pals in Paris for my first trip there to investigate the squatting scene. (The SqEK group held a conference in Paris two years later. See Chapter 35) I would do an artist’s residency at La Générale en Manufacture. This place is in Sèvres, across the river from the end of the metro line. It’s a rather harrowing walk along a tiny sidewalk beside a metropolitan highway, heading to-wards forbidding looking corporate towers. Sudden-ly there is an opening in the high gray walls. Inside, there is a courtyard and two rundown buildings, the former school of the government porcelain factory. I was there to give a public talk about my book, and to learn about art squats in Paris.
Michel’s friend Jerôme Guigue welcomed me. His worktable was littered with deconstructed Chinese toys. Éric Lombard, who was coordinating the artist residencies for La Générale, gave up his room over-looking a public greenhouse and nursery for my stay.
Eric is an ex-punk rocker who drums sometimes in
the group Sister Iodine with the “other Eric,” Erik Minkkinen, who produced an annual sound art event called the Headphone Festival.
We toured their hangout, a former TV studio in the listed 1932 build-ing, with heavy glass-walled control room still intact. On that first day, I was recruited straightaway to advise Alexandre of La Biennale de Paris on his upcoming trip to NYC. Afterwards, Beatrice took me in hand, and we set out to visit some of her friends.
We made a nighttime visit to Montreuil, an easterly district of Paris with Anne who was running a feminist seminar. It turned out to be a melancholy march past shuttered and bricked-up former squats. Anne told us of the Bastille squat, violently evicted at night with tear gas during a memorial party held for a dead friend. Perhaps it was fear of the growing network of squats that led to the repression. The admin-istration of Montreuil changed from Communist to Green Party, and the new mayor, Anne said, was considered “some kind of a witch” for the violence of the evictions she ordered. Her intention to gentrify the mostly working class district had led to a kind of war with the police.
As a result of the repression, Montreuil became “a desert” for public occupation activity. (This would change, as we saw on our next visit.)
We passed Titaken (Titanic) on Rue Carnot, a former squat, now empty and bricked up tight. It had been active with many events, and full of mostly queer and transgender teenagers and young people. A local hater told neighborhood youths that Titaken was a fascist squat.
The neighborhood is largely Moroccan, from the Maghreb. Encour-aged by the police, these youths attacked Titaken, beating up squat-ters as they went in and out. One was hospitalized in a coma for three days. Finally, they abandoned the squat.
Two years ago the son of a local theater director lost an eye in a fight with police at the shopping mall near the train station. A semi-abstract wall mural in the square alludes to the event – at its center is a staring eye. In another incident, a group of kids at a school were attacked by police, who shot one of the youths in the eye with a flash bomb. They were aiming for the head, which is forbidden with these weapons. La Clinique squat was evicted by a special tactical unit of the police. They used helicopters to drop men onto the roof of the squat. La Demi-Lune (“Half moon”) was also violently evicted, even though two pregnant women were living there at the time. The building was destroyed at 6 a.m. Why, I asked, do people continue to squat with all this repression? “C’est choutte,” Anne replied – it’s fun.
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Of course squatting in Paris has a serious, political side to it as well. At the end of our tour, we visited a large apartment building on Rue Bara near the metro stop Robespierre. It was full of African im-migrants from Mali. By then it was late – 9 p.m., and all the women had retired. The men were sitting talking and playing games, milling about the courtyard, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, buying cigarettes and miscellanies from small stands. Anne told us the place had been opened around 1997 by autonomists of the sans papiers movement (that is, migrants without papers, or the undocumented migrants). For a while activists and immigrants lived together, but now Bambara elders ran the place. The Montreuil district has many Malians; if it were in Mali, it would be its second biggest city.
In the morning we visited some of Beatrice’s activist friends. They open houses for the sans papiers. We arrived at the metro stop Place de la Nation where a group of African women were dancing in a cir-cle, insulting the cops. They were preparing for a demonstration that would begin soon. We walked along to a housing block and rang up to the new apartment of Beatrice’s friends. We entered a North Afri-can household with a demi-circular red couch on which two women reclined. There were dates on their stems sitting on the table, and curious, eager children climbed around. I talked a little with them in English, which they found exotic. Mama served us tea, pouring it from high in the air down into the cups. Soon she brought couscous, and a honey nut desert and coffee. We chatted with the two gals on the couch – or rather, Beatrice did since I didn’t speak enough French to participate. One of the women declared that she was part Basque, and proudly related how her grandfather fought with the Resistance during the war and later escaped from a prison camp.
She herself had led an action against an architectural exhibition in Paris in the 1990s. The city had commissioned a show of temporary shelters for the homeless, a project called “Toolkits for Survival.” She went with a friend from the journal Liberatión, and took a press pack with a map of all the projects, so her group could go around and fuck up these symbolic, superficial responses to a real crisis. The other woman, in pain from an attack of periodic migraine, was chipper at times. She described how she had been invited to a recent Social Fo-rum gathering, but decided not to go. She did not want to be co-opt-ed by the NGOs, which that dominate the social forums. Her group is autonomous, and happy to stay that way.
