Harden Noten: Voices from the Rotterdam squatting movement
Our first pocket book is out and for sale! Harde Noten by E. T. C. Dee follows on from their 2018 book Squatting the Grey City. Ten people who have squatted in or around Rotterdam were asked four questions. The questions were as follows:
1/ When did you start squatting?
2/What did squatting help you accomplish?
3/ Got a good story from your squatting times?
4/ How do you see the squatting movement now?
Harde Noten is a 78 page pocket book.
It can be bought from all good infoshops, from hive.co.uk and if all else fails Lulu / Amazon / Book Depository
ISBN 9781716424410
#usingspace 15 – The squats of London Road
Using Space is a zine about squats, social centres and alternative ways of living
Recent (2020) squats in Brighton on the short stretch of London Road which goes from St. Peters Church up to Preston Circus led me to refect on this area’s incredibly active radical history.
To focus on just one element, let’s walk past the sites of former squats on London Road…
This is a 28 page zine which is presented A4 sized and can be easily printed brochure to make a A5 zine. Download here.
Next up … using space 15!
I’m hoping the next one will be about the squats of London Road in Brighton …
Text from using space 14 – One day in London
I have to say one of the things I like most about not squatting offgrid anymore is being able to have a bath easily. So there I was sitting in the bath reading a book on Saturday morning and at a certain point I felt like becoming aquatic and never moving again, yet in the end I’m glad I hauled myself out and went into London.
The ‘anti-university’ were doing a series of events to commemorate the original anti-university of 1968, whatever that was. The only thing that had caught my eye was a social centre tour, so I headed up to Bethnal Green, to the Common House.
Zine version available here
I had never been there before, it was interesting to see that it’s basically a rented room in a building used for meetings and they pay 20 grand a year in rent?! I’m not sure if that fits to my idea of what a social centre is (not that it matters what I think if people are self-organising and doing cool stuff).
We heard short presentations about the Feminist Library and DeCentre. Feminist Library is currently in negotiations with Southwark Council for a new building on a 25 year lease and I hope that works out for them! DeCentre is a small room above Freedom Bookshop which hosts occasional events and functions as a communal space for local anarchists.
So what does a social centre mean to people? I guess I was expecting the people on the tour to be involved with spaces themselves but out of the 20 or so peeps, the ones I spoke to were mostly new to social centres and wanting to find out more, which is also good! There were even three Germans in London for 2 weeks whose professor had done something at the original anti-university and who had ordered them to drop by! I think they had fun, especially when we were set exercises to do by megaphone as we walked/trained it through London! Different perspectives are always welcome, for example one person asked why the social centre network isn’t connected to Kurdish community centres and that really brings to the forefront the invisible lines dividing struggles.
Actually, our old Dutch social centre did have some links between our anarchist space and Kurdish groups, but they were hard to maintain, since they didn’t understand our wish for a vegan kitchen and our levels of (kitchen?) cleanliness routinely disappointed them. Also in NL Kurdish groups can easily get state funding (often as a way to negate their radicality). This makes me think about it the other way round, since self-organised spaces almost never ask for funding as a point of pride but maybe they should, like for example doing the old EYFA scam where you got a volunteer from a different EU country to come work for 6 months and then got loads of money for the project. And if the person was already known to the group, well then all the better they could even be a ghost volunteer and all the money could go to good causes.
Anyway I digress. I did have a fascinating discussion with someone involved with a group using Common House about how they needed a local meeting space at times convenient for them, which felt safe and which everyone could get to easily. I guess this explains the need for Common House, as a space to be used for meetings, for me to be honest it didn’t seem much like a social centre since it didn’t seem to be ever open for public events and there’s a limited possibility of sociality when it’s a room behind two locked doors. Also for me a social centre is multifunctional whereas this in fact seemed better described as a meeting place. However, that’s just a superficial opinion, I’m sure I don’t know the full story, there was an offhand remark about a sex workers radio station which sounded cool. And that demonstrates well the need to be locally sited, even if I’m still a bit stuck on the ‘paying 20 grand a year in rent’ thing.
Paying rent is always going to be hard without having something to bring in the money, whether that be creative funding or other income streams. The Cowley Club has a housing co-operative living above it which pays rent and also has the private members bar, so that’s two fairly reliable income sources. There have been projects which tried to make money as a dry vegan cafe but they don’t tend to last long. And that’s the brutal truth.
We then walked down to LARC, a lovely stroll in the sunshine. Now LARC is also a funny one, I haven’t really been there much since it was bought and setup in the late 1990s and we used to have meetings in the cold cellar. It doesn’t seem very embedded in its local scene (whatever that would mean in practice) but people say it’s well used by activist groups so maybe it is working out, I must say to me it seems a bit tired and unused. Again just an outside opinion. Good that it’s there I guess. And anyway it does define itself as an action resource centre, not a social centre…
At LARC we got a presentation about social centres from the early 2000s onwards, starting with Grand Banks and moving forward through squatted social centres (Spike, Russell Square, Offmarket, Non Commercial House, 195 Mare Street, Social Centre Plus etc). There was a definite East London focus since there used to be so much going on (RiP Hackney).
