callahan, of the Oakland, CA <a href="http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/ccra" target="_blank">Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy</a>, whom I had seen speaking to the 16 Beaver Group assemblies. The CCRA has worked with the Zapatistas directly since they first emerged, running autonomous education programs for many years. A cornerstone of Callahan’s teachings come from the indigenous agricultural <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milpa" target="_blank">practice of the <i>milpa</i></a>, a sustainable system of planting in the jungle.<br>
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<i>Works produced by Mia Eve Rollow with the Zapatistas<i><br><br>
#ZapanteraNegra #zapatistatour2021 #chtodelat #FreeHomeUniversity #museosituado #ecoversities #ontheprecipiceoftime #practicesofinsurgentimagination #thezapatistaforum2021<br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-36212116623994399432021-05-11T03:34:00.001-07:002022-01-21T03:32:42.835-08:00"Official" End of the Squatting Europe/Everywhere Kolletive<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLcCLZKiT9Y3XqdfZm3-m5AZJ-bvEScmeigtD0VcZxuyvBM_MWpiL0HNfDxISG9hdZoiEzR9Uf7mcBBnwOsxwKyCbxzFkigHkGkT-BLlJv5vegvNIDVnpzxkOtv6NVeHjd8TmXgQRNWJ4u/s418/sqek+logo.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="267" data-original-width="418" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLcCLZKiT9Y3XqdfZm3-m5AZJ-bvEScmeigtD0VcZxuyvBM_MWpiL0HNfDxISG9hdZoiEzR9Uf7mcBBnwOsxwKyCbxzFkigHkGkT-BLlJv5vegvNIDVnpzxkOtv6NVeHjd8TmXgQRNWJ4u/s320/sqek+logo.jpg"/></a></div><br>
</i>I tweeted this today --<br>
1/ The SqEK email list today ceased to exist. This group of squatting researchers and activists, dedicated to producing knowledge useful to the movements, formed in 2009. The "Kollective" -- more a community of researchers -- split in 2019, after a final meeting in Madrid. <br>
2/ We from NYC went to SqEK meets. I wrote of them in "Occupation Culture", and blogged it in "Occupations & Properties". Squatters aren't done, nor are the ceaseless attempts to evict and erase them. For updates on these precious carbuncles of the commons, see https://es.squat.net/.<br>
Alan Willard Moore on Twitter<br>
@joeblowenarbol<br>
also on Mastodon<br><br><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVZVNCYcDjdLT1IlOwkTx7kRcgatATlcO1CJB_qLD6S89ljGAxrHs8mxLJ7DDChYbEMmTbzFaAng6JwWUsL7fCBUyDTQgcjtmTmo5SVEwlwu-4cx6lsUXkiiaUfRp7AsuUuVlsDIj_Y3Ag/s1350/3+-+SqEK+book+%25282%2529.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="200" data-original-height="1350" data-original-width="900" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVZVNCYcDjdLT1IlOwkTx7kRcgatATlcO1CJB_qLD6S89ljGAxrHs8mxLJ7DDChYbEMmTbzFaAng6JwWUsL7fCBUyDTQgcjtmTmo5SVEwlwu-4cx6lsUXkiiaUfRp7AsuUuVlsDIj_Y3Ag/s200/3+-+SqEK+book+%25282%2529.jpg"/></a></div><br><br>
<b>Saddened, But Unsurprised</b><br><br>
</i>From its start SqEK was a group of academics. Many of them came from squatting movements, but their intention was to produce academic-quality research that did what social science really always aspires to do -- explain, and through accumulating knowledge, to expand understanding of squatting as a coherent social and subcultural movement.<br><br>
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<br><br>
Through that kind of work, consistently marginalized and politicized movements like squatting enter into the calculus of governance as something other than a police problem. Social science is implicitly ameliorative; it is complicit with power<br><br>
<b>Too Much Success</b><br><br>
SqEK came apart in a way from its success. After the conclusion of its biggest funded research project, called Movokeur, which saw historical maps of squats in various European cities produced through assiduous assembling research, and its blow-out 2015 conference in Barcelona (funded by Antipode foundation), there were no more big grants. The unfunded activist-organized conferences thereafter were somewhat sparsely attended. (These reprised the form of the 'squatter convergence', which will doubtless continue in future.)<br>
<br>
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<i>Alan Smart's "book machine" at work at the SqEK meeting in Rome, at the Forte Prenestino</i><br><br>
<b>Onward</b><br><br>
I could not have done my book "Occupation Culture" without SqEK. (That book, and our anthology "Making Room", are <a href="http://occupationculture.net/" target="_blank">free PDFs here</a>.) Most of that book is an account of our meetings, most of them revised from this over 10-year-old blog. As the reader may have gathered, this writer is not done with squatting, nor are many of the researchers and activists once affiliated with the SqEK group. How we will meet, network and collaborate in future years is what is now up in the air. <br>
In any event, SqEK produced an impressive body of work over its 10 years of existence. The group also laid down a marker on the responsibility of academics to return their work on marginal resistant communities back to those people to help them better conceive and execute their work against the grain of capitalist property-based society. Although never explicitly stated in its communiques, SqEK was a group of militant researchers.<br>
<br>
By the way -- this blog remains open to contributors on the themes of squatting and occupation. Even to promote your recent article or book with a small blurb. Contact me at awm13579 [at] gmail [dot] com if you are interested.<br>
<b>Adelante!</b><br><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-84968080366211933192021-05-04T11:07:00.004-07:002022-01-21T03:31:04.612-08:00Flexible Batons and Social Unionism
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</i>
It’s been pretty heavy in the runup to the provincial elections today. Tonight the left got fucked; at the moment it looks bad for the left. The snap special elections were called by weird, eye-rolling right-wing governor Isabel Ayuso (rightwing PP, "Madrid's Trump") so she could get rid of the faux-centrist Ciudadanos and govern alone, or most likely in coalition with extreme right Vox. (Ciudadanos in Murcia had proved an unreliable coalition partner, and Ayuso feared a similar threat in Madrid.) Her most reliable partner is Vox.<br><br>
<i>Illustration is of paper dolls of Madrid traditional costumes -- the chulapo y chulapo</i><br><br>
Their election discourse is a ceaseless attack on Pablo Iglesias of the Podemos party, who quit his federal post to run in this regional election. Ayuso attacks Iglesias. Ciudadanos attacks Iglesias. “Communist”, he wants to “make Madrid Venezuela”. <br><br>
<b>Return of Fascist Glamor</b><br><br>
Vox party outliers have been busy. Recently neo-nazis attacked a social center in La Paz barrio, CSA El Barco, destroying furniture and food collected for the pantry of Red Solidaria de Fuencarral. 15 of them, from the recently-formed group Bastión Frontal, attacked the center, striking some volunteers with a motorcycle helmet and a flexible baton. <br><br>
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<i>Fascist teen queen Isabel Medina</i><br><br>
</i>It’s a gas to be a young fascist in Spain now. 18-year-old Isabel Medina Peralta, daughter of a Toledo PP party man, heads the recently revived womens section of the Falange, and is a member of Bastión Frontal. She recently expressed a classic modernist anti-Semitism in a ceremony honoring the fallen of the Division Azul, Spanish fascists who fought for Hitler. The assembled celebrants, military garbed, gave Nazi salutes in a shocking video.<br>
These fascists resemble the US Proud Boys and Boogaloos. But unlike those macho fronters, mainstream ultra-rights are women. It’s a fascist answer to the transversal feminist left.<br>
This attack on the El Barco social center was not in the mainstream news, but the bullets and threatening notes sent to left and center-left leaders in the government did make the news. Vox said the leftists sent the threats to themselves.<br>
So today Madrid votes. After some shilly-shallying, mainily from the statuesque and inexpressive socialist candidate, the left finally came together and stopped squabbling. Didn't do them any good.<br><br>
<b>Meanwhile, Outside the Government</b><br><br>
</i>La Ingobernable, the social center two years in the center of Madrid, was evicted as soon as the rightwing PP took the mayoralty, in November of ‘19 (despite a court order). Now the Ingob crew has struck again. They took a vacant hostel near the Puerta del Sol, the very center of Madrid, indeed the “kilometer zero” of the country.<br><br>
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<i>Banner dropped out front of the building on calle de la Cruz -- "Oficina de Derechos Sociales La Ingobernable #DerechosParaCambiarloTodo"</i><br><br>
The building they took belonged to a family of hairdresser-landlords who had evicted another okupa in one of their numerous vacant buildings. La Pluma -- "the feather" -- called a Centro Social Okupado Transfeminista, was taken during Madrid's Pride Week, 2018, to lay down a political marker in this now quite commercialized event. @CSOTLaPluma was evicted with the help of hired thugs. A criminal complaint is still pending.<br><br>
<b>An Office of Social Rights</b><br><br>
A banner drop outside the building claimed “Social rights to change everything” ("Derechos sociales para cambiarlo todo"). <br>
Inside the assembly plans to hear the problems of citizens beaten down by the pandemic and continued low-wage precarious labor, exploitative rents, hunger and inadequate health services.<br>
This action was taken on 2nd of May, an historic date in Madrid’s history, the day of the rising against the French in 1808. Activists are said to have dressed in traditional city garb, as chulapos y chulapas, as they negotiated witih police.<br><br>
<b>Against Our Erasure</b><br><br>
This resonant date was chosen as the moment for the social movements to respond to the ceaseless provocations of the rightwing city government, which has remorselessly dismantled numerous sites of self-organized citizen participation, social centers and community gardens.<br>
(See my earlier posts on this blog, "Tearing It All Down: The Twilight of the Citizen Participation Movement in Madrid" 3/21 and "Destroying Citizen Participation in Madrid: Part 2", both March, 2021.)<br>
These spaces were not okupas. They had all been authorized by earlier mayoral administrations, some of them right wing. The new mayor ended all of them. Just as he promised he would replace the original building occupied by Ingobernable with a) a health center, and b) a museum, nothing has been done. There are no signs of any government activity to renovate any of these places as anything. The citizens have simply been cleared out and the places locked up.<br><br>
<b>Against the Logics of Neoliberalism</b><br><br>
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<br>
Invoking David Harvey’s “right to the city” (and behind Harvey Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book <i>Le Droit à la ville</i>), Duke in Madrid professor Ernesto García López writes that the evicted projects generated “common goods” through radical democratic practice. They “spawned a certain moment of disconnection from hegemonic moral universes”, the “logics of neoliberal subjectivity”. <br>
