My understanding of European squatting move-ments expanded enormously through the work of SqEK. The Anarchist Book Fair in New York in the spring of 2011 featured a panel on “Squats, Social Centers and Autonomous Zones,”1 and myself and the artists of La Générale video-called in from Paris.
The talk was held at a satellite venue of the fair, the
1 Sebastian Gutierrez, “Squats, Social Centers and Autono-mous Spaces – I,” the first of his five part documentation of the April 2011 discussion at http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=XMp1M55S3p4. Participants were: me, Howard Brandstein, homesteading organizer and director of the Sixth Street Community Center, Frank Morales, Episcopal priest, squatter and housing organizer, Marta Rosario, resi-dent at Umbrella House Squat, and Ryan Acuff of Take Back the Land.
Tamiment Library of labor history.2 The discussion was organized by the Colombian filmmaker Sebastian Gutierrez working with O4O – Organizing for Occupation, a group directed by Frank Morales.
Frank is an Episcopal priest and a longtime squatter activist.3 Sebas-tian had made documentary portraits of the previously obscure Span-ish-speaking squatters in Loisaida. None of them assumed leadership roles in the movement because many were illegal immigrants. The discussion reflected the growing linkages between New York activists and the newer U.S. occupation movements.
In the spring, Hans Pruijt called for a “mini-SqEK” meeting in Amsterdam during the summer. Nazima Kadir, working on a PhD in anthropology at Yale, was moving away and Hans felt we should hear about her work in situ. (I had met Nazima briefly two years be-fore.) The SqEK meeting happily coincided with an invitation I had received from the Amsterdam art space W139 to give a talk on the cultural history of the Lower East Side.
The Dutch movement is one of the oldest and best known postwar squatting movements in Europe. It began in the 1960s, when the prankster activists of Provo [Kempton, 2007] published their “White House” manifesto. Rather than wait for years on social housing wait-ing lists, young Amsterdammers started takwait-ing the matter of houswait-ing problems into their own hands. Soon they had squatted hundreds of houses in the city center. Thanks to the initial clumsy repression by the police, the squatters gained much public sympathy. As time went on, the movement acquired broader political objectives. The Provos dissolved, and some of them went on to have political careers. Bizarre-ly, the powers that were had decided the city needed an underground
2 The library had acquired the “Squatters’ Rights Collection: Jane Churchman Papers.” (Its full name is the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, at Bobst Library, New York University. Access is free to the public upon request.) Old-line radical historian Michael Nash was the director when this ma-terial, 1.5 feet, was acquired. Other material relevant to the relation between art, squatting and occupation in downtown Manhattan is to be found in the same library, in the “Downtown Collection” of the Fales Library & Special Collections.
(These include the Lester Afflick Papers, Between C & D Archive, Stefan Brecht Papers, Collective Unconscious Archive, Sylvère Lotringer Papers and Semiotex-t(e) Archive, and others. Access to Fales is also free upon request.)
3 O4O, or Organizing for Occupation, is a group supporting direct action squat-ting and eviction defense in New York City and environs. It is closely related to the organization Picture the Homeless, and includes Robby Robinson and Frank Morales.
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metro. This would require massive demolition and squatters carried out strategic occupations of historic canal houses in districts targeted for urban renewal. (This campaign was Hans Pruijt’s case study for the concept of “conservational squatting.” [Pruijt, 2004]) By the time of our visit, the squatting scene in Amsterdam had undergone many changes. Squatting had been criminalized. Still, as we were to learn soon, the practice was by no means historical.
I had visited Joe’s Garage, a storefront social center, some years earlier for their weekly Voku kitchen event. (See Chapter 4) It’s not a big place, and the attitude towards visitors is not overly friendly. It’s thick with evidence of classic Dutch squatter attitude – dry, humor-ous, with barely concealed aggression. But this visit was different. We were guests. We were not invited to stay anywhere, but we were made to feel comfortable in the nicely decorated room during the confer-ence, and the political workings of Joe’s were fully explained. The “ga-rage” is set amidst a web of streets named after the Dutch founders of
SqeK members and their hosts in Amsterdam on the roof terrace of a by the author)
South Africa (Afrikaaners), and at least one hero of the anti-apartheid movement. For many years this district was the home of immigrants living in social housing. Now the relentless pressure of the city’s hous-ing market has led to a cycle of privatization, speculation, evictions, and redevelopment. Amsterdam’s “squatting group east” – since the city has long been divided into sectors of a united movement – has conducted a campaign of occupations and tenant organizing against these processes of gentrification.