You can check the clusters on maps.squat.net
Grand Banks and maybe Russell Square too were WOMBLES projects (or had WOMBLES involvement, or however you want to put it). This anarchist group was influenced by Italian social centres of the YABASTA / White Overalls persuasion, doing some large Mayday events and organising a string of social centres. For the person who made the speech it was cool to just rock up as a young local and hang out at Grand Banks without needing to spend money or justify their presence. I can see that being a great formative experience in the same way that squat raves taught me about autonomy and freedom. For this person the open door aspect of a social centre was really important, so that anyone could just appear and start chatting. As I write this now I see maybe this could also be a comment on LARC and Common House, which are both far from having an opendoor. I don’t know about this, I don’t think it’s necessary, of course it depends on local context, but in squats I’m more used to keeping the door shut to keep the cops out.
Furthermore, if you are going to do it legally and have a bar, then you probably want to have a private members club and the door needs to be shut as a licencing condition. And I have to say, this then also becomes a useful control mechanism since it’s easier to keep out people at the door than kick them out when they are already inside and trying to hit someone else over the head with a bar stool. This may sound harsh, but these things happen and please remember context, if you are there long enough as a project there will be people you want to keep out of the centre whether that be cops, trouble-making kids, drunk violent knobs or whatever. I’m worried this makes me sound harsh, but I’m thinking right now about social centres fucntioning as bars or venues. Other places I’ve been involved with, like bike repair workshops or infoshops, yeah sure by all means keep the door wide open.
Funnily enough my experience of London social centres pretty much ended where the talk began. I lived in London something like 1995 to 1999 and it was actually a bit of a lull. When I arrived, Cooltan had just been evicted in Brixton 😦 There was the Rainbow Church in Kentish Town. Squat parties got me into the scene, and there were sometimes midweek squatcafes in Hackney. 121 was still going, it was evicted in 1999, I went there a couple of times for meetings and to be honest it seemed very worn down. Dead by Dawn did excellent weird noise and speedcore parties though. I’m trying to think what else there was. It feels like most activisty meetings at that time took place in pubs and universities. Sadly I never went to Spike, it sounds like an amazing project. I also never went to 491. Too late now! As an infoline once said “Big parties happen because people attend them.”
We did do TAA, Temporary Autonomous Art, a series of squatted art events put on by free party folks who wanted to do something else as well as full-on parties. Funnily enough I went to a TAA after the social centre tour which was awesome and explains why I had such a great day overall.
More on that below.
After LARC we took the “new” overland train down to New Cross Gate to go to the Field. When we got there, the person on the tour repping the Field wasn’t able to get us in since the code on the door had been changed. It didn’t really matter, we could still sit in the front garden , although it would have been cool to see it. I was expecting something like a garage from what I had read about it online, but actually it’s bigger than that. It’s like the annex to a house. Strange it was standing empty, now apparently they’ve got it rentfree for 5 years before it will be demolished. Let’s hope it goes longer!
Now I did say it’s bigger than I thought, but it’s still tiny:) It is noticeable that all the radical spaces in London are quite small. Aside from the ones previously mentioned, 56a, Mayday Rooms and Freedom are all pretty small.
So then the question is why are the social spaces in London so small? Well, the obvious answer is that property prices dictate that we can only carve out small pockets of resistance. Even a bought space like LARC is small. Even a place like Mayday Rooms rented with Sainsbury money is small (also it’s an archive, it doesn’t need to be crazy big).
For sure that’s a “big” part of it, but still in other European cities we have massive freespaces. And it’s not even like we have any huge legalised venues that survived from back when property prices weren’t insane. Rome’s got shitloads of spaces, like Forte Prenestino, SCUP, Metropoliz, exSnia, squatted cinemas etc, Paris had Transfo, Copenhagen’s got fricken Christinia and Ungdomshus and the Volketshus, Amsterdam had ADM and has OCCII, OT301, Vrankrijk, Maastricht’s got Landbouwbelang, Cologne’s got the AZ. I could go on… Les Tanneries, Leoncavallo, Bike Wars, Arena, Kemika, Metelkova, Rozbrat, Uzipis, Ruigoord, Grangegorman, ORKZ, Köpi, Black Triangle, Auro…
Most of these began squatted and maybe that’s another factor, nowadays it’s hard to imagine a big longterm squat in London (yet by no means impossible, a city the size of London you can still get lucky and Grow Heathrow shows it is possible). Big buildings get squatted pretty much every weekend for parties, and sometimes they end up not being hit and run but residential for a while, I can think of a couple in Tottenham and Hackney Wick that went that way. What a bummer one of them didn’t turn into a solid longterm venue. I guess the thing is something about the English mentality means the authorities here don’t turn a blind eye, like they (used to) do in other countries. But I think it’s also really a sign of our weakness as a movement and that’s a fucking shame.
