About a month ago I started a journey that led me from Venice to Palermo and Catania via Rome and Naples. In these cities, in the last year, groups of knowledge workers (visual and performing art workers, researchers, technicians, cultural managers, people who work with cinema, publishing, translation, radio, journalism), but also students and citizens have occupied some theatres and spaces destined to culture.
I lived and visited these places, I interviewed the occupants, I participated to the assemblies.
I anticipated something about this experience in a comment to the mission Taking the Theatres, but now I want to give a deeper vision of these facts. I collected a lot of materials and so I’ll divide this mission in two parts: in the previous mission there is a general description of what is happening and why, in this post there is a deeper analysis about the social and cultural value of these facts and more information about the modality of governance and management of these spaces.
In Italy the media are talking about these occupations rarely and without giving a true idea of the situation. Instead I think that what is happening is very important!
Culture as commons, precariousness, welfare, cultural policies and wasting of resources are the themes at the base of the occupations of spaces, spaces that can be considered as symbols of contradictions.
Relations with Institutions
it is requested to the institutions to share part of their power so that culture as commons can function as devices for the diffusion of participation and of decisional power. This could be also a service to the Institutions so busy that is impossible consider every problem of the citizens and of the city.
it is requested to the institutions to reduce waste (like investments to build new spaces and great events) and promote artistic talents.
The public administration are alternating between indifference (Catania), attempts at dialogue and attempts to encapsulation (Naple, Rome, Venice). But in this year of occupations in all the cities there were no violent fights with the police.
What are they doing inside the occupied spaces?
Public assemblies alternate with roundtables of inquiry on the conditions of knowledge workers, on culture as a commons, on formulation of proposals for the management of these spaces and on the formulation of the job counter-reform as opposed to the one currently being discussed. here some concrete results about the job counter-reform (it is only in italian, i’m sorry!)
Meanwhile, every day these spaces are clean, open and alive with a varied, continuous, hybrid programmation, accessible to all with the help of all the artists and workers, including some of great fame: workshops, performances of all kinds, Sundays for children, after-school care for children (in Sicilian spaces), the barter markets (Naples), seminars on copyleft and creative commons, a desk to legal support and business planning support (Coppola Theatre), history lessons (Nuovo Cinema Palazzo), readings, projections, trump tournaments in the summer for the elderly (Nuovo Cinema Palazzo).
At the Teatro Valle are now numerous the residences and the weekly artistic directions with exchanges also between the spaces occupied (the Coppola Theatre will be the artistic director of Teatro Valle for a week).
Dancers, actors, lawyers, architects and all other knowledge workers are working together in workshops, on stage, experimenting and even putting the lime in the walls as is especially in the Coppola Theatre.
All this combined with a social commitment that goes outside the space occupied: from demonstrations, to the campaign #savecyclists to the one against the privatization of water.
and then there is what the Coppola Theatre call ‘social co-operation’ as the “liberation” of a playfield for football and rugby made by the occupants of the Coppola Theatre and the association Iqbal Masih Librino working for years in one of the worst neighborhoods of Catania with inhabitants and especially children, by providing social services and basing the social inclusion of children especially on sport. it had been asked to the administration to clean up and leave that playground to the association, they also collected signatures on a petition, but to the Public Administration indifference they responded with another “liberation” illegal but legitimate.
All the income from subscriptions or bar as the only sources of funding of these spaces, for activity and works on the structure.
Valle Theatre is formulating a statute participated for the first foundation established for the management of a commons
Participation, citizenship and neighborhood
the participation especially of the inhabitants of the neighborhood is related to the different conditions of the places and also of their neighborhoods: the Nuovo Cinema Palazzo, Marinoni Theatre and Coppola Theatre are located in working class neighborhoods and so the participation of the inhabitants is so strong, also for the reconstruction of the places in worst conditions. Instead a process of gentrification is going on in near Valle Theatre in Rome and in Naples near Ex Asilo Filangieri (now called Knowledge and Creativity Asylum), both in perfect structural conditions.
In Catania a lot of people didn’t know the existence of the Coppola Theatre, but in Catania there is an amazing participation in reconstruction: materials, work from people of the neighborhood. Also from professional plumbers and masons. But at Coppola Theatre now the inhabitants brought also collections of records and a man brought also a gramophone.
I think that bringing personal objects is a symbol of recognition that the theatre is a place of culture, but a place of all the inhabitants.
But everywhere it is evident the awakening of the district. The first person I met in Nuovo Cinema Palazzo is Adele, a woman of more or less 80 years old who was the conductress of the Cinema and is one of the occupant; often on Sunday in the Valle Theatre arrived pies baked by neighbors who also participate to the occupation doing cleaning or host committees or also every week-end there are guided tours of the theatre and a lot of Roman citizens entered in the theatre for the first time in their life during the occupation; the Sunday for children in Knowledge and Creativity Asylum (Naples) or in Nuovo Cinema Palazzo with clown are always crowded (children in occupied spaces!!!)
Social and cultural value of “illegal” spaces
I asked the occupants as you might quantify the social and cultural value that they are producing. They haven’t even found a way that would make quantitatively the value produced, but everyone agrees that finding a way to quantify it can be useful to legitimize their illegal actions and it will probably make it even easier to request the negotiation of a new labor law and a new welfare system.
The social and cultural value is produced because these spaces have become places of artistic and sociological research and experimentation, places where we take care of his own cities and citizens, places where you implement new social policies based on co - operation and identification of real urgencies.
In these spaces the artists and workers of different disciplines are experimenting new collaborations, as well as in the New Palace Cinema there is a permanent laboratory of juggling and clowning, a discipline that has no place in academia.
how to quantify the value produced by experimentation? With what has been cut off funding for culture?
How do you quantify the actions of social cooperation? What is the value of a clean playground for children of Catania? how to quantify the effects of the new sociality that is created?
There are people of all ages that somehow make their own space and live together.
How do you quantify the restoration and the maintenance of the spaces?
The Coppola Theatre is quantifying how much you would spend hiring construction companies to do what the occupants did and comparing with the costs actually incurred.
How do you quantify the value of the knowledge produced about the formulation of new legislative and management tools? How to quantify the legal counseling and the business planning support? with the fees that would ask the consultant?
What is illegitimate in the face of indiscriminate cuts, neglect, indifference?
Final cuts and a new vocabulary
at the end of this journey I have a little new activist vocabulary in which “occupy” means “taking care” and “commons” are places for construction of other economies and pure forms of cooperation and sociality, other forms of government, new forms of social enterprises.
I think it’s obvious how to deal with the degradation in the cities, the restrictive ordinances give poor results compared to open a space for culture, of everybody, completely multifunctional.
But we must understand how to keep alive and active in the long term these activities and these spaces to avoid the risk of self-exploitation
I don’t know if the new type of foundation that the Valle Theater is founding, with the popular shareholding to support the foundation, can be a solution.
Each group has a strong identity related to his own territory so I guess it’s hard to find a single solution for all the same, but you should still focus on the strength of the network that is increasingly widening, thanks to the incorporation of workers with different skills and thanks to the liberation of spaces in different cities almost as if there was a viral infection.
(Ah, the infection will explode tomorrow in Milan. It is a scoop for Edgeryders!)
I know there are other theaters in Europe, in Greece and the Balkans in particular, who are carrying out similar experiences. I’d like to know more about them. So I invite other Edgeryders involved or informed on these events to share their experiences
thank you for reading. I know it was long and complex 