Quite simply, you don’t have to pay to hang out or particpate in those places. They are free and open to all – common goods.<br>
The rightwing neoliberal privatizers understand the danger. “[P]recisely because the adversary has understood that these neighborhood experiences pose a threat...” García López writes, “these kinds of experiences constitute one of the decisive battlefields to contest the city today and tomorrow. Now more than ever, neighborhood communality becomes a strategic scenario of the political.”<br><br>
<b>“If” – Tearing Down, Building Up</b><br><br>
The “neoliberal logic” was embodied in Ayuso’s monosyllabic campaign – “Libertad”. Freedom to what? Go have a beer, despite the confinement being practiced all over Europe; freedom to keep your bar or restaurant open with minimal restraint; freedom to stay in your residence if you are old and sick, and not be sent to the hospital; freedom to pay a doctor because the lines at public health clinics are so long; freedom hopefully not to pay such high taxes to support a socialist system. Ayuso paraded around the province, turning public events into campaign events, in a way unprecedented in Spanish politics. But not in Trump’s USA. This morning, after the PP victory, she is crowing.<br>
The citizens' centers are bad for business. People in them are not consuming. Even as the right wields the power of governance to smash these citizen centers, these kinds of centers are replanted, grown back, and ever more tightly theorized.<br>
The mayor also shut down Medialab Prado. “Moved”, it was said, but the Medialab has yet to be reconstituted in its “new location” outside the center. Medialab had evolved into the think tank of municipalism. (These complex meetings were blogged here during 2016-17.) <br>
One of Medialab’s groups, GriGri Projects, boasts an extensive array of academic and institutional collaborators. GriGri Projects centers Afro-Europeans and Latinx collaborators of color. This spring they’ve launched a series called "Un botiquín para mi ciudad" (“A first aid kit for my city”; it’s on YouTube also). They write of their intention:<br>
“In the face of the emptying of the collective senses, in the face of the cutback of community public services and the generalized privatization of life, at a time when we are faced with a reality of climate and health emergency and the devaluation of life in common as stated in the manifesto ‘Catastrophe Ethics’ , we want to propose a space from which to collectively imagine and design tools to deploy a livable life in the city of Madrid and in this way weave our common existence.”<br><br>
<b>Social Unionism</b><br><br>
Pablo Carmona, a key author of the municipalist manifesto <i>La Apuesta Municipalista. La democracia empieza por lo cercano</i> (2014), returns to an earlier conception of social unionism to explain the necessity of the social center today.<br>
A historian, he points out that the socialists passed the labor reform which broke the social contract. The young working class became a cheapened labor force with few of the rights their parents had enjoyed. Precarious work in tourism and hospitality became bedrock features of the Spanish economy. Now, 30 years later, “widespread precariousness came face to face with a runaway real estate market”, making survival a daily struggle.<br>
To confront this neoliberal “wild urbanism”, “new models of organization and articulation” of struggle are needed. Besides trade unionism – “cis-hetero male, white, with rights and sustained by family salary” – what was needed was a social union that would answer the needs of “migrants, domestic workers, <i>manteros</i> [migrant workers without papers who sell in the street], evicted and precarious young people” – in short, all those on the margins or completely excluded from the social contract of the state.<br><br>
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<i>Jack Kirby</i><br><br>
<b>Offices of Social Rights</b><br><br>
The kind of space the Ingobernable crew opened up last week, then, is to “build forms of self-organization and struggle that will serve as a meeting in the midst of dispersal”. It sounds something like the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s.<br>
“In these spaces there were activities as different as Spanish classes for migrants, or school support, solidarity pantries, rights workshops or housing counseling. All of them, forms of encounter around specific problems with the aim of fostering an idea: the construction of communities that fight for their rights.”<br>
(A living example of this is the as-yet-unevicted resistant social center ESLA Eko in Arganzuela barrio, which hosts all these activities – as well as three iterations of the JACA exhibition of radical art described in this blog.)<br>
The Social Rights Office would provide “collective advice” for problems people in Madrid confront, a cornerstone of the trade union model, and even some government offices. But these SROs would avoid “the assistance, charitable and paternalistic logic that can be produced in these spaces, to compose spaces of resistance from the community in struggle.”<br><br>
The logic is clear. The issue now is survival. When you lose the government, the only recourse is the streets.<br><br>
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<b>LINKS, REFERENCES</b><br>
[machine translations cited]<br><br>
Guillermo Martínez, “La Ingobernable vuelve a ocupar en el centro de Madrid y crean una Oficina de Derechos Sociales”, May 2, 2021, <i>Publico.es</i><br>
https://www.publico.es/sociedad/ingobernable-vuelve-ocupar-centro-madrid-y-crean-oficina-derechos-sociales.html<br><br>
Ernesto García López, “Disputar Madrid desde las experiencias vecinales”, <i>CuartoPoder.es</i>, February 26, 2021<br>
https://www.cuartopoder.es/ideas/2021/02/26/disputar-madrid-desde-las-experiencias-vecinales-ernesto-garcia/<br><br>
GriGri Projects – Convocatoria "Un botiquín para mi ciudad" (May 6-June 12)<br>
https://grigriprojects.org/acciones/un-botiquin-para-mi-ciudad/<br><br>
Pablo Carmona, Nuria Alabao, “El sindicalismo social y los Centros Sociales siguen siendo imprescindibles”, <i>El Salto</i>, May 3 2021<br>
https://www.elsaltodiario.com/opinion/sindicalismo-social-centros-sociales-imprescindibles<br><br>
e.s.l.a. EKO – Espacio Sociocultural Liberado Autogestionado ...<br>
https://eslaeko.net<br><br>
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Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-12884505308932767452021-03-28T07:54:00.000-07:002021-03-28T07:54:02.352-07:00Destroying Citizen Participation in Madrid: Part 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4ZtRRyacFetJM6jMMj65xRK6xes0swSv-O_w39jexs514Ryj5f-f5we13Lguc6ncXK41PDBYqforMsVrlixoRQEl5CXvRcnmRowcI3W8hlLuoBKAyOusQF3qCG7jnZXYNRFn033Ub6d83/s838/cuadernista.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="629" data-original-width="838" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4ZtRRyacFetJM6jMMj65xRK6xes0swSv-O_w39jexs514Ryj5f-f5we13Lguc6ncXK41PDBYqforMsVrlixoRQEl5CXvRcnmRowcI3W8hlLuoBKAyOusQF3qCG7jnZXYNRFn033Ub6d83/s400/cuadernista.jpg"/></a></div>
<i>Drawing of the demonstration for EVA, by @cuadernista</i><br>
As I blogged last time, the city of Madrid has been on a revanchist rampage to shutter all the permitted citizen-managed spaces in the city. <a href="https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2021-01-30/golpe-a-la-participacion-ciudadana.html?fbclid=IwAR3gZl8AEIlwmK9ZanUzsgbLHTNw-DoQQiCAMOcr87GQnVD6oMm_L0UT5oA" target="_blank">It started last year</a>, and has not let up. They began with La Gasolinera (@LaGasoli) in 2019, right after they beat Manuela Carmena in the elections for mayor. Manuela’s party, Mas Madrid, was expected to win, but the left split and the right came to power in both the city and the province.<br>
La Gasolinera was an innocuous place, full of parents and kids. But they showed a film that the neighborhood councilman didn’t like, and that Vox man, the ultra-right political party with whom the PP “center right” has allied, demanded the place be closed. <br>
That was the start. There’ve been several evictions since then, like the lovely <a href="https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20201207/6101891/ayuntamiento-recupera-solar-antonio-grilo-okupado-decada.html" target="_blank">Solar de Antonio Grilo</a> (see pic of mosaics) @solarantoniogrilo. The next place on the chopping block is Casa de Cultura de Chamberí (@CasaChamberi, @SomosChamberi). That’s a rich neighborhood, so it’s perplexing why the right would want to close a place where the people likely vote for them.<br>
I went to the demo to save the Casa Cultura. It started with a bang – a drum corps beating out the rhythm. A brass band further along the parade played traditional popular songs. Lots of kids, some carrying heart-rendering collaged signs. There was no sign of any political party, no angry placards, and only a couple of people wore t-shirts. (One “bruja” [witch] beating a drum, and another from La Ingobernable 1st anniversary, La Ingob the evicted social center next to the Caixa Forum tourist attraction.) <br>
<br>
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The apoliticism of the crowd was in itself a plea, albeit useless. They’ve filed a lawsuit to delay the eviction, arguing that the work of social interest should be continued during the pandemic. They cite the neighborhood food pantry (the city doesn’t do that, although some churches do), and the support group for patients from a local mental hospial. There was another demo later at city hall to bang a pan for the food pantries.<br>
The legal route did not work for EVA (#EVAsigue, @evArganzuela). They got the boot anyhow.<br>
More to the point, a group of young people "struggling for a barrio organized, joyful and combative" (Arganzuela 27 @agz27), have broken into an abandoned Santander Bank building to open a new social center.<br>
So the beat goes on….<br>
All of this is rather atypical for a city that has long tolerated a certain level of squatting – it alleviates a housing crisis they have no interest in solving. But this new administration, both in the city and the province level, is especially brutal and uninterested in solving poor and working peoples’ problems. The outlying shantytown <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/07/spain-shantytown-residents-facing-third-month-without-power-as-snow-forecast-canada-real" target="_blank">Canada Real was without electric power for months</a> last year, a scandal in Europe. Why? <br>
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<i>The garden Solar Antonio Grilo before eviction</i><br><br>
They were running so many marijuana plantations they caused blackouts, said the shameless politicians. Look at their expensive cars parked outside!, said the unrepentant legislators, as the media showed kids doing homework by cel phone flashlights and mothers gathering wood to burn for heat.<br>
If they can do that why should they care about a bunch of citizen-run spaces that provide, as the Chamberistas wrote, a “meeting point so that from mutual support a social fabric seriously affected by the pandemic crisis could be sustained.”<br><br>
#espaciosvecinales <br>
#EVAsigue <br>
#ParticipacionCiudadana<br>
@FRAVM<br><br>
NEXT: The <a href="https://www.museoreinasofia.es/museo-situado/museo-situado" target="_blank">“Located Museum”</a> Steps Up<br><br>
<b>LINKS</b> <br><br>
