A World of Wings and Cries: Swedish anarchists build their own autonomous zone
reprinted from ROLLING THUNDER issue 6, fall 2008
Culture of Control: Autonomous Zones in Sweden and Europe
In the previous issue of Rolling Thunder, we documented the defense and eviction of Ungdomshuset, a Danish social center that had served as a gathering place for thousands of people across more than two decades. Why doesn’t Sweden have anything similar?
A few key factors distinguish Sweden from the rest of Europe in respect to the development of autonomous zones. First, there are no laws that protect squatters’ rights. Many European countries established squatters’ laws after World War II as a way to deal with housing shortages in bombed-out cities. Sweden, being neutral through both world wars, did not experience this. Another deciding factor has been the Social Democratic policy concerning the standard of living in Sweden. During the first part of the 20th century, the Social Democrats began to develop detailed zoning laws and building codes. Everything from the height of a kitchen counter to the number of toilets per square meter has been researched and written into law. This standardization is meant to protect the rights of renters, to ensure that no one is forced to live in squalor; it also ensures that no one is allowed to live in squalor, thereby standardizing not only building codes, but also the lifestyle necessary to support them. It is, after all, the renters who pay the cost, not the building companies. This same theme of control extends throughout the Social Democratic policy concerning the development of culture: the unspoken rule is that no movement may exist that the State has not itself brought about. All movements, cultural or otherwise, must either be incorporated into Social Democracy or totally destroyed. The Swedish government spends lavish resources on cultural development, and has succeeded in keeping public opinion on its side regarding extra-governmental movements. The building of the Cyclops can be seen as a counterattack on this view of culture.
Recent years have seen a renewed effort by the European Union to evict and remove even long-established squats. It has always been standard policy to protect the interests of capital against autonomous movements, of course—but now state governments appear to be making a point of attacking squats on principle. The eviction of Ungdomshuset, for example, cost the equivalent of over 10 million US dollars. The capitalists can hardly expect a satisfactory return on such an investment in a single derelict building; it follows that the war on squatting is no longer a matter of financial expedience, but has become an ideological war—a religious crusade against all who do not accept the sanctity of private property. Thus Cyclops, though developed as a response to the specific Swedish context, offers a model that may become increasingly relevant across Europe in years to come.
Many years ago I took a job as a carpenter’s apprentice in Stockholm. I was a thousand miles from home, had a kid on the way, and had no place to live and no income. I was about to get too far gone. So I signed up for the first decent thing and figured I’d at least be good with money for a while and could worry about whether or not it was the right way of life some other time. Six years later I was still stuck in it. By then I was fully educated and well paid with a secure job and union membership—and none of that made it easier to get back to living free as I had in the old days. I kept saying to myself this is how it happens; this is the long and winding road that leads us away from the people we’d hoped to become.
On the other hand, of the jobs for which I was eligible at the time, apprentice to a carpenter wasn’t too bad. My life could’ve gone in any number of directions—I’d applied for all kinds of shit. Bike messenger. Store clerk. Dishwasher. In the beginning I couldn’t speak the language, so that ruled out a lot. This was in Sweden, remember, and I’m from North Carolina. Greensboro. Lucky for me, the father of the girl with whom I was about to have a kid owned a small contracting firm, and he gave me a chance despite the obvious disadvantages. I stuck to it, and slowly over time I picked up the pieces to the puzzle. I figured that if I was going to have a job, I should at least try to be useful. Everybody lives in a house or an apartment, I reasoned, and all those spaces need to get fixed or built or whatever; so at least I’d be providing something of concrete value. It seemed to me as good a use of time as any.
How you think about your job has as much to do with where you come from as with where you want to go. My folks worked throughout my childhood. White collar. Mom worked with the State before going private. Dad climbed the corporate ladder. By the time I was 21 I’d decided I wanted to work as little as possible for the rest of my life. I would have told you I’d rather be poor than sell my time. But I’ll say this—regardless of your beginnings, humble or otherwise, when you’re about to bring a life into the world and you don’t have the resources to house and feed a baby, a good job is a godsend. Whether or not that automatically equates parenthood with wage slavery remains to be seen. I spent the first part of my adulthood trying to rid my life of all its inherited safety nets and then decided to take on one of the most demanding projects there is. Adults have always said that somewhere along the line life stops being just a party, but what does it become? I was about to find out.