On my next visit to Paris, the SqEK group would meet in a bilin-gual encounter with a large group from DAL (the Droit au Logement – the Right to Housing group) – one of the most prominent activist collectives that squat houses for marginalized groups in France. But during this first trip, I hadn’t really much idea what was going on. I could just be impressed by the variety, the seriousness of purpose and depth of commitment of the squatting movements I encountered.
I was tipped off about a meeting of a group planning a new squat.
It was the Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires d’Ille-de-France (CIP-IDF; Coordination of Temporary and Precarious Employees of the Ille-de-France), a prominent radical labor rights group whose ac-tions had inspired Brian Holmes’ viral essay of 2001, “The Flexible Personality.” [Holmes, 2002] The CIP-IDF1 had a large, dilapidated office building beside a canal. It was to be demolished. They hadn’t been given another, and so they were planning an occupation. About
1 The Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires d’Ille-de-France (CIP-IDF) stems from the struggles of entertainment industry workers in France in 2003 against proposed changes in their unemployment compensation system. Continuous re-structuring of film, television and theater work over decades which unions had been unable to cope with had radicalized many of these workers. They evolved new influential conceptions of their work and its relation to economic domina-tion by capital. Italian autonomist analysts theorized them and their social posi-tion as immaterial and precarious laborers. Canadian scholar Christopher Bodnar identified an anti-war group of artists, called Canal déchaîné, as the source of this thought, which was influential in broadening a new kind of anti-capitalist organizing around the emerging realities of precarity – what capital prefers to call flexibility. This thinking centers around cultural work and the labor of artists like those in the CIP-IDF. In 1997, Bodnar writes, Canal déchaîné described the work of mental laborers. Communication workers who “create cultural prod-ucts that help define and materialize identities, tastes, ways of life, imaginations, and sensibilities for the sole purpose of consumption. As such, ‘mass intellectu-alism does not only produce the cultural product or merchandise, but also and simultaneously the public or consumer’.” (Christopher Bodnar, “Taking It to the Streets: French Cultural Worker Resistance and the Creation of a Precariat Move-ment,” Canadian Journal of Communication, vol 31, no 3, 2006; at: http://www.
cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1768/1887.) As the struggle was renewed in 2012 under the regime of austerity, the Guardian quoted arts economist Françoise Benhamou on the French unemployment system: “It was invented at a moment when this sector was unique in its precariousness. Now lots of sectors are going the same way, it’s difficult to say culture can be different. To make an exception for artists during a period of growth and low unemployment is fine. When other industries have problems too, it becomes far more complex”
(Angelique Chrisafis, “European arts cuts: France threatens to pull plug on cre-atives’ special benefits,” Monday 30 July 2012, at: http://www.theguardian.
com/world/2012/jul/30/review-threatens-french-creatives-benefits).
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20 people of all ages and degrees of unkemptness were gathered around a big table smoking and drinking Cokes and beers. I was in-troduced and passed the House Magic zines around the room. Several people contributed to the talk – a tightly poised sharp-featured man of about 40, smoking continuously; a heavily bearded man who spoke only briefly. A disagreement flared. Cigarettes waved, hands flailed.
At one point everyone arose and put their mobile phones into a large cooking pot, and the lid was closed. A whiteboard easel with a di-agram of a building was set up. The spring occupation season was beginning in Paris.
Later, Beatrice told me that the CIP-IDF had been given another building, so they did not after all have to carry out any occupation.
There was no reason to be uneasy at that meeting, she said. It was an open meeting that any police spy could attend. Was the strategy conference then a kind of bluff? It was clear I had no idea how these games were played.
That was fun. But the most exciting anarcho-tourist outing I made was to Fontenay, again with Beatrice. Again the perilous and fearful walk out of La Générale along the road filled with murderous motorists. It’s anxious walking with other people, or if you meet someone coming the other way. This time we went to Fontenay, on the opposite end of the metro line that goes to Montreuil. From the train station I spotted the squat straightaway by the red and black flags flying from its upper story. It had been opened just two weeks before by a group from the Brussels student movement. Ephraim, a tall handsome black-haired young man with a serious mien told us the group had met at an earlier project, a group of squatted flats in an apartment building near the Odeon. That was a noisy, dirty squat, he said. It wasn’t designed to soothe the feelings of the neigh-bors, and they were evicted pretty fast.
Ephraim said there is a strong division between the political and artistic squats. (This was to be practically the leitmotif of the 2013 SqEK meeting in Paris.) The art squats are given more space and time by the state, while the political ones are evicted more quickly. The kind of squat they had opened in Fontenay, he said, is “an open space to experiment with another form of life.” He felt that a combination of artistic form and political practices was very important to develop in the squats, but the government allows only a disconnected artistic practice to take place.
The squat can be a critique of the political system. If it’s only a cheap studio, a stop on the road of art world success, it’s not inter-esting. There is a conflict between the forms of life available under capitalism and the possibilities of forms of living in open space. A
“maison de liberté” should not only be for poor artists. (The term has already been appropriated by the real estate industry, just as in Berlin I saw a rental agency called “Freiraum,” free space.) Ephraim told us he aimed to open three new squats in Paris, and to create a little vil-lage. This would begin a struggle with a standard form of politics. The anti-capitalist struggle must include the form of living. The question, he said, is how can we invent this form of living?