Obviously, holding down a big squat is loads of work don’t get me wrong. However I do miss them in the UK. And also the feeling of strength you get from participating in them. So maybe I do have to face the facts and admit it’s all now a bit impossible in the UK. Anyway it seems the new styles are different. Someone told me about Make Your Own Shift, a communal bike repair project and it all seemed a bit popup hipster shizzle to me, but then apparently they have a creche and a bar and stuff, so maybe they are providing social centre functions in a new form.
What do people actually want? Maybe people just want hit-n-run parties to get smashed at. Maybe people don’t want infoshops. I mean, who wants zines that have to be printed out nowadays amirite?
WHO WANTS ZINES ANYWAY!?
I should point out at this point that DiY Space for London exists! I can’t say I have been there (yet – I haven’t been living in England since it opened). I’ve got to say I am dubious about the longevity of a rented venue, but at the same time they would have bought a space if they could have and at least they have already got further than many projects (such as Emmaz).
I guess what I would like to see are more self-organised projects of any form. It’s difficult to decide how much capitalism to bring into a project. Renting for me is a killer resource drain to be avoided but of course that’s not always possible. And owning / meanwhile leasing / whatever doesn’t in any way exempt you from all the day-to-day problems of running a space. Places like Brighton and Bristol have all this “alternative” stuff going on, but it never seems to end up in longterm radical spaces. I do wonder why.
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PAUSE FOR BREATH
—————-
From the Field we led a vanguardist revolutionary (and hungry) brigade (of three) on to TAA (Temporary Autonomous Arts). Wow there’s lot to say about TAA as well, I even wrote a zine about TAA a couple of years back which I never finished, I should dig that out since it had an awesome title (TAA very much).
This was a Tiny TAA and it was actually in the same building as the Pokora rave two weeks before, very close to Old Street roundabout. This area used to get partied a lot before it got gentrified in the late 1990s, early 2000s. I remember an Immersion party in a building just off Kingsland Road which didn’t even have an exterior wall, we were literally partying looking out on the City of London. I mentioned the name of the street to an old head and they immediately said Insanity used to do parties there. I remembered nearby Curtain Road as well. And of course the Foundry with the rotating dancefloor in the basement.
So it felt sort of familiar to be partying there but actually nowadays to be so central is quite unusual. I can understand why they wanted to hold onto it for TAA, it’s a great building. Would be cool if it stays longer, but of course it won’t. It’ll just get taken to court and evicted. Pff!
Also for TAA it was an oldskool venue. In the beginnings TAA was in places like Farringdon and Stokey, then it moved further out to Hackney Wick and Tottenham. This suited the travelling culture of the scene, people could rock up in their vans from other cities, but it lost the interventional side of things, where anyone could enter because they were walking past and be like “wow oh shit what’s this?” To be honest that was always one of the most interesting aspects for me, although i wouldn’t have thought we got much passing traffic in Old Street, it was down a sidestreet and anyway there wasn’t an open door.
TAA was really cool, props to the people who made the mad scaffolding hammock thing on the roof (see zine for pic)! Also it was good that nobody fell off the roof. It was funny at the party when we were all up there scaring the neighbours and someone started raging and my buddy who was blitzed on K started wobbling then tumbled over for no reason and we got a bollocking from Pokora party crew for not being careful :} BIG LOVE POKORA for actually looking after their ravers, that doesn’t happen enough any more (I’m wearing my hoody as I write this … and listening to speedcore obvs)
When I went back to the same building for the TAA, I certificated the toilet (see zine for pic). I was just so impressed when I went to the rave that they had plumbed in one toilet an hour before and it didn’t get trashed!? That’s surely unheard of for a squat party. And more than that, it was still there and functioning for the TAA. What a trooper.
I got dragged along to a street party under a bridge right by Shoreditch High Street station. It was awesome! There was this sick 12volt sound chariot thing pumping out dirty music and people cycling around on crazy bikes nearly crashing into all the normies wandering past no doubt asking themselves what the fuck was going on. It really cheers me up to be in zones like the street party or TAA when the people present are the ones who are controlling how the space functions, not the CCTV or the cops in our heads. It makes me feel strong and part of something which isn’t bullshit. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s the same feeling as when I drove into Köpi’s wagenplatz or when I hitched onto a teknival terrain or when you walk around the echoing floors of a massive squat.
—
I loves freespaces! What else is there really?
#usingspace14 – a zine about squats, social centres and alternative ways of living
Using Space 14 was written August 2019 and came out somewhat later. Hail inertia!
It covers a day in London when I went on a social centre tour thanks to the anti-university and then went onto a Temporary Autonomous Arts event in a rave venue in Old Street.
All in all a fine day out.