So I re-entered the work force. I picked up the routine of getting up early and getting to work, busting my ass all day, then arriving home tired and paid. The stress of food and rent eased as my wage rose, but I had new problems. My final day of unemployment was like breathing out that last breath before drowning. My career as a musician pretty much ended, and I hadn’t had the chance to become a poet or a painter yet. Prospects for going back to school seemed slim what with being in Sweden and all. But there were upsides other than the merely financial. I was no longer responsible for choosing how to spend my days, but I was given the opportunity to show my talent, if I had any, within a certain frame. Doors were opening and closing all around me. I secretly coveted the dream that maybe, just maybe, the skills for which I’d traded my free time would serve me in projects of my own choosing. I even daydreamed about it on the job, pretending that the multi-million dollar apartment complex I was building was actually a radical collective of badass artists and activists. I hoped something might come along one day that would make all those early mornings worthwhile.
In December 2005 I was helping clean up at a local collective here in my suburb after having hosted 150 antifascists from Copenhagen. Every year the Nazis in Northern Europe gather here to commemorate the death of a Nazi guy who was murdered by some immigrant kids a couple years ago—and every year the antifascists come to give battle. We host a breakfast for the busses from Denmark, so they don’t have to go out on an empty stomach. Anyway, I was washing up in the kitchen and I happened to meet this couple, two young but experienced-looking punks. I was introduced to them by a mutual friend and they started telling me about this project they were involved in. They called it “Kulturkampanjen,” which is something like Culture Campaign, though it has a much better ring to it in Swedish because the words for “campaign” and “struggle” are similar—not to mention double Ks are more aggressive than double Cs.
By that time Kulturkampanjen had been working for two years to create a new free space in Stockholm. They began by squatting abandoned buildings, starting with the enormous one that used to belong to the State Television Department—a gorgeous old industrial mansion that had been abandoned for ten years. Together with a few other groups they began the construction of living and working spaces, a cafe, and an office. They contacted the owners of the building and the Stockholm Social Commissioner, Margareta Olofson, to begin a dialogue about the use of the space and make their intentions known. They were waved off by the politicians, charged with breaking and entering, and evicted. Soon after the eviction, the city government ordered the demolition of that fantastic building.
Kulturkampanjen, at that time consisting of no more than five to ten people, tried to maintain a dialogue with the politicians. Eventually Olofson invited the group to meetings at Stockholm City Hall, where they were scolded for their unacceptable methods and told to find a place they could rent. Kulturkampanjen replied that the City of Stockholm spends a fortune in taxpayers’ money keeping a hundred buildings empty while the citizens of the city freeze to death and starve. They proclaimed the municipally owned and controlled cultural centers insufficient and demanded the opportunity to create their own space. They presented a list of thirty suitable abandoned buildings and continued to open and enter the forgotten corners of the city. During the occupation of an old subway building later that same year, Kulturkampanjen, in cooperation with a professional dance company, submitted blueprints and drawings, financial plans, and lists of scheduled events to the landlords, offices of city planning, and municipal commissioners. The government’s response was the same. The group was thrown out and the building scheduled for demolition.
The group then decided to begin working in secret. They broke into a giant abandoned forge and began to renovate the inside. At the forge there were new challenges because unorganized groups and individuals were also using the house for other purposes. After half a year, Kulturkampanjen abandoned the project on account of extensive vandalism of the building and of their own renovations. The project reached a definitive end when the smithy caught fire and burned down near the end of 2004.
Kulturkampanjen resumed dialogue with the politicians in City Hall. Their ideas were received positively but no solutions could be reached. It goes without saying that a gang of kids, no matter how ambitious, will never be taken seriously by a city government that takes orders from the owners of capital, and that the rules of the game are too ingrained to be changed, no matter how ridiculous they may seem to the people who are forced to play by them. All those meetings and all that dialogue were just a bullshit show, a bureaucratic routine to maintain the facade of democracy while bowing to the gods of finance. This is the way it has always been.