Merche Negro, “Golpe a la participación ciudadana: PP y Vox promueven la eliminación de asociaciones vecinales a base de quitarles los espacios concedidos”, 31 ene 2021, <i>El Pais</i><br>
https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2021-01-30/golpe-a-la-participacion-ciudadana.html?fbclid=IwAR3gZl8AEIlwmK9ZanUzsgbLHTNw-DoQQiCAMOcr87GQnVD6oMm_L0UT5oA<br><br>
Agencias, "Ayuntamiento recupera el solar de Antonio Grilo, okupado durante una década", 7/12/2020, La Vanguardia<br>
https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20201207/6101891/ayuntamiento-recupera-solar-antonio-grilo-okupado-decada.html<br><br>
Leah Pattem in Madrid, "Spanish shantytown residents face third month without power as snow forecast", Mon 7 Dec 2020, <i>The Guardian</i><br>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/07/spain-shantytown-residents-facing-third-month-without-power-as-snow-forecast-canada-real<br><br>
Reina Sofia, “Museo Situado” manifesto <br>
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/museo-situado/museo-situado<br><br>
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Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-49360227287934335282021-03-22T01:10:00.001-07:002021-03-22T01:42:00.074-07:00Tearing It All Down: The Twilight of the Citizen Participation Movement in Madrid <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi86_DBxedR9pXB6f9jHwAsOItG9LQ3MI_V92h71Dc0gM4qRoSwDVhA-va3W9PbxdzQKXsqt2X9CIJlCzeIdXe8NvQbQLUqe1rjWXEsNM88UckOwFFd6ZpGkh89thpvD4EmQWzC6ksYgLb4/s1300/EVA+mani.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="731" data-original-width="1300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi86_DBxedR9pXB6f9jHwAsOItG9LQ3MI_V92h71Dc0gM4qRoSwDVhA-va3W9PbxdzQKXsqt2X9CIJlCzeIdXe8NvQbQLUqe1rjWXEsNM88UckOwFFd6ZpGkh89thpvD4EmQWzC6ksYgLb4/s320/EVA+mani.png"/></a></div><b>What’s Wrong Here?</b><br>
It’s hard to explain these places because they don’t really have many counterparts in the USA. But they’re common in Europe, and there are many in Spain. The geneaology of citizen spaces is mixed. There’s the anarchist tradition, exemplified by the career of the education martyr Francisco Ferrer, of workers’ self-education. Some of the spaces have that tendency, most especially in Barcelona. Others are descendants of neighborhood organizations from the time of the dictator Franco. So you’d be forgiven for understanding their existence as part of a common civic good.<br>
They are places of popular animation, where people can come together to do projects that they themselves decide are useful and interesting. They don’t need approval from bureaucrats or managers, they just need agreement among themselves.<br>
They are the nodes of citizen participation, places where people can really feel a part of their neighborhood, not just a consumer.<br>
<br>
<b>We Don’t Like You</b><br><br>
Right wing politicians have never liked these places, no matter what form they take. Over the last few decades many of these citizen spaces have been set up and legalized. They were given contracts by the government in response to steady organized pressure from citizens’ groups. <br>
Now the city administration has passed to the right wing hands again. This time the traditional PP is reinforced by coalition with a new hard right neo-fascist party called Vox, and they are determined to eliminate <i>all</i> of these spaces throughtout the city, not just the few <i>okupas</i> they fulminated against during the electoral campaign. Moreover they are disordering and disturbing the operation of the principle think tank and generating center of citizen participation, a funded agency called Medialab Prado. It’s being evicted from its purpose-built building in central Madrid.<br>
Over several years, I watched the arising of spaces like these, and reported in this blog on the discourse of citizen activation across institutions and cultural agencies in Europe. Artists, architects, urbanists and activists were talking about strategies, holding conferences, generating reports and journal articles. <br>
Put queries like “strategies to activate citizen participation”, “How can you encourage public participation?”, and “What is active citizen participation?” into a search engine and they’ll come up. <br>
<br>
<b>Get Back In Line, Buster</b><br><br>
Why is the right wing so opposed to this plainly effective goal of good government?<br><br>
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The questions may seem tiresome since the answer seems so clear. Contemporary reactionary politicians, and in the case of Madrid the self-declared “center right”, have embraced the political strategy of polarization that worked so well for Trump. Spaces of citizen participation, where people of different points of view can meet, interact and decide things together can break the spell of polarized siloed political viewpoints. So that’s no good.<br>
And of course people are doing things other than consuming, so that’s no good either.<br>
To grant contracts of use to citizens for centers of self-organized initiatives means those places aren’t available to be sold to the highest bidder or simply given away to a political friend. Corruption is endemic to right wing politics in Spain, so that isn’t only conspiratorial supposition.<br>
Last month the permitted legal neighborhood center EVA Arganzuela was evicted from its premises. (It's name, EVA, means Espacio Vecinal de Arganzuela, Neighborhood Space of the Arganzuela barrio.) I went there a number of times. I blogged about its formation, in a long campaign of demand for such a space carried out with the collaboration of the nearby cultural center Intermediae in the Matadero complex. Intermediae later paid for supporting that demand when the city cut their space in half. That kind of reprisal happens when a city agency steps over some invisible line drawn in the minds of the right wing. That’s what is happening now to Medialab Prado. The agency is paying for its past political sins.<br>
<br>
<b>Break It Up, Move Along</b><br><br>
Medialab is Madrid's think-tank on citizen participation -- fablab, media center, and a place of international conferences. The director has been fired, the custom-built edifice in the center of Madrid is being cleared, and the staff moved to the periphery of the city. This is the crowning act on the on-going demolition of citizen participation infrastructure -- cultural centers, community gardens -- going on all over the city. As the right’s slogan for the May election campaign goes, "It's either communism or liberty." Citizens together apparently is communism.<br>
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<br>
I did a project at EVA. I proposed they use some machines they had to make a zine. It was tough to get it going. I had to attend several assemblies, and argue with numerous people. Finally a young couple supported the idea, and it happened. What distiniguishes that experience from normal generation of cultural projects in Madrid is I didn’t have to know somebody in the administration in order to get it to happen. It wasn’t easy, but the door was open. That’s how it is in citizen-run spaces. The complaint that these kinds of places are just “run for a group of friends” and not “public” at all demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of cultural processes. The “public” cultural institution in Madrid is solely a site of spectation. You can only look. Not touch. Everything is arranged by professional cadres. No suggestions are invited.<br>
<br><br>
NEXT: Anemic Pandemic-Era Resistance<br><br>
LINKS<br><br>
<br>
Apoyamos y defendemos Medialab Prado<br>
https://wearethelab.org/organizaciones/<br>
<br>
Jorge Otero Maldonado @jorgeotero99<br>
"El traslado de MediaLab-Prado amenaza la candidatura del 'Eje Prado-Retiro' para ser Patrimonio Mundial de la UNESCO"<br>
https://www.publico.es/culturas/final-medialab-prado-traslado-medialab-prado-amenaza-candidatura-eje-prado-retiro-patrimonio-mundial-unesco.html<br><br>
María F. Sánchez<br>
"El cierre del EVA: el desalojo de un espacio vecinal esencial durante la pandemia"<br>
https://www.cuartopoder.es/derechos-sociales/2021/01/04/el-cierre-del-eva-el-desalojo-de-un-espacio-vecinal-esencial-durante-la-pandemia/<br><br>
in English<br>
https://tekdeeps.com/hundreds-of-residents-rally-against-the-eviction-of-the-arganzuela-neighborhood-space-in-madrid-eva-is-not-closing/<br><br>
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Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-43006113282176243462020-09-20T09:46:00.003-07:002020-09-20T09:48:34.638-07:00The Terrible Horrible No Good Year 2020<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5qDpBfd8IRAPTrZgr6i_85bhX-w6whFjjDQJ23S9hWmnSqXJQs1GmOstaQw2JLOsH2cFuYb4-AoXJh2-Xnc2gpsHWwHSRx0oWjXO-M7oiEvvjTgBT4fHUhB5Y7C0kvMWjZsgvcViAl8Fy/s2048/ABF_Poster_08272020-1%25281%2529.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5qDpBfd8IRAPTrZgr6i_85bhX-w6whFjjDQJ23S9hWmnSqXJQs1GmOstaQw2JLOsH2cFuYb4-AoXJh2-Xnc2gpsHWwHSRx0oWjXO-M7oiEvvjTgBT4fHUhB5Y7C0kvMWjZsgvcViAl8Fy/s400/ABF_Poster_08272020-1%25281%2529.jpg"/></a></div>
<br>
<b>Personal Prologue</b><br>
It sure has... So, in writing here again I'll first toss out neutrality. The travails of this year have compounded with the death of my mother in Milwaukee last month. (Joan W. Moore was a distinguished sociologist, known for her work on Chicanx gangs. <a href="http://pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/ucla/clucs/jmoore.pdf" target="_blank">Her papers</a> on those projects, early instances of participant research, are at UCLA.)<br>
So I have a house to clear, an art collection to catalogue, and all those boxes, boxes, boxes of papers and books -- including numerous from the <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/housemagicbfc/" target="_blank">"House Magic" zine project</a> and the "Occupation Culture" book research -- to store until I can get back to Milwaukee and work on them again.<br>
Yes, I'm in the city by Lake Michigan -- "It's not a lake! It's an inland sea!" Right.)<br>
And, to quote from the website of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee where my mother taught most of her career: "We acknowledge in Milwaukee that we are on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee homeland along the southwest shores of Michigami, North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida and Mohican nations remain present."
<br>
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<br>
<i>Facebook post about the Milwaukee Home Show of our family art collection</i><br>
<b>Other Business</b><br><br><br>
So there is this -- the weight of the past, which I'm doing now in my parents' home before selling it and leaving town. Milwaukeeans deserve a chance to see the things which delighted my late folks as they lived in this typical midwestern house.<br><br><br>
<b>Meanwhile, "SQuatting Everywhere Kollective" Lives!</b><br>
We hope. And the <a href="%20%20%20%20Login%20%20%20%20%20How%20to...%20%20%20%20%20Groups%20%20%20%20%20Events%20%20%28Virtual%29%2014th%20NYC%20Anarchist%20book%20fair%202020" target="_blank">"(Virtual) 14th NYC Anarchist book fair 2020"</a> is kicking off next week. I'll cobble up a video for my and our books (5 years old but still realistic). And urge y'all to check it out, tune in, however you can. Technical disasters anticipated!, but a ferment of ideas and action as well.