You can read all about it online or download an A4 pdf, which when printed as a brochure produces a zine.
#usingspace13 – a zine about squats, social centres and alternative ways of living
Sqek is Dqed! This zine from 2019 has a long article discussing what happens when a collective falls apart. You can read online or get the zine here in A4 format, print as a brochure to make it into a zine.
From usingspace13: SqEK is dqed
It’s always fascinating when collectives fall apart, so we decided to
publish this view on the end of the SqEK, which has produced some texts on
squatting most of them quite readable. It is quite niche, but heyho, we’re
niche anyway. Thanks to the people who read versions of this text and
hopefully made it more accessible.
This text in zine form as a pdf
Well, well, WELL. Here we are, it’s been the best part of a decade and now
SqEK is dead. I have mostly enjoyed my time being part of Squatting
Everywhere Kollective (SqEK) ever since I popped up at the London 2010
meeting, having seen a post on Indymedia UK (RiP). On the whole, being a
member of the collective has been a productive and inspiring time. I have
written a few book chapters and journal articles about squatting, a couple
in collaboration with people, and none of these things would have happened
if I hadn’t got off my arse and taken that train up to London.
The annual conferences have been an amazing opportunity to engage with local
squatter and radical leftwing movements in places like Barcelona, Berlin,
Catania, Copenhagen, Paris, Prague and Rome. Disparagingly described by
someone leaving the collective back then as “just people meeting up to go
visit various squats,” these meetings have actually been amazingly fertile
encounters between us as SqEK and social centre participants in places like
Klinika (Prague, recently evicted), Can Mas Deu (Barcelona), New Yorck im
Bethanianen (Berlin), Candy Factory and Trampoline House (Copenhagen),
Poortgebouw (Rotterdam), Studentato Occupato (Catania), La Gare XP and
Transfo (Paris).
After an unintentional(?) misfire in Barcelona where we ended up doing an
academic conference sponsored by Antipode in a university setting and were
mostly ignored by the local scene, I was very pleased to organise a DIY no-
budget meeting in Rotterdam which was based in a legalised squat and whilst
using venues of differing institutional status, also had a self-organised
(and anti-gentrification) theme.
Overall, the conferences, the books we produced, the conversations with
people have informed my activism and writing, as well as giving me
intellectual stimulation and the impulse to carry on when little else does.
Sometimes we dropped right in on massive local controversies and perhaps (!?)
our interventions made a small positive contribution to these inevitably
acrimonious debates eg artists versus anarchists (see “I’ve painted myself into a corner” in Using Space 8), or an unpleasant internal power
struggle at Klinika, or the eviction meltdown at the Foundry in London
(I don’t think we helped much there) or the big Cox 18 versus Leoncavallo
debate (in Milan). I possibly and inadvertently stoked the fires of the la
tter when I gave our ‘fresh off the press’ Pluto book The Squatters’ Movement in Europe: Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism
to the Cox 18 library, not realising the book comments on the debate in a
postscript I hadn’t yet read (I guess it was submitted too late for copy
editing). Luckily I don’t think they realised it either, but I did get a
hilarious lecture about self-organisation:
-Did you write this book yourselves?
-Yes I wrote that chapter
-Did you edit it yourselves?
-Yes I copyedited the book myself actually
-Did you print it yourselves?
-No we got it printed by the publisher
-Ha! Take this book – we printed and published it ourselves. Now that’s self-
organisation!
Our collective never defined its politics too much beyond supporting
squatting and being antifascist and I was quite happy about that, there’s
really no point in having abstract doctrinal issues ripping us apart (let’s
leave that to the Marxists), especially since ideological formations depend
a lot on local contexts, for example legalisation is/was controversial in
Spain, it’s not controversial in the Netherlands and in the UK, most
squatters can only dream of a place existing long enough to legalise it.
Through SqEK, I met some really cool anarchist-minded folks from all over
the world. Also of course, there were the more liberal-minded people and
ironically for a collective interested to compare and contrast how squats
institutionalise in different places, there was always the fear for me that
SqEK would itself institutionalise. I really did worry about that for a few
years, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t happen, because things were so
great. And somehow we did preserve our marginality and radical nature for a
while, despite having a core of older white male academics running the shop.
Through my relatively early membership and my gender and my skin colour, I
appear to have joined this inner clique in some ways. I picked up on the
frustration of younger female and/or queer participants and was disheartened
that they often came once and never returned, yet my addiction to the
central matter (namely sitting around with a bunch of intelligent people of
all nationalities, disciplines, genders and ages to discuss squatting
movements) always won out, since I simply could not have found such a high
level of discussion elsewhere.