At some point during the meetings at City Hall, someone there had suggested that since none of the premises available for rent were up to scratch, Kulturkampanjen might try building their own. Looking back, I can only imagine that this person was joking. The likelihood that a small group of young people with no experience in construction, and no budget whatsoever, would be able to wade through the paperwork necessary to even begin building must have seemed miniscule. The idea that they might then somehow pull the technical knowledge of how to construct the building magically out of their hats—that put the chances of success near zero. I can’t help but suspect that this suggestion, coming from the mouth of the beast itself, was the equivalent of Snow White’s poison apple, intended to put this group to sleep forever. But Kulturkampanjen took the bait with ardor, and a year later was ordering lumber by the mile. The motherfuckers’ bluff was called.
So I’m there with a rag in my hand, washing up after the Danish antifascists, and I’m talking to these two kids. They’re telling me they just got their plans approved by the Zoning Commission of the Municipality of Vantör, a huge achievement for them. They’re very excited, telling their story with wide and glowing eyes. They’ve rented the corner of a gravel lot on the outskirts of town for six hundred kronor a month, less than a hundred bucks, and soon they will meet with the State Building Authority of Stockholm, after which they plan to begin construction. One soaps and rinses a dish and hands it to me, I dry it off an hand it to the other, she puts it away. They talk out of turn and complete each other’s sentences. They’re looking for an engineer who will sign off on their plans, which they have drawn themselves. They want to build the place with containers, which they say you can get for cheap on the Swedish version of eBay. I was like Okay, these people are totally insane; but this is obviously the chance I’ve been waiting for. When the dishes were done, I took down a telephone number and promised to call later to get more details. I knew I was going to get involved, but I didn’t yet know what that would entail.
The ISO shipping container is a cuboid module forty feet by eight feet by eight and a half feet, constructed on a steel frame with bottom cross-members, steel corrugated walls, steel corrugated roof, metal doors, and ISO corner fittings at all corners. These suckers can carry a pay-load of up to 26,680 kg each and have the unbelievable stacking capacity of 190 tons. Most of these containers are manufactured in China and are used to transport goods to the markets of the West. Having arrived in port, the containers are loaded onto trucks and trains and sent out across continents; they are seldom returned. This one-way flow of export has led to a buildup of used containers in countries like Sweden. A readily available, standardized unit, the shipping container made an ideal starting point for the inexperienced architects of Stockholm’s new autonomous zone.
The first meeting I went to was in a student housing apartment of about thirty square feet, near downtown Stockholm, about two months after I’d finished my apprenticeship and begun work as a bona fide artisan. I think we started by talking about the drawings for the roof. I asked them if they’d thought about the grading of their lot, because that seemed to me to be the first place to start. They hadn’t. Two of them were in architecture school. One of the older dudes was the father of one of the younger ones, and the other old dude was a family friend. We sat around and they filled me in on how they planned to go about this whole thing. On the one hand it seemed like a fantastic amount of work, more than any of us could calculate, and there were so many question marks, so many weak links, that it seemed impossible. On the other hand, it was exactly the sort of thing I’d been waiting for. And if people came through, if things worked out like we hoped, it would be an incredible experience.
They figured if they used containers, they wouldn’t have to figure out how to build a complicated load-bearing frame to support the roof, plus they’d get a weather-proof skin and four rooms for free. Their idea was to build the gable walls, which would enclose the 700 square foot space between the containers, as modules which could be taken apart and lifted into the containers. Following that principle, they hoped to make the building almost portable. They planned to build with found materials as much as possible—to drive around in a van dumpster-diving everything from abandoned buildings, construction dumpsters, and trash heaps. Combined with zero labor costs—we were counting on volunteers—that would put the price within reach. We wouldn’t have to compromise our vision by making everything commercial in order to meet costs, and the house would be built by the people who would later use it.
There were problems with the design, of course. Insulating the containers from the inside, combined with drastic wintertime differences in indoor and outdoor temperature, would create large thermal bridges and possible condensation problems inside the walls. This, plus a ceiling height of over 20 feet in the main chamber, would make the house at best inefficient to heat, at worst unsuitable for year-round use. Relying on volunteers was also risky. We were gambling that somebody other than us would actually give a fuck, and we would need a lot of and from them. The point was not that we had an airtight plan, but that we had a place to start.
