Proceso sensorial

mod-est in comparison to “Signs of Change.” The exhibi-tion was designed by the ABC No Rio visual arts col-lective to include logos of different European squats stencilled onto the wall, dossiers on clipboards with information printed out from social center websites, and materials needed for painting copies of banners hung on squats – paint, cloth and a projector. There was also a library of books and videos collected on my travels.

The stencil plan reflected the kind of artwork many at ABC No Rio had made on the streets.

Stenciling is a “poor” medium that yields a complex

Discussion event at “house magic” show at Basekamp, Philadelphia, 2009. (Photo by the author)

result – a representational image and an accompanying text. It re-quires only a stiff material from which to cut the stencil; some Ar-gentine artists use discarded x-rays from hospital trash. These are easily applied to public walls using spray paint, allowing the artist a quick getaway from police patrols. Stenciling has become a mainstay of the repertoire of techniques used by international street artists, and has been especially important in subversive political campaigns to publicize ideas and images barred from public print controlled by authoritarian regimes. [MacPhee, 2004; MacPhee and Reuland, 2007; Cerisola, et al., 2012]

The show opened with the stencils on one wall and the clipboards on the other. I also made “social center wallpaper,” consisting of pho-tocopies of handouts I had gleaned from squats in Europe that emu-lated the look of walls there. The idea was that with this wallpaper, you could convert any space into looking like a European social center.

Despite its modest design and low attendance, the exhibition suc-ceeded in generating some discussion. The show, and the rundown building of ABC No Rio itself, were a backdrop for the conversations that took place between artists who had experienced the European social centers or had an interest in them. (Oddly, this did not include Lower East Side squatters, very few of whom visited the show.) Small audiences heard first-hand from artists with stories from the squatting

House Magic zine logo, 2009, by Suck Zoo han

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movement very different from any which had been heard publicly in New York before.

One of the first to present was Michel Chevalier, an American from Washington, D.C. living in Hamburg. Michel was deeply in-volved in the politicized German art world. He spoke about his work with a group of folks from the New Yorck Bethanien squat I had visited in Berlin. The AKSB (Archiv Kultur und Soziale Bewegung, or Culture and Social Movement Archive) formed in Hamburg in 2005. The group was comprised of artists, media activists, and stu-dents who traveled to political events with material like videos, books, and workshops. They had been visiting Social Forum gatherings in Europe, bringing materials about the Russian Revolution, the Russian avant-garde of the ‘20s, Dada, and the Situationists. They were trying to present something other than what they saw as the “boring, stereo-typical” cultural presentations at Social Forums. They were trying, as Michel put it, to “redistribute cultural capital.”

In 2006 the AKSB group met people from the New Yorck squat at a Social Forum in Erfurt. The NYB group had run into problems with their neighbors, the art center Künstlerhaus Bethanien. The Künstler-haus during the ‘70s and ‘80s was famously experimental. But in the

‘90s, Michel told us, they became more art market-oriented and social-ly conservative. They took corporate sponsorship from Philip-Morris.

Their open call residency program was changed so that only embassies of countries could nominate artists. The director of the Künstlerhaus launched a campaign against the New Yorck squatters next door. He started a petition and gathered signatures from corporate sponsors and prominent people in the Berlin art scene, protesting against “the self-empowerment of the squatters and their sympathizers. They plan to turn Bethanien into a playing field of ideological class war.” The squatters had to go because they were a threat to culture.

The AKSB commissioned documentary videos about the squats Forde (in Geneva) and La Générale (in Paris), and the filmmakers came to Berlin to discuss their perspectives with the New Yorck activ-ists. The screening and discussion event reversed the attack, manifest-ing what Michel called “an artistic critique on self-declared cultural projects that actually represent the interests of capitalists.”

Other squatting stories that Michel presented concerned the Rhino in Geneva and the Rote Flora in Hamburg. Rhino was a large apartment complex squatted in 1988 and evicted in 2007. Michel

screened a video called Rhino féroce: un squat a Genève, simultane-ously interpreting its French soundtrack into English. [Egli, et al., 2006] Rhino was a late flowering of a squatting movement that be-gan during the collapse of the real estate bubble in the 1980s. Young people began to take over the many empty buildings. Police at first repressed the movement, and then organized a squat brigade with the job of maintaining contact between squatters and the owners.

The Rhino center, like many squats, housed both activists and art-ists – 500 diverse people in all. They held many street actions to call attention to vacant buildings, and Rhino became a prime location for cultural events.

At its height, Rhino had a bar and a concert venue, which host-ed avant-garde music. Then a bistro openhost-ed, with lunch, concerts, parties and film projections. The squat became a popular symbol of alternative culture, and was called by media friends the “cultural lungs” of the city. Communal living and self-management were part of consciously developed models for a kind of community life lived against and outside society. The rules were open: People chose their neighbors; there were places for artists and travelers to stay overnight.