Naturally, most housing activists are interested to talk about squatting,
many of them squat themselves, yet in my experiences of squatting and
activism in the UK and the Netherlands, I always found myself both able to
have good chats with anyone but also at a certain point needing to look
elsewhere for stimulation. SqEK scratched that itch. It was such an amazing
feeling to go to that meeting in London and realise I was in a room of ten
people and everyone liked talking about squatting just as much as I did! We
seriously could go on discussing issues for days without stopping and of
course the breaktime conversations were always superinteresting too. The
SqEK format was way more relaxed, informal and interdisciplinary than the
standard academic fare which is ring-fenced, super formalised and boring.
Let’s take the Catania meeting as an example. We had a lovely airy, light
room in a squatted student project where we sat around and discussed
different presentations. Some food was provided by university catering
thanks to our connections, some we cooked ourselves. At night we hung out
with the people we were staying with and they took us off to show us stuff
in town. We went to this longterm social centre (with a crazy backstory) for
a gig and there were our hosts from Spazi Sociali Catania, doing everything:
the door, the tickets, the bar, selling the Tshirts!
Another evening we had an amazing gathering, where SqEK people were sitting
on one side of the table and the other side slowly filled up until the room
was bursting with waves of local activists, by which I mean all the way from
those squatting in the 1970s up to and including the present generation. A
long scroll of paper with a handwritten timeline of events was unfurled and
stuck to the wall. People who were actually there told stories about how
they interacted with mafia and owners, how they dealt with hard drugs in the
scene, how their group didn’t really get on with other groups, why they
squatted a certain building and so on. Tireless translators went between
Italian and English. It seemed like everyone who wanted to speak got to
speak. It was an incredible experience!
And then afterwards the local SqEK people said they were a bit frustrated
because we heard so much about Catania but we didn’t get to tell them about
our local projects so the engagement had only gone one way!!
SqEK spans different disciplines, we don’t talk about it much because that
is simply the way it is, but that in itself it is really an amazing
phenomenon and rather unusual. We have sociologists, architects, hardcore
activists, historians, geographers, journalists, anthropologists and so on,
all mingling and for the most part respectfully communicating. That’s really
incredible! Especially when we consider the participants are from places as
diverse as Sao Paolo, Lausanne, Brighton, Madrid, Stockholm, New York City,
Middlebury, Rome, Rennes, Potsdam, Prague and Ljubljana!! And as I suggested
before, these informal meetings are so much better than usual academic
conferences where 3 papers are presented in 2 hours and then there is
supposed to be a discussion but there is never time. SqEK meetings were
nothing like that. The informality was created by the mindset of the people
and I love how there wasn’t much hierarchy of knowledge: a professor can
talk on an equal level with a student since in the field of squatting
studies everyone is welcome to give an opinion (assuming the opinion is
based on some knowledge of course, not all hierarchies are bad, sometimes we
had to suffer way too long from ignorant architects blathering about their
bullshit).
There has often been the complaint that we are talking about squatting
instead of doing it. Some activists seem to find that simple statement 100%
damning, despite the severe risks which would be entailed practically
anywhere in the world by expecting a group of 30 people who only know each
other vaguely to take and hold a building for a week. For me it’s not a
problem, I’ve been squatting the last five years and I like to talk about it
too. It would for sure be good to have more people in SqEK who are actually
squatting but I don’t want to get caught in the deadend of identity politics
here.
Another general complaint which seems to rear its ugly head often is people
telling us to stop studying squatters and putting them in boxes. I see some
merit in this but it mostly comes from people unaware of the sort of books
we have actually written AND from people who are actually themselves
academics, nursing some twisted guilt for their own positionality.
My complaints come from different angles. And I’ve cut out the really fruity
bits.
So what went wrong? Why am I now at the moment of throwing up my hands and
walking away from the collective? As you will have seen, I have found much
for myself to nourish and enjoy in SqEK, but there have also been issues,
which after not being dealt with for so long have festered and become ill-
smelling boils. People tend to just leave when they get fed up, but I feel
like saying my piece, since my affection for the collective and most
importantly what it could be motivates me to do so.
Despite the open nature of the collective and its many good points, it has
become painfully obvious to me that for a certain minority the collective is
nothing more than a blood-sucking organisation designed to facilitate
academic knowledge extraction. With all the oneupmanship that comes with
that. Attempts for more activist discussions are brushed aside – witness the
person who wanted to add fairy tales to a project being brusquely rebuked,
or the younger people pushed away by older white males, or the consistent
refusal of those with access to academic funding to allot this money towards
radical projects such as translating the SqEK books into other languages
aside from English.
For me, SqEK has run its course. It was fun, it lasted longer than I could
have hoped, but now it’s over and should dissolve. SqEK never really became
useful for social movements in the way I had hoped it could and now I would
argue the opposite, it’s becoming useful for agents of repression.
Not too long ago, someone sent a superinteresting link to the sqeklist
about how studying migrants can only harm them. I don’t agree with what it
says 100% by the way, but it’s an important (and open published) article
which deserves a read and has obvious implications regarding the study of
squatters.