So I joined Kulturkampanjen and hit the ground running. In the beginning we met several times a month. Planning, drawing the plans, looking for used containers to buy on the web… We held benefit shows and sought wide support for our project. We shuffled papers and tried to get all the details in order so we could begin building when summer came. I know what you’re thinking, reading about something like this in a glossy magazine, looking at all the pictures of the finished building: it might seem that we were solidly capable of doing it, it may even seem easy. Let me tell you, from the first meeting I attended to the grand opening of the house a year and a half later, shit was in total chaos. We all had to push ourselves way beyond what we thought we’d originally signed up for. A lot of people gave up and moved on, but new folks were always showing up. Our group had mad drama. We suffered schisms and problems with hierarchy and gender; frustration abounded. But we constantly sought solutions and tried to be as creative as possible, never letting go of the vision of our project.
I kept myself in the periphery at first. At that time, almost everybody in Kulturkampanjen was younger than me. I was unsure what role I wanted to play. It was obvious early on that I was the only one who had even a modicum of professional building experience. Would that create a weird situation? Also, I can’t deny that I had qualms about working with people still in high school. I feared they would be uncommitted and unreliable. Nevertheless, I decided to go through with it, and soon I felt myself nearing the heart of the project.
On a sunny day in June we formally began work on what would become Stockholm’s most radical performance and activity space. Before the containers arrived, we measured the grading of the lot and discovered that, to our good fortune, we had the best spot in the lot for water drainage! We measured out where the containers would be placed, and then we ordered them. When the containers were set up and the first deliveries of wood arrived, we called in all our friends and began work. We built the roof and the floor at the same time. We built six-foot-tall roof trusses spanning forty feet! We made our own jig and raised the trusses by hand, up on top of the stacks of containers, tied together with scaffolding twenty feet up in the air. We looked up drawings and dimension tables in books and on the internet, and we trusted our lives to them. We worked with bike helmets on. We split up into groups. The idea was to chop the monster up into manageable pieces we felt capable of taking on. One group began work on the built-up beams and joists for the floor. Another group began laying out the windows and framing for the modules that would make the gable walls. This madness went on for months. We were barely finishing details such as fascia and drip moulding when winter fell.
That first summer I really felt invincible. We were a strong group. The first few weeks we took turns sleeping at the site. We had just ordered all this wood—it turned out we weren’t able to dumpster everything!—and we didn’t have good locks; we were afraid that if we took our eyes off the place for even a minute it would vanish like a broken spell. So we threw down some mats in one of the upper containers and decided that every night someone, preferably two or three people, would sleep at the site. I remember waking up groggy as hell climbing down the ladder to brew cowboy coffee at the fire pit. Across the ditch there was another lot, and a construction company used it to store aggregate—so there was often someone rummaging around piles of gravel with a backhoe. Something about waking up that way makes you feel dirty as hell—not necessarily in a bad way, just dirty. Plus, there were mosquitoes at night, so we wore chemical repellants. What can I say, smoke, Deet, sweat, sawdust, sand, sun beating down at six in the morning like it was noon… put the active back in activism!
Our schedule for the place was ridiculous. Granted, we had no idea how many people would show up to build, and we naïvely thought all the materials we needed would be readily available, not to mention the budget to pay for them—but still. Our first time-table had us finished with the staircases and loft at the end of the first month, leaving us month two to get started on wind turbines and plumbing. At this writing, a full two and a half years later, we are still not connected to water and the roof is yet to be insulated. We have no climate-friendly source of heat or electricity, and the bathroom and kitchen are not even completely built. But my opinion now is that none of that matters. What matters is that we keep on.
After the initial rush of taking on the project, after that first adrenaline shot of getting started when potential appears out of the fog like a ghost hammer thirsty for the heads of nails, I began to comprehend the crazy scope of the task we had taken on, and I realized I would either have to stabilize my rhythm or risk burning out too fast. Damn, how much willpower and focus it takes to organize the building of a house! Here was the fire I’d been waiting for, finally the one that deserved all my fuel—but it was also a black hole that could devour my time and energy and vanish with no guarantees. Our to-do list quickly became (and remains to this day) so damn long that looking at it was like opening the fucking bible. Itemizing, prioritizing, coordinating the needed materials, and keeping up with the to-do list could easily have been a full-time job in itself, quite apart from us actually doing the shit! On top of that, we were trying to function as a consensus-based collective, so all those little decisions fell on the heads of several people at once, none of whom knew exactly how to go about getting everything done. So before we could even put hammer to nail we faced the task of organizing ourselves.