Saludos a todxs -- en soli, /awm<br><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-70223733407771236582019-11-22T10:46:00.000-08:002019-11-22T10:46:59.661-08:00SqEK Meeting in Madrid, October 2019<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Photo of La Casika, Mostoles, Madrid, from diagonalperiodico.net</i><br><br>
The SqEK group’s 10th annual meeting was held in Madrid in late October. The Squatting Everwhere Kollective organized with Madrid social centers, and activists of the housing group PAH. (PAH, for Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, is the network of Spanish housing activists which came out of the financial crisis of 2008; they work with people displaced first for mortgage default, and more recently for privatization of public housing, resisting evictions, demonstrating and occupying.) This report is put together from collective notes shared with the group.<br>
The focus of the SqEK was “one full day on Squatting for Housing, and another day on Squatting and Migration.” Mornings were given over to presentation and discussion of research papers, sharing of activist experiences, posters, videos, etc. Evenings saw talks with activists and some collective debates. The meeting included visits to different squatted spaces across the city and environs. <br>
The conference began with a welcome dinner at the cooperative Achuri bar on calle de Argumosa in Lavapies. It’s an ‘alternative’ gathering place, hung with anti-fascist posters. <br><br>
La Casika, Mostoles<br><br>
The next morning, conferees trained out to Mostoles, a city near Madrid Central, to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/csolacasika/">La Casika</a>. An activist from the social center met the conferees to present the CSO, which is housed in an old-style low-rise building. She announced she is being evicted in early November. Squats have disappeared in Madrid Central, and now it is even rare to have squats in the periphery of Madrid. La Casika is used as a social center but offers support for people with housing issues.<br>
This social center was occupied 22 years ago by an antifascist group. Over the years, there have been many refurbishments in the house, “to keep it alive.” The program includes groups of self defense, yoga, feminists, animal rights, prison support, drug addiction assistance, and more, organized by both activist groups and neigbours. La Casika also organizes “Corto y Cambio,” a popular short film festival, and a jazz festival. There are summer concerts and wall climbing.<br>
The city administration wants to demolish La Casika as part of their renovation plan for the Mostoles city center. The collective stopped three eviction attempts. These were juidicial successes because the government made mistakes. Now in the fourth attempt, they will likely succeed. The court cases have taken different judicial paths – criminal, civil – now it's administrative.<br>
Conferees asked for consent to take photographs and make recordings. "In Spain we like to take photographs, so we can show to the outside there is many people." SqEKers were invited to a solidarity party for migrant minors in La Ingobernable squat tomorrow. [La Ingobernable center, in an occupied city university building, was <a href="https://www.elsaltodiario.com/la-ingobernable/cerraron-desalojo-madrid">evicted in November, 2019</a>.]<br>
The papers scheduled for the day: Shabna Begum > Home, squat home: exploring migrant homemaking inside a squatter movement (London) / Explorando la producción migrante del hogar dentro del movimiento okupa (Londres)
Matina Kapsali, Lazaros Karaliotas > Translating the common: Orfanotrofio housing squat for immigrants as a space of political subjectivation across differences (Thessaloniki) / Traduciendo lo común: la okupa Orfanotrofio para inmigrantes
Nikolas Kanavaris > Refugee housing Squats as Commons (Athens) / Las okupas de refugiadas como communes (Atenas)<br><br>
Bengali Squatters in East London <br><br>
Shabna Begum presented her paper, “East London Bengali Squatters, Tower Hamlets, 1970s,” a historic research on migrant home-making.in a new environment. Bengali squatters occupied whole blocks of flats in East London, Spitalfields, where centuries before the East India Company had offices. Today 41% living there are still Bangladeshi. <br>
[Note: In these notes, there is often no clear distinction between the presentation and the discussion.]<br>
In the 1950s and ‘60s, many migrant men arrived. The 1970s saw changes in immigration laws, restricting the rights of families to join them. Housing was very precarious; the men were sleeping in shifts – “hotbunking”. The local housing council had a racist allocation system. Bengalis were kept off the waiting lists, and were housed separately. At the same time, there was "popular violent racism" from National Front skinheads.<br><br>
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<i>anti-racist march in Brick Lane in summer of 1978 protests murder of Altab Ali in Whitechapel. (Photo: Paul Trevor, eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk)</i><br><br>
Bengali people formed the BHAG (Bengali Housing Action Group), a word that in Bengali means both “tiger” and “share” – a radical, fierce collective, community. BHAG activists "identified with the black power movement," adopting a racial identity. Their strategy was to squat in density, and to establish vigilante patrols to ensure security and safety. The home then extended onto the street; to be at home was understood as to be safe in your community, in your area. They did this for two years, pressuring the council to provide better conditions.<br>
For Bengali squatters in the 1970s, home was a space both meaningful and political, space for solidarity and resistance. Begum used oral history of people involved, to ask how people reflect upon those experiences, and how they feel about home. Begum interviewed five men and three women in Bengali. Everything must be translated to English. She used theory of feminist geography to explore home space as material and affective, connected to both London and home in Bangladesh. Unique problems: for example, Bengali does not have a direct match with the word "home".<br>
Begum saw this migration and squatting narrative as in danger of being lost. Other accounts of daily lives in squatting include: Matt Cook in the 1970s, worked with gay squats and their "everyday lived experience", including new family dynamics and domestic arrangements (“Gay Times: Identity, Locality, Memory, and the Brixton Squats in 1970s London”). Christine Wall (?) wrote on feminist squats in 1970s (“Sisterhood and Squatting in the 1970s: Feminism, Housing and Urban Change in Hackney”).<br>
"These are exceptional cases – more often, migrants were not organising like this." Bengalis felt directly targeted, and saw themselves as a cohesive group with a separate housing interest. They were supported by white squatters, especially legally. Squatting then was not yet criminalised. "This was also temporary for them." <br>
Since the 1990s there's been a criminalization. Because of the media campaign against squatters, many people now use the word "occupy", not "squat". Discussion of research on “racialised identity”. In London, the <a href="https://www.elsaltodiario.com/la-ingobernable/cerraron-desalojo-madrid">Remembering Olive Collective (ROC)</a> worked on issues of black education.<br><br>
Migrant Squats in Thessaloniki, Greece<br><br>
Matina Kapsali spoke about the Orfanotrofio housing squat for immigrants as a space of political subjectification across difference – “Translating the Commons”. Squatting disrupts the dominant order of cities, but constructs political spaces of solidarity. As per Jacques Rancière, “politics is world-making”. The “production of emancipatory realities” must be created by outcasts of the hegemony. While equality is presupposed, dissensus is important (citation: “Ten Theses on Politics”).<br>
The method of the paper was informal conversations with migrants & activists. Many initiatives came from a “wave of solidarity" with migrants, the “corridors of solidarity” via Turkey through the Balkans to Europe which included squats and makeshift camps, and organised legal support groups. <br>
The Orfanotrofio squat was in an orphanage owned by the Orthodox church. About 70 people lived there, families with children, 30% women. The places had rules of community. It was an institution of commoning, not a state organization nor an NGO (citation: “Citizenship as inhabitance? Migrant housing squats versus institutional accommodation” (<i>Citizenship Studies</i>, 2019).<br>
Everyday life in the squat consisted of collecting goods and provisions, making events and struggling together. The building was evicted and demolished in 2016. When it was evicted, many were moved to camps, but many were taken in by friends they made while squatting.<br>
<a href="https://en.squat.net/2015/12/31/thessaloniki-a-visit-at-the-orfanotrofio-squat/">The Orfanotrofio was an intensive political experiment.</a> There were tensions between refugees looking to work with the state and find places to stay and access services, and the squatters’ political aims to maintain autonomous spaces and not work with and resist the state.<br>
How was the built network different from previous anarcho squat networks? It used the same symbols and relied on similar infrastructure, but with so many "ordinary people participating" there were not so many commonalities with "traditional squat movements" of Greece.<br><br>
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<i>Photo of poster at Orfanotrofio squat in 2015, from squat.net</i><br><br>
Athens, the Big Assemblies<br><br>
Discussion of the big assemblies in Athens, the “great ideas” generated. “It’s very powerful to do these networks in the city." Talk of the complex situation of migrants in Greece during the summer of 2016, moving from camps to the city, country selection, the Red Cross, etc. “We always have the issue to understand if squatting is empowering people or not."<br>
Paper – “Refugee Housing Squats as Commons - The case of Athens and the City Plaza Hotel” (Nikolas Kanavaris). The hotel was in Exarcheia, famous as “anarchist ghetto". With the 2019 change of government to right wing from center-left Syriza in power since 2015, the hotel was evicted. (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/aug/26/athens-police-poised-to-evict-refugees-from-squatted-housing-projects">The <i>Guardian</i> covered the event.</a>) While many of the migrant squats were evicted; the City Plaza actually decided not be evicted, but to close voluntarily. In many rooms, people had their luggage “ready to go”.<br>
The author sought to understand the internal dynamics of the squat, “using the theory of commons”. He saw the "commoning" process as a "relational practice", "creating a new ethos". He focussed on assymetries of power relations, and tried to give them meaning. This involved theorizing the concept of "hospitality" at different scales – state, regional, local, etc., as an ethics of power and space which enables subjects to encounter and transform each other’s identity. <br>
Using a spatial approach, “I want to remap hospitality as radical solidarity”. This mapping considered spaces of organization, reception, food preparation and consumption, and the more private corridors and rooms. <br><br>
A Panorama of Housing Struggles in Madrid<br><br>
The 2017 film "La Grieta" (The Cry) was shown. One of the directors, Alberto García Ortiz, was present. The film follows the struggle of a family in social housing in the Villaverde barrio after the crisis of 2008 when the local council sells their apartment building to a North American “vulture fund”. The film explores the complex collusion of banks and politicians as well as tenant resistance.<br>
In the evening, a panel discussion on migration, shortage of public resources and squatting in Mostoles (municipality near Madrid) included activists from the collective of CSOA La Casika, the okupa “La Dignidad”, the Stop Evictions assembly of Móstoles, and the photographer and activist Alberto Astudillo.<br><br>
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The activists of La Dignidad get legal advice from a committee. One of the provisions of their new contracts was found to be abusive by the European court. “Many procedures are still stuck in court. Some we can’t appeal – but the bank can.”<br>
We got 80.000 signatures on a petition for a new housing law, but it wasn’t discussed in the Madrid Assembly (the regional government body), as it was controlled by the right wing. They were re-elected, so now it will be even more difficult. But we keep fighting! Even though most of us don't come from law, we learned things that we can now pass on to empower people.<br>
The collective Stop Desahucios Móstoles is one of about the many district assemblies against evictions in the Madrid region, which meet weekly to deal with mortgages, tenant issues and squats. The assemblies offer “peer to peer” legal support.<br>
Discussion: How do evictions happen in different places?<br><br>
Day 2 – Squatting for Housing and Commons<br><br>