I think the article makes some very astute points but also becomes a bit
dogmatic. Of course research can benefit participants, of course there are
cracks. Was there a discussion about this on the list? Was there fuck. Maybe
it cut too close to the bone, that’s what I thought at first. Now I think
people will only actually engage in things which will result in beefing up
their academic scorebook.
Speaking of which, now I see a callout for a SqEK in Madrid. This is nothing
more than a desperate attempt to keep the dying parasitical organism alive.
It needs more blood! Social centres in Madrid have already rejected the
parasitism of Miguel Martinez, who wants to organise this “10 years of SqEK”
meeting. He was explicitly called out for his behaviour in a book, in which
he was called a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” (page 66) for his methods. Patio
Mariovillas refused to talk to him again after he published Okupaciones en
Movimiento. He also steamrollered a friend who lives in Madrid out of the
collective. And now the proposal is to do a SqEK in Madrid… This is
bringing the good name of SqEK into disrepute. Remember this is a name I
(amongst others) helped to create with my activist connections and my
preference for freely accessible and high grade academic work. I hope you
can understand my anger here.
Martinez also contributed an article to our journal, got lots of fine-
grained advice and then published it elsewhere without giving credit to the
unpaid labour. And of course this person talks a lot about collaboration,
washing the dishes, feminism and so on. This talk, with all these buzzwords,
don’t count for much when you look at the actual behaviour. OK, one time you
might give the benefit of the doubt, but how to explain away all these
incidents?
Sure, this is how it goes in the cutthroat world of academia, but I thought
our collective wanted to do things differently. It won’t surprise you to
learn that this person’s name is plastered all over our supposedly communal
projects.
I have the feeling that my time and activism willingly spent promoting SqEK
as a collective and also the books in which I contributed articles (as one
of the few independent researchers amidst a glut of academics I might add)
is now supporting a project which I no longer endorse. Although I have made
my opinion quite clear on multiple occasions (Copenhagen, Barcelona, Prague,
Catania) the new path is the commons … not practicing the commons of course
which might make some sense, but studying it for personal academic and
financial gain. Despite the many amazing experiences I’ve had in SqEK, I no
longer feel welcome since I dislike the structural problems. I’m staggered
that these patriarchal dynamics are replicated after so much hot air has
been spoken precisely about not doing that.
It really bugs me that these fruitful conversations I’ve had and amazing
encounters might now be legitimating SqEK and allowing it to enter other
squats, only for the academics to take what is good for them and give
nothing back. We stayed in some wonderful places, but let’s take Klinika for
example, when it was under eviction threat we did nothing to help.
I was thinking previously to go to the next conference and organise a
session on academic (ir)responsibility, but this collective is already dead.
SqEK for me is now just another part of the academic sausage factory and I
sincerely regret helping few people’s careers out. For me it was always a
political struggle in support of squats and social centres. Now some people
in the collective support Colau in Barcelona. And she is evicting squats..
Culture is the hook with which journalists and academics are trying to
recuperate our struggles. There is a world of difference between attempts,
whatever their limitations, of people involved in struggle to reflect on it,
to theorize their practice, and the efforts of academics and journalists to
write about such movements. Whether hostile or sympathetic, as expressions
of the fundamental division of labour in capitalist society – that between
mental and manual labour – these specialists in writing and in ideas are
forcing a praxis that is escaping this division back into it. For those of
us engaged in the collective project of getting out of this world and into
the one we all feel and know is possible, a critique of the category of ‘DiY
culture’ and the recuperative project which lies behind it is becoming
imperative.
Hilariously, this quote is from Aufheben. It’s probably written by the
sellout who ended up thinking it was OK to advise the police on riot
control. It just goes to show how much shit people can spout while not
looking at their own behaviour.
And all that glitters is not gold.
Let’s be honest from the outset, it would have been weird if there had never
been any flareups concerning ethical or political issues with a collective
like SqEK that researches squatting. In the time I have been involved with
SqEK, squatting has been criminalised (totally) in the Netherlands and (in
residential buildings only) in England and Wales. Therefore working on this
topic can (and should) raise huge ethical concerns not least in the sense
that providing evidence to the forces of repression about things that they
deem criminal and/or a threat to public order. And I know that at least for
the people I consider comrades it does raise these worries. For me this
probably explains why having tried to study how criminalisation was being
achieved in order to stop it, I have now veered off into historical studies
since studying the past avoids these issues to some extent, like I’m not
going to get anyone arrested for writing about squatting in Rotterdam in the
1970s. Another reason would be the hope to inspire future squatters by
documenting all the hidden, inspiring stories from the past. And another
reason would be that sadly in both the UK and NL,squatting movements are
really winding down. To the extent that the places I work on are pretty much
gentrified to fuck nowadays.
Most people in SqEK are from the same sort of activist milieu as me, in
which hatred for the police, refusal to snitch, support for social
movements, solidarity with prisoners are so normal as to not even be worth
mentioning (and if this makes you raise your eyebrows, congratulations you
are the sort of person who fucked up the collective).