We were not a dream team, not at all the collective you’d imagine accomplishing a thing like building an autonomous cultural center from the earth up. Kulturkampanjen was and is a rag-tag group, a few dedicated people at the center of a wide periphery of flighty, loosely-tethered volunteers. We work in our free time. Practically all of us have full-time jobs or studies that require the majority of our focus, and we all have families and relationships that need our time and energy. All the same, we hacked our way through the jungle with blunt machetes, hot on the trail of a dream that seemed just within reach. Step by step, one task at a time, we created the Cyclops.
At the end of the first summer we were all ready for a break. We hadn’t been able to hold to the original timetable, but we had accomplished a lot. As the days became shorter and the weather colder, we worked less and less, and after a while we decided to take a break for the winter. When spring came we started work on the interior. First, we built the loft and staircases up to the second-level containers. Then we raised insulating partitions around all the exterior walls and installed wiring, lights, switches, and outlets, which we ran to a fuse box where we could connect our generators. By that time summer was almost over and we decided that it was time to open the place up, despite the fact that we still weren’t connected to water. So a group of us broke off and began to work on the grand opening, while the rest of us focused on finishing the last details: painting the interior woodwork and getting the drawbridge operational.
The drawbridge was the high water mark of our innovation and improvisation that second summer. I remember the night we hooked the bridge up with the winch. The basic design was to have a counterweight on one side and the winch on the other. This turned out to be more complicated than expected! We had to calculate the weight of the bridge itself and account for the leverage of its forward lean to know how long to make the cable attached to the counterweight. The math was too difficult for us to figure out whether one person would be able to hold the winch against the weight of the bridge, so we had no idea what to expect! The image of the winch spinning out of control and yanking somebody’s arm out of socket led us to overcompensate. We attached a huge stone to the other side; in the end, we actually had to push the bridge down. The counterweight was too heavy! This back and forth between uncertainty and applied science is one of my favorite things about DIY projects. Relatively simple feats of engineering become epic challenges when there are no experts around—and ordinary teenagers become heroes and heroines! Moments like this renew and reaffirm my conviction that life can be deeply rewarding when we play with the limits of what we know and care to do.
Day after day we worked, as our grand opening approached. It would be the culmination of our first year and a half of labor. By then, we were about fifteen people working several hours every day: coordinating, networking, calculating, building. For me, it was a time to unleash my energy, to bring the fucking rain! We pulled out all the stops, called in all our contacts from around Scandinavia and Europe, brainstormed, and busted our asses to make it happen. I remember waking up and biking with a thermos of coffee in my backpack through the bright Swedish morning, dodging people more or less going through the motions of their lives, and showing up to work on this project—not because it was fresh on my mind, not because it was especially attractive, but thinking this is what a truly ambitious project demands, this is what it’s going to take for our DIY projects to reach the level of our professional ones. And though it was hard, though it seemed weird to do for free on the weekends the same shit I do every day for a high wage, it was very satisfying to give Kulturkampanjen what it deserved, and to follow through on a serious commitment to my dreams for once.
At the beginning of September 2007, our big day arrived. I played hooky from work that Friday and showed up early to Cyclops to start getting prepared. We divided the building up into different areas: containers one and two for workshops, containers three and four for storage, and the main hall for performances and large discussions; the loft served as a lounge area and space for smaller discussions. Outside, we set up a field kitchen and space for distributors along the wall of the building, and beyond that another tent area for outdoor workshops.
People came from all over to pitch in. A new people’s kitchen collective had taken responsibility for serving meals during the weekend. An anarcho-feminist who works as a professional audio technician for the largest theatre in Stockholm coordinated and ran our sound system. A well-established DJ crew organized the big Saturday night party. A local pirate-cinema collective, known for showing pirated copies of unreleased movies on the walls of buildings around town, organized film showings throughout the weekend. There were bands playing, collectives and individuals giving workshops, and volunteers to chop vegetables and sweep floors. Throughout the building of the Cyclops, Kulturkampanjen has called on the expertise of volunteers from every corner of our social circles and beyond; whatever we have accomplished has truly been a group effort, and this was clearly manifested during our grand opening.
