As usual, I have been trying to catch up on posts that I haven’t got around to posting. But it’s a real pain in the arse. And whenever I do get around to it, it seems to take forever. And as yet, I’ve never managed to get up to today whenever that is.
This morning, for example, I posted a couple of posts, back-dating them both to when I took the photo or wrote that thought in my notebook. Doing things like that just seems to be too out of sync though. So maybe it’s best to just draw a line in the sand and commit to posting “live” as of today, by which I mean every morning for example, as if this were my morning pages. Hmm yeah that would be great! And it’s gonna be awesome when others start posting here in large numbers….
The thing I most want to write about today is the idea of being open to the public, the passsers-by, the meanderers the yokels. That’s something that I know is vitally important for the future of Space Pirates. It’s how I found out about the wonderous potential vested in squatting, its how DA! grew, and I’m sure it’s how we’ll grow, both in numbers and in strength of diversity.
It’s a tricky thing to open a squat to the public though.
Both for the squatters who live there and for the potential visitors. For the squatters there’s always the concern that the owner will turn up and for the visitors there’s the challenge of stepping over the threshold into an alternative reality.
I wonder what the ASS’s take on the owner-turning-up-sitch is… Of all the squats I’ve opened to the public, I’ve only once been visited by someone claiming to be the owner. I explained that they clearly entered the building as a member of the public, not in their capacity as the owner and asked them to leave as the owner, or remain as a member of the public. They weren’t exactly happy about this but it was in the middle of an opening night arty party where there were hundreds of people wandering around amid the performance art etc. I think he realised people listening to him exalting his status as a landlord wasn’t going to earn the respect he imagined it would. I wonder how many people thought he was a perfomance artist…
For the visitors to a squat, I think the main challenge is the lack of ‘script’. Going to a pub for example has its own script: 1 Walk up to bar, 2 buy drink, 3 drink drink, 4 chat drunk shit. When you go round to a friend’s for dinner there’s a script too bring a bottle or something, share dinner, offer to wash up etc, and so on with pretty much every other social situation. But with squatting, you arrive, hopefully there’s an address, but you can probably figure out which door it is, maybe not… You get inside – its commercial interior architecture has been transformed more or less into a home. Whose part of which room you’re in is not usually clear, there’s probably someone sleeping somewhere, and there’s a pervasive sense that you shouldn’t really be there, but you are! You’ll probably get into some elaorate conversation about whether it was the Spanish Civil War or the Spanish Revoultion, and there’s likely to be vast quantities of skipped food making its way to the bin for the third time. But which bag is the bin exactly?
Hmm not really sure how to end this post, but I don’t want to go on and on for the sake of it… I guess in conclusion, there’s a lot more to be considered about these challenges. I guess it would have been a good idea to focus today’s theme: Safety & Security… hmm yeh ok, tomorrow I’ll do that and post about Domesticity.