Yolio!

Feels strange to say it, like I’m stating the obvious, but Olio has been such a great resource, both for food and generally kitting out the squats we’ve occupied these past few months…Here’s a top ten list of things we’ve got from Olio…

  1. Soup maker
  2. 2X cookers
  3. Endless matresses
  4. Lamps
  5. Bread
  6. chairs, sofas
  7. stationery
  8. Bread
  9. Bread
  10. Bread

These have all been found in the offers section, there is also a wanted section. I’ve only used it a couple of times, but it’s been great. The trick was finding good images, I got an AI to make these images for me… feel free to save and use them if you’re ever after any generic kitchen stuff! Maybe I’ll put a Space Pirates logo or watermark on them 🙂

There’s also a Forum on Olio…. I have replied in the comments there a bit, but I haven’t posted anything myself there yet – I think it would be great to try it out tomorrow and see who’s out there in Olioland … There are 7 sections to choose from: App Q&A, Spreading the word, Olio Goals, Tips & Tricks, Zero waste, Olio love, and Recipes…

hmmmm… any thoughts about what we could write about in any of those sections? Each post can also have a link… I guess linking to this post would make a lot of sense! Is it Olio Love or Spreading the word… or maybe Tips & tricks…?

I’m wondering how we might get over that prejudice that I fear is likely to be associated with squatting… I hope this site might take the edge off a bit…

Domesti-City


The species problem is the set of questions that arises when biologists attempt to define what a species is. Such a definition is called a species concept; there are at least 26 recognized species concepts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept

The Space Pirates have been busy for days, scrolling hard and getting set up down in the Sett downstairs.

Let me fill you in a little about what we’ve been up to with the badgers…


Squatting

Yesterday was the safety and security day of the Space Pirates’ week.

We have installed a digi-lock on our inner door downstairs and secured the external doors. The Space Pirates have a new battery drill, and have cobbled together some other tools to this end.

An ongoing safety concern is water leaking from above the ground floor, dripping into the lobby, running out onto the street and sometimes even reaching the basement.

One pirate posted a note in the neighbours’ door, alerting them to the leak and including our new email address, ‘spiceparrots@proton.me‘.


Possession of the Flowerpot, our much adored location in Bethnal Green, has been awarded to a lord of the land by the courts today.

This figure, Circuit, a time guardian (and clearly a pirate), was discovered on a slide at the Flowerpot only recently.

Did you know that pirates at sea, apart from flying the Jolly Roger, have also flown the hourglass symbol on flags? (Graeber, Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia 2023) This image will take any “ex-XRs” back!

This time guardian was discovered down the Sett, but nobody has named her yet…


Domesticity


An old mine shaft near the Welsh coast

Domestic comes from the Latin Domus:

any dwelling-place or abode (of people or animals)

Synonyms: domicilium, habitāculum, habitātiō, tēctum, mānsiō, sēdēs, aedēs

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/domus#Noun_2
We have been busy furnishing the Sett.

I found it interesting that, on the other hand, it also seems to me at Wiktionary.org that the Latin word, habitatio similar to the one we nowadays use for animals, has less a sense of home, than one of rent!

An inhabiting, dwelling.

A habitation, residence, dwelling; lodging.

The rent (for a dwelling).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/habitatio#Latin
What does this mean? I dunno! But the Sett sure is coming along nicely…
I also found out domesticity shares a common Proto-Indo-European root with the English word timber!

An act or instance of staying, remaining; stay, continuance.

‘Mansio’ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mansio
We have been enjoying the sunshine when we can too.

Where in the city do the foxes live? If you know the answer, why don’t you come on down the Sett for a jam tomorrow evening and let us know?

CRACK-A-SQUAT – Space Pirates style aka Submersion Week aka Keelhauling aka Space Pirate’s Rehab aka The Cabin aka… probably a lot of other names!

Soooo the names are all very appealing – I know! A few people have asked me though:

“What’s exactly is the line up for this week then?”

So here it is:

Saturday 7th- get-to-know and look ahead.

11am-3pm Arrivals

There is no set plan for Saturday, arrive anytime between 11am and 3pm for this informal day where we’ll all get to know each other a little more, start to tell one another our back stories and maybe do some omming together or something. By Friday we will have established and be part of our own fully autonomous Space Pirates Squat! – no pressure ! : )

>3pm Dorming

From 3pm you’ll be given your space in the cabin, a 6 person dorm with the other 5 proto-pirates. There’s a shared locker in the cabin you can keep any valuables in but you’ll need to have everything you personally need for the week in a rucksack.

Sunday 8th, The Pirates Code

Sunday is dedicated to the Pirates Code – the foundation of Space Piracy.