When meeting a new person in SqEK, I would always have to check if they were
politically aware or merely some academic parasite. For sure we did have a
few masters students focusing on squatting as an interesting and trendy
topic before spotting the next trend with which to continue on with their
academic career and in addition we did have a few horribly perverted career
academics who wanted to suck all the energy they could out of the nearest
available movements, using the cultural cachet of SqEK to gain access to
groups they would otherwise not be able to reach, BUT overall most people in
SqEK are really sound. Just as I found out when talking to scholars of
adverse possession in the UK, it seems that rightwingers are interested in
other things. We are generally an amicable left-wing bunch.
The problem is that suggestions to collaborate on projects are only
interesting for people if they can make money from them and/or further their
academic career. Now if people want to do that, fine, although it’s not
interesting for me and I would hope there would be some sort of ethical
evaluation regarding how to treat the “objects of study.” If some SqEK
people want to do that and find it morally justifiable to earn loads from
studying the commons whilst giving very little back, well it’s their life I
guess, but then I would also expect more activist projects to have a look-in
too. But the idea for translations has gone nowhere, and my proposal to
interview squatters locally and pool resources generated no interest at all
except for the parasites whose eyes lit up when they realised they could use
the interviews for their own projects (it’s free real estate).
Within SqEK I have tried to discuss these issues several times, with various
degrees of success. Regarding academic (ir)responsibility, in Copenhagen, I
made a short presentation about Aufhebengate (referred to above, total bunfight, would def recommend looking into it if you don’t know it and like a lonely evening on the computer with the popcorn), then opened up the
discussion with the intention of generating a debate about academic
responsibility. And for once the collective was silent! That doesn’t happen
very often.
In Barcelona we got into things in our evaluation meeting at Can Mas Deu,
sitting in the shade of a beautiful elder tree. My initial point was that
not everyone gets to live in a place where there’s a lot of activism and
radical culture, so there’s no need to judge people purely on their
anarchist points. People don’t need to be squatting to have interesting
things to say about it. I do even think there is a place for quality
abstract academic work, this can be hugely influential. But I also think
people need to have their heart in the right place. If you think squatters
need ‘guidance’ or that you know better than them because you are more
intelligent/ cultured/ whatever, then your work will no doubt be shit and I
won’t help you with it. That’s my opinion.
On another tangent, it always surprised me how much we published in English.
Sure I’m a native English speaker and so hohoho I’m alright, but it’s
strange how dominant English is in the academic world in the disciplines
favoured by most SqeK scholars. I was always hoping we could generate some
cash through grants to translate stuff or indeed do it ourselves since the
many people in the collective were producing texts (short and long) in
English which presumably would be fairly easy to create again in their
mother tongue(s). It’s even possible the texts already existed in another
language!.
With our last book, Fighting for Spaces, Fighting for our Lives: Squatting Movements Today I was actually quite disappointed that we didn’t make a
website for crowdsourced translations, by the end it felt like I was banging
my head against a brick wall for six months just to get the fucking thing
published so I gave up. Should I have just done it? Well yes maybe but we
are talking about a collective here. Anyway it took us the best part of a
decade just to make the damn thing.
It is also interesting to note that with Fighting for Spaces,the academics
basically weren’t interested to contribute to something which would not be
counted for their CV. Meanwhile, it’s also worth noting activists often
talked a lot about websites, interactivity, blabla and then disappeared
again. In any case, I can’t say I like the final product very much but I am
very happy it exists.
Another thing we could have done much better is radical solidarity. Of
course everyone (?) is busy in their local scenes and signing petitions is
fairly pointless, but sometimes places we had stayed in and interacted with
were under threat and we (two hundred people on the mailing list) could have
done more to help out.
So having not dealt with these issues and demonstrating a notable reluctance
to organise the next meeting before this bullshit offer from Madrid, the
SqEK collective is now dead in my opinion.
Vroeger was alles beter. Now SqEK is being pulled in new ridiculous
directions as people grow older and want to talk about legalization and
fucking commons instead of supporting radical projects and putting the
spotlight on how the Colau administration can evict a project in Barcelona
and then leave it empty for eighteen months until it’s resquatted. And
Salvini says he’s going to close down all the freespaces and we are just
going to watch? That’s exactly what we did while the French state focused on
closing down both the ZAD and the Calais Jungle after explicitly recognising
them as threats to its authority.
If I say these things in the previous paragraph without the full context
they may sound weird, that’s because they come from hours of prior debate.
Am I against the commons? No of course not, it’s what we are all fighting
for. Squats are an amazing example of the commons being implemented in
everyday life. Am I against PhD students getting paid loads of money to
study commons projects and giving very little back? VERY MUCH SO YES. Am I
against SqEK valorising bullshit politicians like Colau who have sold out
the people they should support? FUCK YES.