Introduction to the squat EKO – <a href="http://eslaeko.net/">ESLA El Eko (Espacio Sociocultural Liberado Autogestionado)</a>, in barrio Carabanchel – and visit to all the floors and the roof, with brand new solar panels. Days before, Eko had endured a clumsy eviction attempt in the guise of an inspection.<br><br>
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<i>Banner drop outside of ESLA Eko for the JACA 2018, anarchist art show, hosted by the Ateneo Libertario de Carabanchel. "Occupations & Properties" blog reported on the JACAs.</i><br><br>
In the morning, we skipped the presentations and went to a Stop Desahucios (evictions) action in Carabanchel. Legal warnings were made in advance. The police did not show up. We stayed for a few hours in front of the door and chatted with activists and neighbours (around 30 people). Squatters had been in these apartments for more than five years. There were many more squatted apartments in the same street. Most were Roma people. Some were participants in the local housing group, the PAH or the Tenants' Union. The eviction was halted / postponed, because due to the common process in Madrid to sell and re-sell flats between investment funds and banks, the entity asking for eviction was not the same on the property title, so it was blocked by the court secretary (<i>letrado de la administracion de justicia</i>).<br>
The presence of the approximately 20 SqeKers, a big part of the mobilisation, was appreciated by the family involved.<br>
After lunch, we continued with the presentations of research works.<br>
Presentation by Hande Gulen, “Neighborhood and activism in Istanbul: space, locality and the new political forms”. <br>
Presentation by Begüm Özden Fırat, “‘Emek will not bow down to capital’ creation of urban commons and regimes of enclosure in İstanbul”. <br>
Beyond the dichotomy of "state" and "private property”, how can we "common" property? How to practice it in such a way that it's not "private" property, but something else?<br>
The occupied theater was called "Emec", which also means "labour". For generations, the theater was a subcultural space with a radical heritage. In 1987 May 1st was celebrated here, even though the holiday was generally banned. It is located in Taksim, a cultural and political hotspot of Turkey. <br>
In 2009 it was closed. In 2010, a fake "film festival opening" was announced. When people came, the protests were called. There followed monthly demonstrations against the demolition. Some marches brought 3,000 people. The demolition was seen as a symbol of the gentrification of Istambul.<br>
Some famous film people gave the movement a face. The street in front of the theatre was "kept busy" (occupied) all the time. People, "acting like the state", asked for a "common property", produced space as "common" by performing everyday acts.<br>
The theater had belonged to Jewish owners, but was confiscated after the 1942 "non-muslim citizen tax" law. Recalling this informed the participants how property is made! This is not so unlike what states do now in neoliberal times. They confiscate buildings, then sell them later [e.g., eminent domain for purposes of development].<br>
"Squatting is a way of un-making property. We have to think about how that property was made, before" …. "It's not our responsibility to change the past, but to rethink it. We have to think about violent acts that came before our activist ones today."<br>
Peter Linebaugh, a historian of English commoners of the 13th century, argues that in the construction of property, besides only "contracts", "acts" should also be considered.<br>
Questions – Why wasn't the theater occupied? It was too big. There was no neighbourhood around to hold it.<br><br>
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<i>Emek theater occupation photo from hurriyetdailynews.com</i><br><br>
In Italy there was a wave of theater occupations in 2011, like Teatro Valle in Rome. The fact Emec was in the center was considered a factor in favour of occupation. Police repression always depends on many factors. Maybe centrality makes it more likely to be evicted? Squats in Kadikoy survived, because it was just after the Gezi Park uprising. Police were not ready to attack them, especially in a "republican" neighbourhood.<br><br>
Counter-Archives <br><br>
Samuel Burgum presented on "Occupying London: Post-Crash Resistance and the Limits of Possibility" (2019). The city is an archive. The storing and interpreting of historical data establishes authority. As the state does this, it has the authority to say what the city or country is. This dynamic, played out through records offices, museums, and libraries, is especially visible in colonial situations.<br>
Derrida wrote about this: there is "no political control without control of the archive". These are centers of interpretation, with a claim to "know better than everyone else". Archives assert there is a "we", with a past and a future.<br>
In England there are groups of people making their own counter-archives. This is a way to take back control over own history. These archives are defined by their precarity, by the struggle to keep them. London has had several archives destroyed by fire, by being thrown onto the street after evictions, or currently being rained on through leaking roofs. The dilemma is to keep control over them although they are in danger? or to work with a formal collection and lose control?<br>
Example: The Black Panthers in the 1970s; the “Naming Olive” archive, named for Jamaican-born “Windrush” generation activist educator. She squatted a property in Brixton which became a center, used by Reclaim the Streets, had a printing press.<br>
Lukas Kotyk presented “Learning to be horizontal by living together: the squatted garden as a common space for the imagination” / Aprendiendo a vivir juntos horizontalmente: el huerto como espacio común de imaginación.<br>
This article was written for a forthcoming issue of <i>Partecipazione ed Conflitto</i> journal on horizontality in a squatting community. It discusses the self-management of occupied spaces, a study in "non-hierarchy". These are places without fixed positions, where one is able to work "with nobody telling us what to do", with nobody getting paid for "not nice" jobs. <br>
The key questions is how to manage horizontality? to self-manage better, and be aware of mistakes and dangers. "Within the struggle we are focused on the way we fight it" Through practice, movement actors create a "conflation of goals and means". Thus we may bridge "existential revolt" and "political revolution", through trying to have different everyday relations. Squatting seems perfect for this work, since without ownership, much of the usual hierarchy is avoided. Still it requires effort, and the invention of sophisticated forms of governance.<br>
Kotyk studied social anthropology and ethnography. He lives in a squat and tries to see problems appearing and methods of dealing with them. He worked at a house in southern France, anonymized as Cida. The house was their common and safe space, with washing machine and kitchen, but they lived on the garden and focused a lot on agriculture.<br>
In meetings they called "metel", they form a circle, and give each other two minutes each. To begin a topic you first take the opinion of all, without interruptions. If everyone talks, it's easier to be part of the discussion. This tool helps them to avoid that the discussions be monopolised. It also helps to avoid tensions, conflict. If a conflictive situation appears, it can be stopped and restarted. They try to be direct, to deal with tensions as soon as possible. To have non-hierarchical relationships it's fundamental to study these methodologies, these small tools, and how they are used.<br>
What about when hierarchies are important like, when you are doing electricity? "It can still be discussed!" It's important to keep being reflexive. It’s also about other things, like always spreading the knowledge.<br>
Evening discussions with Madrid activists from different housing groups and the tenants union.<br>
The next day the SqEK meeting concluded with time given over to internal discussion at the squat <a href="https://lacanica.org/">La Canica</a>. Recent debates on the list-serve have roiled SqEK. These concerned tensions between activists and academics over anthology book preparation, costs of same academic products, and more. It was determined that in the weeks following the meeting that SqEK will continue to exist – one of the basic questions – but now under “new management.” There will be new administrators of the list-serve, a revamped website, a new manifesto statement of purpose. More details will be posted here as they become available.<br><br>
LINKS<br><br>
La Casika<br>
https://www.facebook.com/csolacasika/<br>
https://15mpedia.org/wiki/CSOA_La_CaSiKa<br><br>
La Ingobernable evicted, Nov. 13, '19<br>
https://www.elsaltodiario.com/la-ingobernable/cerraron-desalojo-madrid<br><br>
Remembering Olive Collective (ROC) worked on issues of black education.<br>
https://rememberolivemorris.wordpress.com/<br><br>
The Orfanotrofio was an intensive political experiment<br>
Text from Orfanotrofio squat, 2015<br>
image from https://en.squat.net/2015/12/31/thessaloniki-a-visit-at-the-orfanotrofio-squat/<br><br>
The <i>Guardian</i> covered the event.<br>
Guardian: Inside Exarcheia: the self-governing community Athens police want rid of<br> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/aug/26/athens-police-poised-to-evict-refugees-from-squatted-housing-projects<br><br>
ESLA (Espacio Sociocultural Liberado Autogestionado) El Eko, in barrio Carabanchel.<br>
http://eslaeko.net/<br><br>
clumsy eviction attempt 20 October 2019<br>
http://eslaeko.net/2016/10/comunicado-intrusion-de-policias-y-tecnicos-del-ayuntamiento-de-madrid-en-el-esla-eko/<br><br>
<i>Banner drop outside of ESLA Eko for the JACA 2018, anarchist art show, hosted by the Ateneo Libertario de Carabanchel</i><br><br>
Emek theater occupation photo from hurriyetdailynews.com<br><br>
Banco Expropiado La Canica (calle Huerta del Bayo 2 -esquina calle Embajadores- Lavapiés)
an expropriated bank, part of a network of cooperatives in Madrid<br>
"La Comunidad de Intercambio La Canica es una red de intercambio de bienes y servicios con una moneda social propia y bellísima llamada, claro está, la canica." / The Exchange Community La Canica is a network for the exchange of goods and services with its own beautiful social currency, of course, the marble.<br>
https://lacanica.org/<br><br>
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<i>Photo by Alberto Astudillo from his series, “Historias: Desahucios, resistencias y derecho a vivienda digna en Madrid”
http://www.albertoastudillo.net/historias/</i><br><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-78769576029217927032019-06-28T02:17:00.000-07:002019-06-28T02:18:45.758-07:00SqEK Is Coming to Madrid this Fall<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br><i>Dos okupas del grupo La Dragona de Madrid. Foto: Alvaro Garcia for El Pais<br><br>
<i>It’s an exciting moment in Madrid politics, and not in the way we’d prefer. The right wing has regained power in the last election, at both the city and the provincial level. (Due to a split in the left, naturally.) So the social movements that made up the backbone of the Madrid municipalist movement – Ahora Madrid, Madrid Mas, whatever it’s now-to-be-forgotten formation was named – will be challenged to go back to the streets. The new rightwing city council of the Popular Party includes the ultra-right wing party Vox. They are already <a href="https://elpais.com/ccaa/2019/06/22/madrid/1561211191_952802.html">pulling the plug on autonomous spaces</a> that the city controls. And the new mayor has vowed to evict all the </i>okupas<i> they can find.<br>
So here comes SqEK to analyze the situation...</i>
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<b>First Callout for SqEK Madrid</b><br>
</i><br>
Call for Papers and other forms of participation in the SqEK (Squatting Everywhere Kollective) conference to be held in Madrid: October 23-27, 2019.<br>
Deadline for proposals July 15, 2019. [This is to plan for accomodations and facilities; more about intent to attend. – <i>ed</i>]<br>
In our 10th anniversary as an activist-research network (https://sqek.squat.net/ and https://radicalhousingjournal.org/2019/sqek/) we keep meeting once a year, at least, in a self-managed conference. This means, above all, that we try to keep it as low-cost as possible, and no registration fees are charged. If available, free or cheap accommodation will be also provided for those who request it. In addition, we will collect donations from participants with permanent jobs to sponsor those without sufficient resources to attend. Even if you don't attend, you can donate to support the contribution of precarious activist-scholars. We expect that all the participants will cooperate with the organisation and development of the encounter. <br>
Regarding the contents, we will focus on Squatting for Housing on the first day, Squatting and Migration on the second, and Squatting and Gender on the third. Please, submit your proposals according to these topics, although other subjects might be accepted too in case there are not sufficient contributions for the main ones. If there is an available time slot, we will also discuss draft papers to be submitted for the special issue on Squatting and Urban Commons (to be published by PaCo, Partecipazione e Conflitto, journal).<br>
