I recently stood in front of the huge building in Athens pictured here—what might be viewed, from one angle, as a cop victory against a formerly vibrant squat.
And indeed, I longed to be able to still go inside, imagining the autonomously beautiful chaos and care that filled its many rooms, and art overflowing all the available walls. Imagining, perhaps, that it housed, or at least lent material and emotional aid to what some here call “travelers” (a solidaristic way of de-stigmatizing what states and their borders transform into “refugees”). Perhaps a communal print “shop” that freely served a host of other squats and social centers to crank out posters, flyers, and zines. Maybe a weekly social kitchen. Or language and other DIY classes. Or hosting fundraisers like a “tattoo circus” for the anarchist movement’s prisoner solidarity and anti-repression fund. For sure, lots of assembly meetings—the commonplace structure for swapping info, self-organizing, and making collective decisions. Yet likely so many others things happened here—so many dreams launched and schemes hatched, and crucially, so many interconnections forged or solidified.
The wind, instead, blew through remnants of banners on the outside, and whistled through the barbed wire and other police barriers meant to seal off not merely resistance but also the persistence of everyday anarchisms—spaces and places we self-create together that in so many ways, fly in the face of everyday fascism.
It’s hard not to see loss in this building, not to see defeat, not to read it as one more piece of “evidence” to file away in my weary heart that we’re blocked in all of our efforts to reconstruct lives worth living—everything for everyone, especially freedom, shaped endlessly and expansively by the cooperative powers of our imaginations.
But I saw—and still do, and know I must continue to do so—this building from a wholly different angle (and perhaps metaphor): still a squat, now for rebellious graffiti on its exterior, and feral cats, pigeons, and other inhabitants inside. Still signaling a wider vision of us “[re]squatting [our] world.” Still awaiting a future that’s unwritten.
#TryAnarchismForLife