Decisions were made democratically at weekly meetings. Each inhab-itant paid just 67 Euros a month as a member of the association.

A former resident of Rhino – an artist named Myk – was in the audience. He explained that the eviction of Rhino happened on a day many people were out of town for music festivals. It was also pouring down with rain, so few turned out to protest. Police tied a rope around the bright red horn on the corner of the building, which was Rhino’s symbol for many years, and ripped it off. It was like the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Iraq, said Myk, as if to say, “this is the end of the squat movement.... We were considered kind of the mothership of the squat movement.” Two years later the building remained empty, all the windows cemented, the toilets all smashed.

The association had accumulated about a quarter of a million Eu-ros from monthly rents that was used to pay for maintenance, reno-vations, and lawyers to defend their case in court. They were winning regularly until the right wing took over the courts. They declared the association illegal, and, since the money was in a post office account run by the Swiss government, all of their assets vanished overnight, the day after the squat was evicted. They couldn’t defend themselves

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or look for another house. People were out on the street. “It was a horrible end to a beautiful scene. Even so, 18 years is pretty good,”

Myk concluded philosophically.

Michel Chevalier had also brought along a number of posters from the long-running Rote Flora social center in Hamburg, announcing events there. Thomas Beck, a musician who works with the silkscreen group at the Rote Flora that does a lot of political printing, contrib-uted the posters. There are a few jokes here, Michel explained. One is printed on the real estate page of the newspaper, and the text is print-ed backwards. During the demonstrations at Heiligendamm against the G8 summit of world leaders in 2007, the police raided many squats. The door of the Rote Flora was soldered shut. One poster was cut out in the shape of the portable grinding tool used to reopen the door, and advertises an anti-repression party. Another is in the shape of a hand holding a TV remote control: the static is the person hold-ing the device. There was another in the shape of a bandage. Monika Hardmeier, a Swiss working with the ABC group, explained that this joke might be about squatting as the “plaster,” or bandage of a partial

michel Chevalier discusses the posters from rote flora at the “house magic” exhibition, ABC no rio, 2009. (Photo by the author)

solution to the housing crisis. Another poster was cut into the shape of a blood-sucking tick, and is captioned “Rote Flora ‘ticks’ regularly.”

Again, Monika suggested that this could be based on a characteriza-tion by right wing politicians of the squats as parasites on society – so, as the poster says, the Rote Flora “ticks” with their activities.

We screened the elegant short Take Over [Montevecchi, 2009], about a group of squatters in Brighton, England, who took over an abandoned church. The film is slick and clean, but the action itself wasn’t. This wasn’t a political collective – rather, many “crusties”, lat-ter-day hippies and travelers who lacked discipline and clear inten-tion, were involved. It is a portrait of one of squatting’s subcultures.

Vivian Vasser, a performance artist in Staten Island and organizer with the Day de Dada festival, told me about a film by a group she had met in Zurich. Dada Changed My Life [Lou Lou and Daniel Mar-tinez; 2004] is a pecular docu-drama about an important squatting action by artists that saved the Cabaret Voltaire from development.

The Cabaret Voltaire was the site of important manifestations of the Dada movement in 1916, today it is a museum of Dada. Olga Ma-zurkiewicz, who worked on the film, talked about this eccentric movie and the action itself, a classic of what Hans Pruijt calls “conservational squatting,” intended to preserve historically or architecturally interest-ing buildinterest-ings from imprudent destruction.

The Spanish movement was well represented. We showed Labo-ratorio 3, Ocupando el Vacio, [LaboLabo-ratorio, 2007; Charlon, 2003] a dramatic initiative in the old neighborhood of Madrid. During the waning days of the socialist government in 2009, a group, some of whom had worked on the three successive Laboratorio occupations, finally achieved a legal permission to use a large vacant government building, the Tabacalera. (See Chapter 13)

Okupa, Crónica de una Lucha Social (“Squat, chronicle of a social struggle”) [Octavi Royo; 1996] opened up probably the longest dis-cussion. It was accompanied by the short “Tactical Tourist,” [Green-wald, 2008] documenting Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee’s visit to squats in Barcelona, Miles de Viviendas (“Thousands of homes”) and Can Masdeu, the rural squat on the edge of the city. Emily For-man, who is seen dancing in Dara’s short film, was on hand for the screening, along with her friend Marina Monsonis. Emily was in-volved, along with Dara and Josh, in the DSLR project in Chicago (see Chapter 3), and carried her enthusiasm for disobedient creative

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activism into the Barcelona squatting scene. She became involved with the Miles de Viviendas occupation of an empty former police barracks [Vilaseca, 2013] – which had been a union hall before the Franco era.

This heavily contested squat was in the Barceloneta, a working class portside neighborhood under heavy pressure of gentrification. Marina grew up there. She and Emily told exciting tales of resisting cops and goons in the course of this struggle.