The recently opened squat in Fontenay already contained a library, a hacklab, and a free music rehearsal space. It was a former Catholic school. The owner wanted to sell it to the city, but the council hadn’t raised the money yet. I asked what kind of activities were already go-ing on. Different young people gave answers. Now they were read-ing Marx’s Capital and also givread-ing German lessons. A photography workshop was planned; and a recording studio, a place for sculpture, a bicycle workshop, welding. They told us they wanted to “develop metropolitan skills like gardening and beekeeping.” Two beehives were already in place on the roof.
“We are everywhere,” Ephraim said, not only here. This was not a heterogeneous group. “It can be a trap to see the squat as a unity.”
They often disagreed, but were united in the practice of squatting.
“Conflicts show potential.”
I spent some time there with Natasha, a young Russian who spoke English. I visited her room, photographed the graffitied walls – she had the first great “Köpi bleibt” poster I had seen – and queried her about the scene in the east. Russia is very repressive, she said, although there were some squats outside the big cities. I urged her to write something about the little-known movement for House Magic, al-though as usual I did not expect that she would. She was planning to return to school in sociology. Now, it seemed, she was sowing wild oats. (A tape-lettered sign over her bed read “Too Drunk to Fuck.”) But Natasha was a serious traveler who had been in many squats, in Barcelona and Zurich. Such travelers with their varied experience are the heart of the international squatting movement in Europe.
They are also a kind of dark mirror of international capital. Unlike the localized punks one can find in the U.S., a bright young woman
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speaking several languages and traveling between squats has much in common with any number of aspiring servants of capital. Only her investment is on the other side of the social ledger!
I phoned Stephen Wright, a translator and theorist who works with Basekamp, from the – surprisingly working – telephone in the library of the Fontenay squat. A guy wandered in and placed a cage on the floor with baby chicks in it. The cat is prowling around, he said.
“Last night they almost died because of the cold.” It’s always cold in squats. Now they have been set down near an electric heater. “We are raising them for the eggs,” Natasha told me. “It’s amazing how fast they grow.”
We had lunch with the Fontenay squatters, a thin soup of vege-tables they’d gleaned from a supermarket dumpster. A mountain of tiny cups and plates lay in the sink, previously used by the school for children’s meals. I washed some of these in return for the meal.
One of the group, Maxim, asked if I wanted to go along with him to have dinner at another squat at metro Bastille. They have a court judgment against them, and they are waiting to be evicted. Maybe this will be the last meal. With such a dramatic agenda, how could I resist? We went along with a group. At the metro station in Fon-tenay, the group of black-clad young men formed and reformed.
None of them paid the fare. I don’t travel that way. Instead, I became stuck in the turnstile, and a station attendant helped me. I needed to buy a two-zone ticket at the machine. The anarchists were jumping all around us, but the worker paid them no attention. It was as if they were invisible.
We arrived at metro Bastille and walked toward the squat. Maxim explained, “We don’t fetishize the building. We squat and squat. We don’t negotiate.” I remarked that the Fontenay building looked like a good prospect for long-term institutionalization, to get in ahead of the game and have a say in what the building is ultimately going to be used for. Silence. We arrived. Le Bourdon-l’Arsenal was also festooned with red and black flags and defiant graffiti. The squat had been a ground floor of a factory, closed off by double steel doors. Inside was a party space with a bar, which had clearly seen a deal of good times.
Their logo was a deer in the street, fist raised beside a pile of burning debris. Behind the deer-person, what looks like a line of police with riot shields stand in front of a line of barbed wire. I photographed some cool graffiti and wall murals.
Upstairs was the private space, a floor of rooms all joined to a central common space. This was a well-lit circular room, with rich plasterwork on the ceiling and inset paintings of fauns and nymphs. It looked like a classic bordello. Several squatters were sitting around on low-slung couches and rococo banquettes. There was some sadness, I was told, for the group had recently lost a friend to a drug overdose.
A woman with dyed red hair hobbled around the room on a band-aged foot. She was a real actrice, and amused the boys. She seemed no stranger to drugs herself.
I had a long discussion with a serious young woman named Sophia about political art, Surrealists and Situationists. I explained ABC No Rio and the House Magic project. She confused the New York space with ABC – Anarchist Black Cross, the venerable prisoner support group. Their house had recently held a benefit for a squat in São Pau-lo, Brazil, which had been occupied by ABC.
The squatters at Bastille were waiting for the cops. Eviction was certain. Every so often, someone would look out the window, and
main room in the squatted social center le Bourdon-l’Arsenal, Paris, 2011. (Photo by the author)
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make a remark like, “Here come the flics.” “They are joking,” Sophia said. Still, I was growing nervous. I was hungry after the thin soup
make a remark like, “Here come the flics.” “They are joking,” Sophia said. Still, I was growing nervous. I was hungry after the thin soup