As usual, we will start on Wednesday evening with a welcoming event. From Thursday to Saturday, we will have morning, afternoon and evening activities TBD. Sunday morning will be dedicated to evaluate the meeting and discuss about current projects, the future of SqEK, etc.<br>
Every morning will be dedicated to present and discuss papers, activist experiences, posters, videos, etc. Every evening (6-9 pm on Thursday and Friday, 5-8 pm on Saturday) will consist of a presentation by local activists and a collective debate. In between, we will visit different squatted spaces across the city-metropolitan area. <br>
In order to have a fruitful meeting for all the participants, we will ask local activists what kind of contribution they want from our side. For example: a press conference to support their struggle against an eviction threat, to record a video clip with a similar purpose, to help painting banners or designing posters, etc. We will also ask for permission to record the debates and collective interviews to be held during the meeting.<br>
If you are interested in participating, please fill in the following form and submit it to miguel.martinez@ibf.uu.se, laurabarrio28@gmail.com and alastugar@gmail.com by July 15, 2019, the latest:<br>
http://www.miguelangelmartinez.net/?2019-SqEK-meeting-Madrid-23-27-Oct<br>
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<i>This blogger will sadly not be in town… but will be coordinating events from New York City, a solidarity live stream.</i><br><br>
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<i>Recent <a href="https://www.edition-assemblage.de/buecher/fighting-for-spaces-fighting-for-our-lives-squatting-movements-today/">SqEK book publication</a>, </i>Fighting for spaces, Fighting for our lives: Squatting movements today <i>(2019)
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Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-67466535896809867152019-06-05T10:45:00.004-07:002019-06-05T14:51:37.636-07:00Hopping Kids in Leipzig Lead Electoral Victory<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>The recent Europe-wide elections have turned up mixed results. In Madrid, there is gloom on the left, as the popular mayor looks to be out. She’ll not be able to form a governing coalition, and the right wing, despite their numerous corruption scandals, is back. But in other parts of the continent, the news is brighter for the left and municipalist movements. Marc Herbst’s report from Leipzig lays out how the deal went down there.</i><br><br>
<b>by MARC HERBST</b><br><br>
Ever since the international and regional implications of a potential far right victory in the recent EU elections revealed itself, you got a sense that the government in Germany and the state of Saxony where I’m writing from was put on notice. A large rainbow coalition of pro-EU parties organized a nationwide day of manifestations. The bogeyman right wing AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) party was nowhere to be seen. The Linke, SPD, Greens, DiEM and also Merkel’s CDU participated in the Leipzig event. It was a sizable albeit bland platform, punctuated by a surprisingly good pop/techno band playing from a stage on the plaza at the end of the march. From that stage, focused and partisan announcements on the need to get out and vote were made between bands. Speakers said that besides Berlin, Leipzig was the only other participating city in the former East. It was a lovely spring day. Though the turn-out was fine, it was not the huge “get-out the vote” rally it could have been. <br>
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Over the last months, I've watched the further-left Linke party play with emerging movements and solidifying facts of the city and the wider European and global situation. Earlier this year, there was a sizeable energetic anti-gentrification march in Berlin. The march was built by networks of housing-rights movements who've marched for several years now. Last year’s turn-out should have been larger even if there were some fabulous pictures demonstrating links between the city's electric and queer-fab and cool party scene. With a strong policy initiative of returning large housing blocks to public ownership, including houses upon the symbolic Karl Marx Avenue that heads east from the center of Berlin, this year's turn-out was quite good. Rent prices have skyrocketed in both Berlin and Leipzig – both places with historically low rents. <br>
A few weeks later, Leipzig had an anti-gentrification march with a good turn-out. The Linke was prominent in the march. Speakers during the rally referenced the sizable Berlin crowd and the policy initiatives coming out of the capital city. Later that month, in the immigrant and hipster ‘bad reputation’ neighborhood of Eisenbahnstrasse near the train station, the Linke prominently appeared during the rent party/street protest to support a local bar hit by a terrifying rent increase. I just came upon the protest- I was in the neighborhood printing at the public-access risograph club and was drawn to the event by its sound-system resting in a cart in the middle of the street. The cart had Linke party flags on it. <br>
I’d been seeing the impact of Linke party branding at more official temporary, cultural initiatives. I work a few days a week in Grünau, another ‘troubled’ neighborhood, but one further away from the city center. Grünau was a model socialist neighborhood during the East German period. It was planned and built from scratch using the best socialist urban design. On the long pedestrian promenade at the core of the neighborhood, the Linke storefront is almost kitty-corner to the active indoor swimming pool and youth center, and just down the street from a series of politically oriented cultural spaces. Moreover, in the weekend before the election, I saw their party-cart everywhere in the hipster neighborhoods of the city- notably at the coolest outdoor party of the weekend; one taking place on the newly cool fields by the disused Plagwitz train station- at the cafe by the new-model community gardens and kid-friendly DIY playground. <br>
Over the past few months, in the context of the ongoing issues of housing rights, immigration and lifestyle politics, it's been hard to miss the climate movements. Kids I know have begun to participate in the Fridays for Future climate strike emerging from Greta Thunberg’s resistance to attending school if there would be no future to learn for. The day of the March 15 Friday strike was cold and humid, but it only seemed to amplify the pre-teen and teenage energy of the event; directed at the climate but overplayed by the standard insurgencies of kids– sexuality, popularity, and unbound energy trying to seek an outlet. This march was large and ended with a mass of kids excitedly crowding out the city’s opera house steps, then joining those in the adjoining plaza in a punk rock pogo dance… interspersed with speeches for climate justice. <br>
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The last Fridays For Future before the EU election was larger. The UK initiated Climate Rebellion group was there. I attended their organizational meeting, mostly made of college students and academics. At that Climate Rebellion meeting we had to constantly interrupt the conversation to get more chairs, to introduce more people. That was stunning in itself. But the final pre-election Fridays for Future march was really something else. It was large and contained radical content.<br>
A youth organizer I know excitedly led the chant, “hopp, hopp, hopp, Wachstum stopp.” This translates to the directly counter-capitalist chant, ‘hop, hop, hop, stop economic growth.’ She was leading this chant because she knew that as we entered the square, activists would be rappelling on ropes down the side of the local mall – the Höfe am Brühl. The climbers unfurled a banner with this slogan. When the climbers were eventually arrested, kids from the crowd began to yell the ultimate curse to any mall, “Höfe am Brühl is not cool!”<br>
What concerns kids politically, and what realities confront them as problems in their tender years often goes on to dominate the politics of their later life. They have much more time than adults to brew in their anxiety and make the architecture of their potentiality. Kids have parents who see their anxiety. The kid organizer I know has parents whose family is established in the creative scenes of the city. It seems like a mistake, but a good one, that the Greens were able to capitalize on this current foment. It should be no surprise. While the far right took one of the greatest number of votes in many of Saxony’s electoral districts outside of Leipzig, it was the Greens and the Linke that won the city. While the right did well in Saxony, nation-wide, their vote sank and the Greens, buoyed surely by this energy, surged. <br>
My friend and fellow researcher Michelle Teran dug up this bit from Germany’s Fridays for Future WhatsApp feed that counts coup. I’ve translated it from German to English.<br>
“Hey People, we have been unbelievably rocking over the last 5 months, and we have done more for the climate movement than anyone has done before us. Something historic has just happened. All together, we have transformed the European Elections to the Climate Elections. After the vote, every party’s statement, except the AfD, said that protecting the climate was THE theme of the election. The media has also taken to use our concept of the ‘climate vote.’ Almost all the main candidates are speaking about protecting the climate. (signed) Franzi Wessel.”<br>
In a way, it is heartbreaking that any party should benefit from the failure in governance that climate change represents. It is heartbreaking because the fear of disasters known and unknown are real, and terrifying. Yet, in the politics of a continent and a world, it is also notable and good that systems try to transform individual and common concern into good political developments. We should watch with guarded optimism how things develop. <br><br>
<i>Marc Herbst is artist, editor, researcher, some-times activist with a deep and inter-disciplinary approach across the ranges of art, art theory and social sciences and experience with natural sciences. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest – www.joaap.org, an independent project publishing (in print and online) texts on art, culture and critical theory. He likes the name "weirdo think-tank" for the Journal Project. He completed his PhD at Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies in October 2018.</i>
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<br>Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-635911714730698039.post-67224776905772962252018-11-29T11:04:00.002-08:002018-11-29T11:07:46.944-08:00“Fighting Where We Stand” – Transcript of the Submedia Video Program<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Blogger's note: <a href="https://sub.media/video/trouble-14-fighting-where-we-stand-struggles-for-autonomous-spaces/">This video</a> is one of the best I've seen in a long while at putting together several strands of recent strong movement activity – all of it centered on land occupation and resistance. Thanks to the Submedia collective which produced it, “Occupations & Properties” here reproduces the English subtitle script of the 30 minute episode.<br>
The stories in this episode start with the famous ZAD in France, the years-long airport resistance. There was a grand compromise on the airport construction, and an agreement to vacate with one faction of the encampment. Another wanted to preserve the utopia. This part speaks about internal conflicts in occupation, a topic that goes beyond propaganda.<br>
Much of this episode focuses on Native American resistance to oil companies and pipeline construction. There is much along this line, from the newly vindicated, utterly unquaint Native American reasoning on stewardship, wisdom about healing within nature, and their methods of confronting and questioning agents of the state and corporations who enter their lands.<br>
From Slovenia, urban squatters speak about “the twin minefields of eviction and legalization” – (exactly the dynamic described in Amy Starecheski's book “Ours to Lose”) on NYC squatters' legalization).<br>
<b>Here follows the subtitle script:<br>
(Sorry, I haven't put in the names of the speakers yet...)</i></b><br><br>
Greetings Troublemakers! ... welcome to Trouble. <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/improper-names">My name is not important.</a> From the endless turf battles found within the animal kingdom, to the mechanized carnage of modern warfare, the drive to control territory is a potent and recurring source of conflict.<br>
Yet within the artificial borders that fortify the so-called "developed world", this type of conflict, like all others, is carefully managed. Which is not to say it doesn't exist. People quarrel with their neighbours all the time, even in suburbia and in places like Chicago's South Side,young men routinely get shot fighting over street corners.<br>