Momo, an activist in in Amsterdam’s squatting group east, ex-plained that Joe’s Garage was named after Joe McCarthy – not the notorious rightwing U.S. senator from Wisconsin, but another, Joe Cyrus McCarthy, an Iranian who backed the Shah and fled to Amster-dam after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. Joe bought a house with black money, Momo told us, and intimidated the rental tenants into moving out. (Amsterdam real estate is a good place to launder money gained from illegal activity, according to Momo.) As soon as the authorities found out, Joe fled the country to avoid prosecution, and the squatters took over his house. This was the first Joe’s Garage, which they held for seven years. Relatives of the owner took them to court, but could not prove they owned the building. Because of the irony in the name, the squatters used Charlie Chaplin as a symbol for the squat. The English-born Chaplin was expelled from the U.S. as a communist during the more famous McCarthy’s crusade. In 2008 po-lice, with water cannons appeared at the door of Joe’s Garage at 6:30 in the morning. It was time to move... across the street!
Nazima Kadir had been studying the Amsterdam squatter scene for several years, immersing herself in their anti-gentrification campaigns and living in a squat. She was the lead presenter of the “mini-SqEK.”
Her work concerned the internal dynamics of the Amsterdam squat-ter movement itself and traced the trajectory of activists’ “careers in the movement as a scripted path to self-realization and autonomy,”
including an extensive analysis of conflicts taking place.
Nazima explored what she calls “squatter capital” – who is a “real”
squatter, and how they demonstrate their skills through “activist per-formance,” both within the public sphere of the squatting movement, and the private sphere of a squatted communal house. The kinds of questions she asked within the world of Amsterdam squatting group east were: Who is listened to? Whose suggestions are followed? What makes someone a figure of authority? How do these processes play out
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in private life? “People who are gossiped about the most, particularly their sexuality, have the highest authority.”
Nazima’s talk touched on many issues key to a sophisticated un-derstanding of the culture of squatting, within the public sphere of the social center, movement meetings, and the private world of the communal house. She spoke of involvement in the movement as “an extended adolescence.” People are usually in the movement temporar-ily. Those who are “unable to leave are seen as marginal. They dissuade people from long-term identification, because they don’t want that as their future.” She spoke of the “taste culture” of squatting: dressing, eating, and walking. “Every point of taste speaks of your convictions...
every moment of consumption is a moment of conviction.” Many movement leaders, she said, get the kind of skills a social movement requires, then move on to be middle class professionals.
Nazima’s work points to uncomfortable realizations, especially for those involved politically. I muttered darkly that this was precisely what the CIA men I met at Yale would like to believe about the squat-ting movement, as well as laying the groundwork for evolving strate-gies to disrupt it. Alan Smart remarked that the German movement, which we had recently examined, seemed to have had “higher stakes.”
Cesar, a young scholar who would later present on Milan, suggested that the dysfunctions Nazima described arose from the adjustment between radical ideology and the values dominant within society.
Miguel Martinez noted that social movements have their contra-dictions, but these must be seen in relation to their achievements. If the contradictions are so strong that it seems people are only “doing social life,” partying and so on, then this is a serious matter. But if ac-tivists can live with some contradictions, then they can develop their work in the city, as opposed to living a pure life in the mountains.
“If you refuse that utopian model, once you are involved in society you are experiencing contradictions. Building community resources, sharing things, building networks, opening islands in society – this is the political point of view.” The movement Miguel knows in Spain is open to new people “only if they join the philosophy of self-manage-ment and opposing capitalism.”