12-2 Origins & Background

After an early lunch/late breakfast we will look at the origins of the Space Pirates Code. Beginning with a brief recap of the Pirate’s code, we’ll go on to cover how it was discovered at consentframework.org and how it’s been adapted from that text-based document. We’ll also look at ways in which the Pirates Code can be used: as a treasure map, as a personal mnemonic for navigating consent and accountability, and so on.

3-3:45pm Treasure-map for our week

During this brief session we’ll set out a treasure map for the week ahead which we’ll adapt and use to guide us through the rest of the week.

4-5:30 pm Pirate’s Code public session (optional)

This is a public session where people will be able to come and learn more about the Pirates’ Code. You’re welcome to join in and observe, but this session is dedicated to others who have expressed an interest in learning more about the Pirates Code.

Monday 9th, Navigating

Monday is dedicated to Navigating – Plotting buildings on maps and ways into them.

10-12 Route planning

We’ll be learning all about plotting our way into buildings, this will be an intensive session in which we will select 6-8 buildings, start doing some desk based research on them and plan a route for the afternoon.

3pm & 3am – Recce tours 1 & 2

Prepared for quick in-n-out internal inspections with very minimal kit, we will go together on a group tour to shortlist the 3 best options that afternoon, and aim to get inside for a look around. This may be repeated in the early hours of Tuesday morning if necessary. Once safe rentry has been secured message the general chat saying “We’re in! Come round for a house warming on Friday!”

Tuesday 10th, Scrolling

Tuesday is dedicated to administration and organising

10am-1pm – Pirates Code presentations.

Tuesday begins with confirming today’s timings and reviewing the treasure map so far, Then we’ll share our thoughts on our organisational strategies in pairs present the Pirates code to an imaginary audience. We’ll wrap up by starting to prepare for the Compass sharpening session later today.

3-7pm – Compass sharpening

During this session we will agree exact coordinates of our compasses on the treasure map and prepare for the rest of the week’s action.

Wednesday 11th, Squatting

Wednesday is dedicated to Securing the building setting-up and maintaining safe occupation

<10am Special Breakfast Check-ins & Final prep

This will be the most intense day so far, so we’ll start off with a special breakfast check-in and final preparation meeting.

asap – Occupation begins

According to logistics, we will begin occupation of the building at the earliest opportunity on Wednesday. Beginning by securing the perimeter we’ll go on to ensure the safe supply of services such as water and electricity and assess and mitigate for any new risks, not obvious from our initial inspection on Monday.

<10:30pm Check-outs

Having been the most intense day so far we will settle down and rest well for an early start and another busy day ahead making our new home place comfy cosy!

Thursday 12th, Domesticity

Thursday is about settling in, getting comfortable and making sure everyone’s got somewhere to rest

>10 am Scavenging

This will be another highly practical day starting with this morning session where we’ll buddy up into pairs, two of which will go out and scour the neighbourhood’s dumping grounds, skips, Olio collections and generally locate any other resources to collect from. The remaining pair will hold down the building and show around any other set-up volunteers who’ve made themselves known by this point.

!!Bonus session!! – Court for the Flower Pot!! 11am

12 noon – Scheduling meeting

According to the building and numbers of people involved at this point there will be a meeting at 12 noon to establish what affinity groups have formed by this point and what their priorities are.

Friday 13th, Welcoming

Friday is about welcoming our friends over and starting to think about who else we’d like to share the place with

Friday morning will begin with another review of the treasure map and affinity groups will continue sharing offers requests of assistance and duties according to their own rotas etc.

>12 noon House-warming prep begins

Preparations for the house-warming party will begin to get underway from midday depending on the amount of work involved

6 pm Final checkouts and last supper!

This marks the end of our keelhauling and the beginning of a whole other set of stories…

>8 pm house-warming party

From 8pm guests will start to arrive and perhaps there’ll be a new group of proto-pirates meeting for the first time somewhere among them…

PLEASE NOTE

  • The above information is specific to Friday 13th Crew a new post will be created for future submersion weeks.
  • Precise timings are to be agreed on by those involved.
  • A lot more detail will be handled by affinity groups more and more so towards the end of the week, this will be determined by the nature including it’s size and location.

Reimbursement

  • All tickets are fully refundable on completion of the week.
  • Tickets are sold as part of a registration process to ensure commitment of participants.

Food

  • Breakfast lunch and dinner will be a shared event three times a day which we’ll all take responsibility for.

Shelter

  • You’ll be provided shelter at 43 Teesdale Street from 3 pm on Saturday night until 11 pm on Friday 13th, however
  • we will be in occupation of the new building by Wednesday night, but you will still be able to access the cabin in an emergency.

Drugs

  • There will be a high threshold on all drugs including nicotine, caffeine and alcohol
  • You will be encouraged to commit to following these optional extras if you feel abstinence may challenge your participation.