Bonus question: Am I against lame academic conferences? YES A THOUSAND TIMES
YES
So let’s pull the plug and let the parasites die inside the decayed and
braindead organism.
So I started with the good and then went to the bad. Hopefully it is quite
obvious why things are not good any longer. Things have changed. Everyone
grows old. Projects grow old. This is part of life. SqEK has been in
existence for over a decade now, which is pretty cool for an informal
academic group. Finally the inner tensions seem to have ripped it apart and
finally, I’m OK with that. I guess I had reasons to go down the academic
path for a while and those reasons have expired and/or collapsed under my
disgust at the way this collective is heading.
There’s a lot of clever people trapped in academia who could do a lot more
for the world if they cared to. So why don’t they?
I hope the next project can learn from these things instead of reinventing
the wheel.
And I look forward to continued collaborations with the friends I’ve made
worldwide through this collective.
Boycott Madrid.
Up the squatters!
written feb – august 2019
#usingspace12 – a zine about squats, social centres and alternative ways of living
Published August 2018. Amongst other stuff this features a call for more zines, an account of what happened when Nazis tried to squat in Amsterdam and a book review of a terrible pro-gentrification book. You can download a print ready pdf.
Interview – Squatting the Grey City
A short interview with E.T.C. Dee, the author of Squatting the Grey City
Why write a book about squatting in Rotterdam?
I have visited, lived and squatted in Rotterdam for a number of years. Right now I am squatting there and missing a bit the old squat scene, which I guess I caught the end of back in the 2000s. We had some cool places, like the Slaakhuis, the Fabriek in Delfshaven, Onrust, Boogjes, Groene Voltage, Quarantaineterrein, Wolfart and of course the Poortgebouw. Most of these places have now been evicted but a few still persist. And now you can read all about it in a book I have been writing for the last three years! It is a partial history of the squatting movement(s) in Rotterdam from the 1960s up to the present. It was never my intention to profile private residential squats and the scene here is so fractured and wild that I’m sure that I have also omitted your favourite project. That’s OK, we need lots of diverse histories and herstories, not one hegemonic version. I’ve enjoyed my time spent in various archives, chatting to (ex)squatters and chasing down half-remembered stories online. Hopefully you will enjoy the selection of stories I have retrieved. It’s not just about squatting, but the occupation of derelict space is an important thread running through the book. How sad it was that squatting was criminalised and how stupid it is that most people stopped. It’s still possible!
What does the book cover?
The book starts at the beginning of the modern movement and I talk about two very useful archives, namely the Delpher online mainstream media resource and krakenpost, a squatter mailing list which has been going since the 1990s. Then I talk about various housing projects which also had a public function, such as the Joodse Ziekenhuis and the Emmahuis, before moving onto quirky projects that came out of the squatscene, like Hotel New York (which would most likely have been demolished if it wasn’t squatted in the 1980s) and the successful No Border camp of 2013. Next I discuss the social centres phenomenon and how many music venues came out of the squat scene here (like Thelonius, Waterfront and Eksit), before zooming in on some specific projects. First I look at the Fietsenfabriek and its defeated attempt to become a broedplaats, then the Poortgebouw, which still stands defiant and somewhat autonomous in Kop van Zuid. I next reflect on the squatscene in the 2000s, before devoting individual chapters to the Snellinckstraat experience and the Groene Voltage social centre, two places where I lived. There are then two quick chapters on the kraakspreekuur and Rotterdam zines respectively, before a consideration of what it means to squat after criminalisation in 2010. Following this, I discuss the Dutch housing corporation scandal and then conclude that squatting is still possible, even if most people have kind of given up on the whole idea, unfortunately.
Where can we get the book?
You would be welcome to buy a book from me in person or online, you will be able to find the links soon. You will also find it to download for free at various spots … right now, the only online link is for the epub version.
What is your next project?
I really enjoyed writing this book and I hope people find it interesting. I feel that there is still much to be said and recorded from the squatters movement across the Netherlands and that we need to create our own narratives to kick off future actions. Now you can read a bit about what was going on in Rotterdam. Let’s hear from some other places too!
My next work will probably be a collection of interviews with Dutch squatters, to capture a bit of what is happening now in the scene. I aim to do around twenty interviews, so far I have done three and am putting the raw audio online at the archive.
Book – Squatting the Grey City
Finally a cobblebooks release!
Squatting the Grey City – E.T.C. DEE
Rotterdam has a rich and diverse history of squatting. As well as countless houses, many venues and other projects came from the movement. If you know where to look, the city is full of stories. This book will give you one version of this colourful past, from one squat researcher’s perspective. Read about everything from the Aktiekomittee Progastarbeiders to Zines, with loads of pictures and activist analysis in between. You are guaranteed to learn something new about this grey city and the squatters movement which even now bubbles away within it.
Forthcoming as website / pdf / printbook / epub (links will be added in due course)
cobble 
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