Nazima responded that behaviors in houses and social centers are quite different. “There is a difference when you share your whole life with people and when you share only your activism.... I am look-ing at how internal dynamics work.” She had presented her work to
the people she wrote about, and they asked her what is the relation between the good things we do and hierarchy and authority? She re-sponded: “I still don’t know. I don’t think this is a dysfunction, I think this is how groups work. Groups define themselves according to rhet-oric, but they can’t work that way. I did four presentations in squats.
In one, a guy was drinking (which is not allowed), and saying abusive things. I yelled at him and threw him out. Others said you are being authoritarian. People who worked in social centers said you are doing the right thing. People who don’t work in the movement said you are being exclusionary. People in the movement said yes, you have to set limits.” Momo chimed in to say that at a meeting he attended the day before, “a group was overwhelmed by hash-smoking couch potatoes who won’t do any work, and no one had the guts to throw them out.”
Later on, Momo led us on a tour of the immediate neighborhood of Joe’s Garage. He outlined the housing crisis in Amsterdam that puts both co-ops and rental housing out of reach for most people. Rent is regulated, and “the waiting list for social housing is 14 years. In reality you cannot get in. You can get a job right away for six euros an hour, so there is a giant gap” between what is available and the low wage earners and renters. There is little or no profit in renting residential property, so the push is on to convert it all to co-ops. Renters are being “mobbed out” of their apartments – most of them built as social housing – and their units are being converted for sale. Squatting group east does an occupation publicly, with 50 people. “In one hour we open it and we close it” – that is, they barricade the house against eviction. “They want-ed to sell the apartments, so we squattwant-ed.” Activists joinwant-ed some of the remaining tenants, like the ex-taxi driver from the building where Nazi-ma squatted, a woNazi-man with “an ass of stone” who refused to move out.
I had seen that in bank-owned buildings in Madrid, squatters and aging rental tenants are joining forces in a similar way
The Dutch squatting movement has been fractured by the emer-gence of the “anti-squatters,” short-term tenants acting as guards for private security companies in return for cheap rent. Often low-wage workers and students who used to be squatters themselves are now anti-squatters. The developers use them to “protect their speculative emptiness.” In the late 1980s, buildings were seized, collectivized then legalized. To prevent this now the buildings have been filled with these
“scabs.” Tito Buchholz interviewed the CEO of the Hamlet Europe anti-squatting company. He was told that employing anti-squatters
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was “cheaper than security” for empty buildings. The company man-aging the buildings near Joe’s Garage is called Alvast. Momo pointed to one of the building with their banners on its façade.
On the Kruger Plein, there was an anti-squat with an art gallery in it. A signboard read “Open.” Momo led us into this public space hung with anemic abstract paintings. He asked the attendant to explain what he was doing there. The man said they got the place because it was in development. The developers wanted people there to make the place more lively, he went on. Previously, it was a house full of Mo-roccans ridden by poverty and crime. Momo told him: “You are here to keep us squatters of squatting group east out.” He cursed him, and our group marched out. On the way out, I told the chagrined young man, “C’est la vie – c’est la critique.” Walking on, we passed elegant modernist houses designed by a famous architect, social housing of the progressive era. Some of these were once squatted, now they were filled with anti-squatters. There was another storefront – “Ah, you see?
They are all artists!” Momo cried. “These properties are temporarily administrated by artists.”
Walking on, we came to a large high-rise office building and rode the elevator to the rooftop cafè. From there we looked out over two similar office buildings with the names of Dutch newspapers embla-zoned on them. The same company, Momo told us, owns all of these newspaper office buildings, even though the newspapers represent dif-ferent ideologies and political positions. All these are now empty, and filled with anti-squatters as they await redevelopment. There is a huge excess of office space in Amsterdam, Momo maintained, and there is more being built still. These assets are hyper-valorized on corporate books, but in the real market they are not so valuable. The Nether-lands is sitting on a giant commercial and high-end residential real estate bubble. The building we were in had been organized by squat-ters. To engage in the legalization process takes commitment, Nazima said, unlike squatting itself. Now the building was full of artists’ stu-dios – among these, Alan Smart told us, is the Urban Resort group, with Jaap Draaisma as its principal. He was a squatter in the ‘80s, and connected to the Adilkno group of squat-based media activists.4
4 ADIILKNO, Media Archive: Adilkno: Foundation for the Advancement of Il-legal Knowledge (Autonomedia, 1998). ADILKNO / BILWET [Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge / Stichting tot Bevordering van Illegale Wetenschap] was a collective of five artists/authors, Geert Lovink, Arjen Mulder, BasJan van Stam, Lex Wouterloot and Patrice Riemens.