Optional extras

  • 5 tibetians
  • extra help preparing meals
  • morning pages
  • meditation (group, guided or individual)
  • early morning excercise
  • yoga
  • 9am & 9pm Keelhaul checkins
  • the opportunity to contribute your own optional extras!

Claim your invitation here:

https://opencollective.com/spacepirates/events/space-pirates-submersion-week-aka-keelhauling-this-one-ends-on-friday-13th-lucky-for-some-811bc436

Questions, comments, suggestions?

Please login and comment here or visit the ticket link above.

The Flowerpot

First things first… or so it seems… here’s our signal chat… requires admin approval and here’s a kanban if you’re into that kinda thing.

Soooooo there’s a few of us been in occupation of the Flowerpot for a good few weeks now.

We’ve also been following up with Shared Assets about setting up a housing / workers / some other multi-stake-holder cooperative. Although this was initially focused on 234 Mare Street we’ve decided to see how that might work here… If you’re interested in getting involved in a long term initiative that explores how we might go about this, join the Space Pirates Scrolling signal chat and say “Hi!” there.

Liverpool’s not happening, but as you can see there’s been lots of strange goings on here at the Flowerpot while we’ve been taking things slower recently.

There’s plenty of links below you are welcome to scroll through and we’ll post more info here soon… ish…(soz!) Cyborg’s going to look into a new sign-up process for the website that will incorporate Space Pirates learning resources If you have a website account already, please leave a suggestion, question, comment, observation or anything to indicate that you know how to comment and are using your account.

Flowerpot Scrolling Links

  • tinyurl.com/fpcht1 Flowerpot Signal general chat (requires admin approval)
  • tinyurl.com/flororor Kanban for the flowerpot with cypher swimlanes – Real nifty!
  • tinyurl.com/floprewot A spreadsheet outlining some sums about how we might buy the Flowerpot and run it as a cooperative hostel(node) and community creative space offering short and medium term accommodation rest, recouperation etc, which generates other such self-sustaining places. This link can be edited on a taptop (but not a phone) tinyurl.com/floprewotedit
  • tinyurl.com/flowcomp1 A Compass outlining the above

Clerkenwell Fire Station

Space Pirates have been very busy in real life. We will be posting lots more to the website soon… Sorry for the slight radio silence here… An in depth Signal chat group index is clearly a priority…

For now here’s our main SPOCAGs and their QR codes!

Live with us..

Short term

If you’d like to stay with us for a couple of nights for whatever reason, please text us in advance on 07300303123 the more notice you give us the more we can do to accommodate you. Ideally give us more than 24 hours’ notice but if you have to turn up at out door late one night, knock hard and be prepared to explain your situation, it’s ultimately up to whoever’s in the building in question.

Medium/Long term

If you would like to come and try living with other Space Pirates on a medium or longer term basis as we voyage among deserted islands of paradise, please come and stay with us for a trial 24hrs which will be followed by a trial 7 consecutive days.

During this time there will be a lot of opportunities to learn about and get involved with Space Pirates’ collaboration more generally and we’ll get a better idea about living with one another. At the end you’ll have a 1:1 checkout with everyone else who lived in that building at the time and we’ll all see where we want to take things from that point.

Try living with us.

Settling into area 51!

Monday and Tuesday have been spent tentatively awaiting first contact which still hasn’t happened and slowly but surely we’re setting up some basic infrastructure like a kitchen area and a tool area!

Before getting in here we made a compass for this place and sanctuary was one of the main ideas that it started pointing to. It’s hard to move at this slower pace and it often hard to move at this tempo, consciously slowing things down.

I saw a friend from Fake Club days on Monday afternoon when AC and I were collecting our comfy green sofa from Olio. They’d squatted this place in the summer and has it for a couple of months. Hopefully we’ll be here for a couple of months too. That would bring us into the new year… oooh yeah!

These are stills from a 6min video tour you can watch on our telegram channel..

Thinking about trying to post shorter more regular updates, but it’s hard to synchronise being in the squat IRL and getting on the taptop.

ok that’ll do… Got a few other things left over to post from yesterday…


Guinea pigging the Megatron

Enter the Megatron: also known as “The Trolley”, “The Orange Megatron”, the “Home-in-a-Box”, a 2 metre tall Tesco trolley filled to the brim with liberated tools, food, kitchen items, sleeping mats, the essentials for a cracknight, all on wheels.

The opening of the first space pirates Megacamp called for the first test of our creation, so we set sail into the night…

Some things we learnt for the future:

  • More than 2 people are required
  • Push from the back so the wheels that can turn are at the front
  • The 30m cable works well to keep everything inside (edit: no it doesn’t)
  • Don’t pack it top heavy
  • Dart broke their foot on the front of the trolley
  • It needs a door

It succeeded at getting there however it needs some discussion!