“Tactical Tourist” includes a short interview with an organizer of a “pirate university” project at the Miles okupa. At Miles, the Pirate University produced Josh MacPhee’s talk on street art. Regular pro-grams of instruction outside the walls of established institutions is one of the many kinds of workshops set up in social centers. I met Emiliano Morra at rampART in London who had done a Pirate Uni-versity project there. He staged a talk on Jacques Derrida’s concept of nothingness while seated on chairs in the middle of a street. It sound-ed like the perfect combination of post-structuralism and activism, mixed to the pitch of absurdity, the kind of thing that appeals to an ironic London academic crowd, drawing students and intellectuals into the squatting movement. The more purposive Spanish activist climate involves other kinds of brainwork. They believe that real polit-ical change is possible, as the sudden arising of the Podemos politpolit-ical party demonstrates.

Nils Vest, filmmaker and historian of Christiania, the venerable

“free city” of Copenhagen, sent along his Christiania You Have My Heart. [Vest, 1991] Rebecca Zorach, an art history professor from Chicago who had attended a conference there commemorating 1968, gave a talk. She focused on the struggle that community has waged to maintain its independence from successive government attempts to re-assimilate the squatted former army base into the rest of the city.

Christiania is a major tourist attraction, and early on achieved the sta-tus of a much-studied social experiment in self-organized living. It is a beacon for squatters and free-livers throughout Europe, a community which foregrounds art and theater as part of its daily life. Christiania has also created rituals, drawing on Danish folk traditions, alongside its political performances. For example, an axis mundi, a decorated pole to signify a center of the earth, was ceremonially erected during the Climate Summit in Copenhagen in 2009. Christianites staged this event as part of a “Climate Bottom,” together with representatives of indigenous nations who had come to the conference.

Home to the famous “Pusher Street,” discussion of Christiania in-evitably raises the issue of drugs, addicts and criminals, and the flow of black money that comes with the trade. The film by Vest deals with this issue, telling how the community banded together in the 1980s to expel the heroin dealers and users from their community. There-after, while marijuana and other organic hallucinogens are traded, a strict rule against hard drugs was enforced. This is more or less the same bargain European governments themselves have made with the explosion of drug users that began in the 1960s. Police have tend-ed to push socially problematic drug users towards squats and social centers as a disruptive tactic, where the self-organized communities strive to contend with them. “But it isn’t democratic” to expel addicts from your community, someone opined in the ABC No Rio conversa-tion, expressing the feeling that makes the subject so divisive. Another compared Christiania to the favelas of Latin America controlled by drug-dealing gangs. This is a large-scale issue for squats and occupa-tions, a problem that never goes away.

A great deal has been published on Christiania, but not so much in English. The “House Magic” zine catalogue that came out of this exhibition published a timeline and a detailing of the political and economic structure of the community compiled by Jordan Zinovich of the Autonomedia publishing collective. Jordan prepared it for a conference on radical urbanism held at the City University of New York Graduate Center, produced by their Center for Place, Culture and Politics. This academic unit is the home of Marxist geographers David Harvey – author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism – and the late gentrification analyst Neil Smith. Together with the retired Co-lumbia University urbanist Peter Marcuse, these academics used their resources to support grassroots organizing of the kind associated with the international Right to the City network. The center was presenting leading international activists, and engaging key questions, including privatization and commons. In 2009, squatting and occupation were more and more emerging as key tactics in activists’ toolkit.

Collective living – commune life – is a key component of political squats and social centers. The Federation of Intentional Communities rushed us a copy of their new release Visions of Utopia, a magnum opus on communal living in the U.S., by filmmaker Geoff Kozeny.

[Kozeny, 2004-09] This was the film’s the New York premiere. (Kozeny passed away just before the release.) We screened the first part, on the

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historical background of this kind of living, and part of the second, concerning urban communes, among them Ganas. As noted above, several key Ganas members had refused to participate in the “House Magic” show. One who had volunteered to speak did not show up.

I had gathered and advertised other important videos by artists, the kind that would be included in an international exhibition or film series on the question of occupation held at a major institution. These were not screened formally, and were only available for on-demand viewing in the gallery. Consequently, some of the richest and most interesting material by European moving image artists was not seen or discussed – only its existence was noted. The library held collaborative documentaries by Oliver Ressler concerned with the Italian Autono-mist movement (Disobbedienti), [Azzellini & Ressler, 2002] and the Global Justice movement (What Would It Mean to Win?), [Begg &

Ressler, 2008] Marcelo Expósito’s, Primero de Mayo: La Ciudad-fábri-ca (“First of May: The city factory”), [Expósito, 2004] about activism in the factory town of Turin; and a video installation by Democracia from their project “Sin Estado” (“without the/a state”) in the Madrid slum, or chabola, called Cañada Real. During the run of the show at ABC, and subsequently in Queens, no one asked to see these produc-tions. Audiences for these films would need to be educated. In New York, “House Magic” opened a kindergarten.

Sculpture Center, new york City, 2009. (Photo by the author)

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