Now he advocates and organizes temporary use strategies for cultural groups in municipalities. (We would see him two years later, speaking at a conference at Ruigoord.) This building, Momo said, is a “com-petitively hip place.” It is not a giant squat. A collective of the tenants deals with the owners.
Momo told us of squatted streets in the neighborhood, today was dotted with chic cafès with open windows, plants and chalked sign-boards. We popped into the storefront of a charming old apartment building where we met Andre, a white-bearded grinning squatter. Na-zima praised him for his fearlessness during police assaults. The tiny space, called Blijvertje has, since 2007, mounted food service, con-certs, poetry readings and political assemblies. It was a social center.
Momo pointed to a swiftly executed ink drawing on large white paper in the window. He praised the late squatter artist: “Hank documented our struggles, with an aesthetics which served the content.” As if to validate some broader role for artists than sketching, Alan Smart spoke about the work produced by the Event Structure Research Group, in-flatables to support the Nieuwmarkt district occupations carried out in the 1970s by ex-Provos and Kabouters to oppose construction of the Metro line.
Back at Joe’s, Cesar Guzman-Concha presented his work on the Italian social center movement in Milan in the mid-70s, the high tide of the radical left. In the two years between 1975 and ‘77, 35 illegal social centers opened in Milan, including Leoncavallo and Cox 18, which continue to this day. The city became a point of diffusion of the movement to other cities in Italy and abroad, especially Spain.
Tino Buchholz had just finished a film about Amsterdam called Cre-ativity and the Capitalist City. [Buchholz, 2011] He reported on the big Hamburg meeting of the anti-gentrification network Right to the City, which had been nearly simultaneous with our conclave.
Miguel told us about the 15M encampment in the Puerta del Sol of Madrid, the strongest European echo of the Arab Spring. I would soon have my own up-close view of the great 15M experiment. Hans Pruijt had lobbied, unsuccessfully in the Dutch parliament against the squatting ban in the Netherlands. In his talk at Joe’s Garage, he engaged what he called an emerging argument among intellectuals that squatting is a precursor of neoliberalism. He outlined the reasons – among them, that squatters and social centers are plugging holes left by the retreating state with their giveaway shops, language classes, free
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food, etc. This led to a lively discussion, particularly about the ways in which the squatting movement across Europe has become a sort of a training ground for future managers and politicians.
There was an awkward moment when Nazima accused Miguel of bad faith for recording the meeting without permission. I regretted that Lynn Owens, our U.S. expert on the Amsterdam squatting move-ment, was not on hand to calm the waters with his shy politesse and keen analysis. Miguel took the accusations with aplomb. Throughout these days, Nazima’s peppery positions opened up a lively and produc-tive dialogue. The questions she raises are ones many activists don’t want to confront, so there is the danger that a researcher in solidar-ity with activists may tend to avoid them. On the other hand, I am convinced that unlimited critique prizes out the mortar from every block of new world construction. I prefer to let things be, to help them grow, instead of nipping them in the bud, and to concentrate
There was an awkward moment when Nazima accused Miguel of bad faith for recording the meeting without permission. I regretted that Lynn Owens, our U.S. expert on the Amsterdam squatting move-ment, was not on hand to calm the waters with his shy politesse and keen analysis. Miguel took the accusations with aplomb. Throughout these days, Nazima’s peppery positions opened up a lively and produc-tive dialogue. The questions she raises are ones many activists don’t want to confront, so there is the danger that a researcher in solidar-ity with activists may tend to avoid them. On the other hand, I am convinced that unlimited critique prizes out the mortar from every block of new world construction. I prefer to let things be, to help them grow, instead of nipping them in the bud, and to concentrate