“Fuck that guy, that’s all I have to say” – Dart, upon self reflection

Area 51 – access established!

Area 51 – our next location was easily accessed this morning at 7am through an open ground floor window. It is a lovely large empty commercial building between Farringdon & Kings Cross.

There is lighting and running water and fitted toilets. there’s a mix of large rooms and small rooms over 3 floors. Multiple windows require new glass but they are secure by bars on the outside. We have filmed inside but it was dark, so the quality of the footage is low.

This building will be shared with other activists and groups, including Just Stop Oil, to offer an opportunity to dip their toes into squatting with Space Pirates.

Everyone is welcome to come and get involved at any point, and to whatever degree they are comfortable with.

Trial weeks for living in this building start on Sundays

Sunday

Sunday’s schedule is as follows, today’s theme is the Pirate’s Code.

  • 9am-3pm – Begin occupying and resisting asap by getting ready practically, online and returning early this afternoon to secure the building and begin moving in.
  • 3pm-4pm – Indoor picnic in the new place – Please bring picnic items to share, considerate of allergies.
  • 4-5pm – 1hr informal meeting focused on using the Pirates Code
  • 6pm-8pm – Film 1 Pompoko
  • 9-11pm – Film 2 Gremlins

Monday

Tomorrow’s theme:
Navigation:
Plotting places on a map and ways to get inside them.

  • 9am Shared Breakfast
  • 10am Checkins
  • more details tbc

Please note, communication will be moving to the website more and more in the coming days, as the chat will soon become overloaded please register for access here:
411615.squat.net

There will soon follow more posts covering a Todo List, Door Buddy rotas (days 9am-9pm & nights 9pm-9am), a Wishlist of things we need, and an events & activities list.

Cyborg TAAkeover!!

TL;DR:22

I went to TAA to make art,
I didn’t go to make friends,
I found out who I can trust.
Cyborg Psychopomp.


An open letter regarding the paradoxical ‘Cyborg TAAkeover’ of Sunday 9th to Tuesday 11th Oct 2022

Dear ‘TAA baton’ holders, whoever you may perceive yourselves to be…

I am aware of a chasm of understanding between us. I have heard your perspective of me repeated many times. Thank you for your clarity.

I do not feel heard, and I feel resentment towards you collectively for the psycho-social way you excommunicated me from the signal groups and the physical manner in which you evicted me from the building.

I stand by every action I took and every word I said throughout that whole experience. I hope ‘you’ will organise some form of closing circle or undertake some other form of accountability in due course and I would like to be a part of that.

If that does happen this year, I feel it would be helpful to be guided by the following explanations of TAA:

About TAA

Staged in a disused building, TAA addresses the need for free spaces which are not governed by commercial interests or exclusive institutional standards, creating a fluid space which transforms in unpredictable ways throughout the event as new interventions and responses are added to the mix. Expect the event to be slightly chaotic, full of surprising juxtapositions, and an opportunity to generate new collaborative relationships.With no selection criteria, no censorship, and a non-hierarchical mode of organisation, TAA is a laboratory for both creative and social experimentation. It is an environment of open discussion and testing of ideas, which challenges the idea of a passive audience by allowing everybody to get involved.

Facebook

What is a TAA?

TAA is an underground festival of creativity that has been taking over venues across the UK since 2001. It was an initiative by Random Artists to use free-party tactics to open temporary arts and social spaces in occupied and often derelict buildings. TAA exhibitions are creative spaces that are organised and constructed by the artists themselves. They operate under an open-access policy, meaning everyone is free to exhibit their work or perform.

Time-honoured art forms sit comfortably amongst digital work, sculptures, installations, films, performance and music. We encourage artists and audience to find their own level of creative involvement and believe that all of our voices are equally important.

This not only opens the doors to a no-cost space to exhibit within but also encourages first-timers and the artist within us all.

All contributions are welcome and there is no celebrity here – our aim is to break free of the sterile nature of traditional galleries and instead create a space which removes barriers between art, artist and audience.

TAA Website

Sincerely

Cyborg Psychopomp.

Fake Club 23 September to 15 October 2021

Space Pirates had a trial run of ‘Squatfest’ at Fake Club, 57 Hartland Road in Camden. The intention was to hold the building for one weekend, do the trial run, and see where things would lead on to from the Monday.

We stayed there for a few more weeks and helped a few different people and crews find new buildings a people to squat with.

There are lots more photos, videos and 360 tours documenting these action packed few weeks and there was a lot of learning done here.

It is quite time consuming to go back over and collate memories retrospectively like this, in future I aim to do all this documenting more or less live…