As groups and individuals, we face differing types and levels of conflict in our everyday lives... but at the end of the day, the ultimate manager and mediator of these conflicts is the state. Through their police, courts and prison systems, states enforce laws that reproduce power dynamics, restrict our choices, and regulate our behaviour.<br>
The allocation of resources is determined by the logic of the so-called "free market", whereby ownership over land is given official sanction by the state-backed illusion of private property. The key to the state control over our lives lies in its ability to regulate all conflict within a given physical area. It follows, then, that those of us seeking to steal back the power to resolve conflicts on our own terms must first draw a firm line in the sand, and deny access to the state and its sophisticated apparatus of social control. <br>
In order to meaningfully assert collective autonomy, we must be capable of defending territory. Over the next thirty minutes, we will explore three autonomous zones serving as living embodiments of defiance to state rule: the ZAD, or Zone to Defend, in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France; Unist'ot'en Camp located on the Wet'suet'en territories of so-called BC; and the autonomous spaces movement in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Along the way, we will speak with a number of individuals who are flaunting state authority, asserting control over the spaces they inhabit... and making a whole lot of trouble.<br>
The ZAD has many realities. But mostly it's kind of a community where people try to experiment other ways to live their social and political life. In the end of the 1960s, somebody came up with an airport project for this area, Notre-Dame-des-Landes. And during all those years, the bocage [a terrain of mixed woodland and pasture] itself is put under the status of ZAD which basically means Postponed Planning Zone, which was transformed one day [renamed] into Zone to be Defended.<br>
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So there was a big resistance with lots of different forms of action, including sabotage, black bloc demonstrations, quite offensive defense. Occupying land is quite similar to a political squat, but with a strong dimension regarding the environment and the territory we live in.<br>
During all those years, we did not simply organize politically against the airport, but we also made connections locally. We took care of the land. Some of us settled for good. And we thought out the future of the ZAD together. So it's been ten years now that structures have been created on the ZAD to figure out how to live as autonomously as possible. It necessarily means that we have to be able to answer our basic needs. Like be fed, sleep under a roof, have access to medicine. It's a place that has become a place where you can live for free. You can build your house, your cabin...<br>
The occupation movement was created at a time when some of the peasants had called for illegal occupation themselves. When squatters came in 2007 they were close to anarchist and/or antiauthoritarian ideas. Trying to work together and allowing for a diversity of tactics, and knowing that that is our strength.<br>
We're fighting against this state and this project. Also we come here.... we fight against things, but we also try to create things together. And making things available and trying to share. That everybody has possibilities and access to a place to live... to water and food.<br>
[<i>Blogger's note: The discussant directly engages problems in the self-organization of the ZAD, and launches a critique of one clique there. This is unsurprising on the left, and less so in an anarchist video since the critique is directed at an authoritarian tendency. Still, it's a bit of a surprise to this blogger that this video includes this kind of reflection. Contemporary radical left discourse, especially in squatting, has moved far beyond propaganda.</i>]<br>
So there's a kind of hegemonic ideology. Diversity of tactics has been much more of a theory for the past few months. Certain ideas that become ways of judging people, of excluding people from discussions.<br>
So yeah there's some kind of really well-organized, sort of communist ideas that have taken a lot of place in the past few years that will have a kind of discourse about "you have to go to our meetings, and if you don't agree you might have to leave, or shut up... or maybe later on we'll come beat you up with baseball bats."<br>
Some people who used sabotage as a tactic have been pressured and even attacked for having dug holes in the concrete
of one of the roads which crosses the ZAD. And someone especially was put in the trunk and taken out of there, molested and left almost naked in front of a psychiatric hospital. And it's been some years that contesting this hegemonic power of the dominant group has been much more difficult. They tend to concentrate wealth. To concentrate strategic discussions regarding the movement. Bonds with local farmers and people governing other institutions of the movement. And they of course, deny it when it comes to critique. We provoked a number of discussions on the place that their reading group, called the CMDO, has been held among us. But they never recognized, publicly, their group as a group of power. And thus, never wanted to share that power with other groups or individuals.<br>
It was mainly this group of persons which pushed towards the negotiations during the evictions.<br>
Well as you can see all around us it's pitch black. People were not expecting the expulsions to happen until 6am this morning, local time here in France. Tiny groups of people chose their means of actions.<br>
When the police attack, making barricades, going to harass the police in any form, or any way... to throwing back their own grenades or other forms of explosives, or molotov cocktails. From sabotage attempts ... especially on the tanks.<br>
We really wanted to see one burn.<br><br>
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<i>bear-warrior-with-head, from unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com blog</i><br><br>
Digging holes to prevent the tanks from going further. And of course, erecting barricades and defending them.<br><br>
<b>Wet'suwet'en Nation Defense</b><br><br>
Deep in the central interior forests of so-called British Columbia lies the unceded territory of the Wet'suwet'en nation. Never surrendered to the settler-colonial Canadian state, the gateway to these remote territories is the headwaters of the Wedzinkwah River, which lies under the stewardship and protection of the Unist'ot'en clan, one of the five house groups
that make up the Wet'suwet'en nation.<br>
For the past decade, the Unist'ot'en have been physically blocking the construction of three major oil and fracked gas pipelines slated to pass through their territories en route to refineries and tankers on the Pacific coast.<br>
Ground zero in this stand has been the Unis'to'ten Camp, constructed in 2010 as a permanent resistance community, located smack dab in the path of the originally proposed route of the Northern Gateway, Pacific Trails, and Coastal Gaslink pipelines.<br>
The Unist'ot'en have also established a checkpoint system, with access to the territories conditional on completing a Free Prior and Informed Consent Protocol. This system grants the Unis'tot'en authority over who gains access to their territory, which has allowed them to keep representatives of the extractive industry and Canadian state at bay. This territory is unceded Unist'ot'en territory, which is part of the Wet'suwet'en territory. Knedebease is the hereditary chief that manages this territory, and I am a member of that house group, so we manage these territories. And in my view, it is not Canada. It's not BC. This has always been Wet'suwet'en territory because we've never ceded or surrendered it to anybody.<br>
Doesn't belong to the crown. Doesn't belong to the federal government. Doesn't belong to the provincial government. It belongs to Unist'ot'en. To my people. <br>
We started travelling through the territories back here a lot more frequently. And the reason why we started spending a lot of time back here is because there were some proposed pipelines that were being proposed by industry and by government, to begin doing some preliminary work back here to stop them. You guys can't be doing any work in here, because we've already told them no. That they can't access our territory. Once we found out that industry was trying to force their way in, we put our cabin directly in the path of the initial proposal for Enbridge, for the bitumen pipeline that was proposed to come through here.<br>
So the log cabin sits right en route of their GPS points of where Enbridge initially had planned to put their pipelines through here. At the same time, there was Coastal Gaslink and Pacific Trails Pipeline that wanted also to put pipelines through our territory. To me that's not self-sustaining. When it's really quick, it's boom and bust.<br>
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And they'll come, and then they'll be gone and they'll leave their mess behind. As you see on the sign behind it says checkpoint. So whenever industry, or just anybody comes through here you go through protocol, which you ask a series of six questions:<br>
Who are you? Where are you from? How long do you plan to stay if we let you in? And do you work for industry or government that's destroying our lands? And how will your visit benefit Unist'ot'en?<br>
And one of the key questions that they could not answer, truthfully and honestly, was the question where we ask “how will your visit benefit the people of this land?” Uhh.. I really don't think there is any benefit. And the reason why we turn them back is because they could not pass simple protocol questions.<br>
The RCMP was created by the government to keep our people off our land. So, they are part of the government, so they too don't pass protocol. We don't trust police, because we're suspicious that your forces would in to scope out our layout so that if there is an injunction, you guys would be better prepared about how you're gonna deal with us.<br>
The camp serves as a beacon for other people who are struggling with these ideas. That they might not be able to stop a project from coming through their territories. And you know, for anybody to stand up to something like that is quite a daunting task. But a lot of people who have studied us over the years, and learned from the resistance that we've taken... they've taken those lessons and have started their own actions. And there's an incredible amount of economic and logistical disruption that arise from that type of activity.<br>
We are here today in solidarity with the Unist'ot'en camp. We wish to share the Unist'ot'en hereditary chief's clear statement that they do not consent to having pipelines built on their unceded traditional territory. This colonization has always been about the taking of Indigenous lands. We always said if we heal our people, then we'll heal our land.<br>
The healing center idea came when we realized that "why aren't our own people coming out here to visit us?" And even though some do come, there's not a high number of our own people. And we realized that a lot of our people are still struggling because of colonization. From the Residential School era. From the public school system ... lotta racism. We realized that a lot of our people are struggling because of trauma. And we realized that we needed a healing facility that incorporated all the whole wellness thing that we were talking about.<br>
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<i>Bear and Wolf defenders from warriorpublications.wordpress.com</i>
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And we wanna put our culture back into our people. So that they will be strong and they will stand up. When people come out to a space like this, what they experience is land that's actually beginning to go through the healing process. This land back here that we're walking through and passing through, is land that was devastated from logging already.<br>
And it's in a process of healing. It actually has berry bushes, so we're surrounded by berry bushes here. There are grizzly bear tracks a half a kilometer from here. So when people come up to spend time here, they begin to learn about the importance of connecting themselves to the planet that is in need of healing. <br><br>
<b>Struggle and Cession in Cities</b><br><br>
While defending territory from state incursions is hard enough in rural, or remote natural terrains, those seeking to establish autonomous spaces in urban environments face an additional set of challenges. Cities are sites of concentrated state power. Not only are they strongholds of surveillance and repression, but they are also areas where the logic of state control is thoroughly integrated into everyday social relations.<br>
This opens the door to recuperation, a process whereby state power constantly shifts and adapts itself in order to preemptively cut off and assimilate potential threats to its authority and legitimacy. This is the balancing act faced by urban squatter movements in cities around the world, whose participants must constantly navigate the twin minefields of eviction and legalization. This means simultaneously avoiding the social isolation that would make full-scale repression possible, while also combating state and real estate developers' attempts to transform these spaces into nothing more than edgy tourist destinations. One of the really important functions of the urban occupation is that it becomes a source of inspiration. <br>
Despite being surrounded by hostile forces – in the form of state, police, capital – that it is possible to have a space in which you can experiment with different forms of existing. With different forms of living. With different forms of relating to one another. We could speak about three distinct phases of squatting experiments in Ljubljana.<br>
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First one is early '90s. This is the time of the destruction of Yugoslavia. It's a time of massive changes in Slovenian society. This movement had a clear continuity with alternative cultural movements of the 80s that was heavily influenced by progressive currents such as feminism, LGBT movement, anti-militarist tendencies, ecological movements. This movement found its highest expression in the squatting of Metelkova military barracks in 1993.<br>
The second wave of squatting can be traced to the late 90s. In around 98 and 99, several different initiatives and individuals were squatting different spaces in the city of Ljubljana and were all evicted from those squats. And in the middle of this wave of repression over the movement, the community of Metelkova decided to give one empty space in the Autonomous Cultural Center to the anarchist infoshop.<br>
The third wave of squatting in Ljubljana is symbolized by the squatting of ROG Factory, which is maybe the biggest squat in Ljubljana. It was squatted in 2006 by a new precarious generation of younger people that later came to be identified as the generation without future. It has always been understood by us that the front between the two different squats is the same front.<br>
Because if one of us is attacked, or evicted for instance, that will mean a huge attack on the ability of the other to actually be part of any kind of political process in the city. The relationship of the state has been slightly different in its expression. So for instance, when it comes to ROG they have had constant attempts of the city to either evict them or attack them in different ways.<br>
And just two years ago there was the most serious attempt to tear down several buildings in that area. That attempt was stopped by a broader political mobilization.The nature of an urban occupation is that it is faced with different kinds of factors that perhaps escape rural occupations. Our squats are part of the neoliberal capitalist society that is progressing further and further towards social devastation. Every time we are faced with the processes that are destroying our cities, we always have to question our position and our changing position within those processes.<br>
Metelkova and ROG both generate quite wide public support. So this forced the public authorities to be cautious. And even though there are several softer attempts to push Metelkova into the state of legalization, we haven't in the last decade really been faced with an attempt of eviction. That of course brings a different set of questions for all of us who are part of Metelkova squat. And that is, in such moments, where the city is actually trying to sell you as one of its premium tourist destinations... how do you maintain yourself as a space that can still produce radical social movements and interventions in the city?<br>
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<i>Architectural rendering of ROG, formerly a bicycle factory... a naked x-ray, with all culture removed</i><br><br>
That of course comes with every question of recuperation. How do we still manage to keep our practices DIY? How do we still manage to stay ungovernable, which is basically the only way not to become a squatting museum, or a sort of caricature of what a squat should be? Many people and many activities that are cleaned from the city center because of the demands of the tourist industry... we all end up in squats with different trajectories and different positions that we occupy in the current social-economic order.<br>
This naturally leads to tensions. Some more serious than others. And the consequence also can be seen in what recently happened to club Jalla Jalla – it was destroyed in a fire. As a community this was immediately recognized as an effect of the general state in which the whole city is being pushed. And our focus is not only to rebuild Jalla Jalla the club, but also to rebuild and reclaim our collective capacity to resist the processes of devastation that are everywhere destroying the conditions of living for so many people in this town. Establishing and effectively securing an autonomous space isn't something that happens overnight. States cannot afford to let challenges to their legitimacy go unanswered, lest they serve as examples for others to follow.<br>
For this reason, any political attempt to reject state authority over a territory is likely to provoke a serious reaction. It is therefore crucially important that those involved anticipate the state's response, and are in a strong enough position to weather the inevitable storm. Autonomous territories allow for the building of dual power. They are alternative focal points of legitimacy that can effectively challenge the state's monopoly on authority. Indigenous Nations draw this legitimacy from spiritual and cultural practices rooted in generations of deep connection to the lands claimed by their colonizers. For those of us more alienated from the lands and spaces we occupy, the process of asserting autonomy must begin with navigating the tensions and contradictions that exist in dominant society, cultivating strong bonds of solidarity, and fuelling antagonism towards the state. We'd rather not pass lessons to anyone. If people get inspired from what they've done here, it will always be a pleasure to share experiences and knowledge of those years spent here.<br>
I think it has been proven several times that building the infrastructure for the movement and of the movement really becomes crucial in moments of high and demanding political mobilization in the society. To have the kind of spaces that enable you to maintain the historical memory of movements, that enable us to find different kinds of accomplices in our struggles for a different kind of world. With the help of allies all around the world ... we've garnered lots of support through Indigenous, non-Indigenous, professionals,... everyday citizens.<br>
A lot of people do support what we're doing and have vocalized it to us. We have come here to be with you, to make sure you understand you're doing the right thing. There's always people who come here also who have connections, or who have been to other places where people are struggling and bring us information. And so that creates solidarity between different struggles. You need to ensure that the Indigenous people who have always lived on those lands, since millennia,
are involved in that struggle. They have long stories. Ancient, ancient stories that talk about how and why they have responsibilities. The mere fact that a squat exists as a potential of development of autonomous ideas, of politically radical ideas, is of course already a threat to the state, a threat to capital's interests.<br>
And therefore we will never be safe, no matter how many selfies tourists make here. If it is possible that in a city that is so increasingly gentrified, so penetrated with different capitalist forces if it is able to have a space where experimentation with our freedom is possible, then it kind of gives us hope that other kinds of political projects are also possible. And what we would really love to see is more of these kinds of inspirations around the world, around different cities, around different communities. <br>
As for our inspiration, we take as much inspiration as possible from as many struggles as possible. The Zapatistas movement, even though we're far far from what they achieved. The Landless Peasant Movement, especially in South America, or Reclaim the Field network all over Europe. Or occupied neighbourhoods, like in Exarchia in Greece. Or people protecting seeds like in India. Rojava is, of course, an insight especially regarding feminist self-defence.<br>
Some of us are also really close to the Italian struggle against the train line crossing the Val di Susa. <br>
[<i>Blogger's note: SqEK research group Gianni Piazza, convener of the most recent conference in Catania, Sicily, <a href="https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/PortaVoices">wrote a book about this peasant & activist resistance</a> to a high-speed rail line construction; we drank “No TAV” wine at a social center in Rome in '14.</i>]<br>
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<i>Val di Susa police line. Image from italycalling.wordpress.com blog.</i><br><br>
The most important thing is that we have to ask ourselves "what are our needs?" And then find ways through which we can express them. We're absolutely going to win this fight. Y'know, this is a fight that belongs to not only us, but all of our unborn. This is a fight that belongs to all of our ancestors who died fighting for these spaces, and protecting them.<br>
So this is a fight that doesn't belong to us. We're not selfish people. This fight belongs to all of our Wet'suwet'en people past, present and future. Some of us went to fight the world of the airport. And the airport was a pretext to fight the system behind it. I'd say for me, the ZAD, it helps me burn the social and structural boundaries in my head ... and then almost everything became possible.<br>
We live in a historical moment in which the global neoliberal order, wracked by overlapping social, economic and ecological crises, is rapidly unraveling before our very eyes. Yet far from being a cause for celebration, the dark new reality rising to take its place promises to be even worse. New and resurgent forms of state power are being constructed on foundations of hyper-nationalist reaction, armed with sophisticated new tools of surveillance and repression.<br>
A proliferation of civil wars, surging levels of inequality and climate change-fuelled catastrophes are provoking historical levels of forced human migration. But while things look undoubtedly bleak, the rapid transformations currently underway have the potential to uncover new cracks in the facade of state power. Revolutionaries must be ready to take advantage of any and all opportunities that these shifting new dynamics may produce, establishing a decentralized network of autonomous zones that can sustain projects of mutual aid, respond to emergent threats, and coordinate solidarity across borders.<br>
<i>So at this point, we'd like to remind you that Trouble is intended to be watched in groups, and to be used as a resource to promote discussion and collective organizing. Are you interested in offering sustained material support for existing autonomous spaces, or figuring out what steps would be involved in launching your own? Consider getting together with some comrades, organizing a screening of this film, and discussing where to get started. Interested in running regular screenings of Trouble at your campus, infoshop, community center, or even just at home with friends?<br>
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Become a Trouble-Maker! For 10 bucks a month, we'll hook you up with an advanced copy of the show, and a screening kit featuring additional resources and some questions you can use to get a discussion going. If you can't afford to support us financially, no worries! You can stream and/or download all our content for free off our website. If you've got any suggestions for show topics, or just want to get in touch, drop us a line. This episode would not have been possible without the generous support of Komunal, Group Groix and Michael. Now get out there and make some trouble!</i><br>
<i>Many thanks to the Submedia collective for sharing the subtitled script with “Occupations & Properties.”</i><br><br>
LINKS:<br><br>
Submedia collective: "Fighting Where We Stand", 30 minutes, November 2018<br>
https://sub.media/video/trouble-14-fighting-where-we-stand-struggles-for-autonomous-spaces/<br><br>
"My name is not important."<br>
Marco Deseriis, "Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous"<br>
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/improper-names<br><br>
Donatella Della Porta, Gianni Piazza, "Voices of the Valley, Voices of the Straits: How Protest Creates Communities" (2008)<br>
https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/PortaVoices<br>
While this academic book is expensive, Gianni has also written articles on the Val di Susa resistance<br><br>
Alan W. Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05603255573431293528noreply@blogger.com1