Friday evening we had our opening ceremony. We made a ribbon out of duct tape and, after a few words, three members of Kulturkampanjen cut it with a hedge-clipper. Then we slowly lowered the drawbridge while booming Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” the theme song from Stanley Kubric’s 2001. And with that, the house was open! Everyone filed in and looked around. Many had visited during the construction and were surprised to see how the place had turned out; others were there for the first time. Those of us who had put serious hours into the project could stand back and watch the reactions of the public and feel that soon they would know what we knew—more is possible via DIY than Capital wants you to think! Later that evening some bands played and we had our first all-out party, which was alcohol-free and very energetic. We relaxed and danced and were carried off by the romance of the place… but then it was time to focus on the coming weekend.
Saturday the weather was less than ideal. It rained that morning and more or less the entire day, which made trouble for our outdoor workshops and distribution area. We rigged up tarps right and left and went right ahead. We opened the day at 10 am with a documentary film a student friend had completed about Cyclops, followed by an open discussion about Kulturkampanjen and autonomous zones, with reports back from free zones and squats across Europe. With the recent eviction of Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen, and severe pressure on Köpi in Berlin, the climate for squatting in Europe has clearly worsened since the 90s. On the other hand, the construction of the Cyclops constitutes a huge step forward for Sweden, where the government has invested incredible resources in hindering cultural development outside the social-democratic framework [see sidebar]. From there, we continued an ambitious schedule of workshops and discussions encompassing as much of the anarchist movement as possible: swarm communication and media activism, antiracist strategies and campaigns, reports from the 2006 uprising in Oaxaca, class struggle feminism, perspectives on a sustainable society, activist trauma and recovery, workplace activism, even slogans and songs of struggle. Saturday was our big day. Our tents were routinely blown over and relashed, and the distributors and kitchen had to deal with constant dripping. But despite the weather we drew about 300 people, which made for long lines to the portable bathroom and contributed to a kind of Woodstock atmosphere, especially with the rain and mud.
When evening gave way to night, the entertainment began. The last workshops concluded around 8 pm and the first band started setting up. The bands included a traditional Swedish crust band, a folk group, and a Baltic group that played modern garage in 2/2. It was truly a beautiful sight to see people hanging all over the stairs and loft we’d built. The transformation from a project in the works to full-fledged cultural force was incredible to behold, and the feeling spread through everybody there. Our generator gave out during the Baltic group’s set, but after a few minutes they started playing despite the blackout, without amplification, as if they couldn’t keep their hands off their instruments.
I remember how dark it was. I came out and saw a group of scraggly activists with headlamps shining white like crown jewels gathered around the generator discussing the situation. The guy from Brighton who had come to give the activist trauma workshop was a trained electrician, and he said we needed a soldering iron. He stuck his hands into the gullet of the thing and dug out a couple of wires that looked damaged. Behind us, the house was damp. Having laid my hands on those walls before they were walls, having seen the place on paper before it was raised—this and the half rain of the night made me take a deep breath. And then the machine jumped to life and the house lit up and everyone inside cheered.
I was vibrating with adrenaline the entire time, walking around thinking no one has ever seen anything like this in Sweden before. I had that feeling in my gut of breaking new ground. Music had never sounded better. Shortly before midnight we switched from live music to DJs, and a Stockholm drum-and-bass crew took over. Though I’m not much for drum-and-bass, I couldn’t stop dancing. I felt like my dance was some kind of interaction with spirits whose presence affects us in subtle but powerful ways. My moves were intended to say “thank you” and “take us higher”; in that moment, I felt like I would do anything to make the project work. If somewhere there was a baron in a tower conspiring against us, he would by god regret letting this night slip though his fingers!
At around 5 am I unplugged the generator and told everyone to pack up their shit. I went out to start cleaning the lot, and when I went back in the smell of the house had changed. I realized then that the place would probably never again smell like sawdust and paint. Now it smelled more like miso: sweat and beer, familiar scents from my days traveling with punk bands. We lowered the drawbridge to air the place out. The floor was filthy, what with all the rain. Our raw untreated floor, soaked in mud and water, didn’t really look like a floor anymore. It looked more like clouds, with streaks across it like the vapor trails of jets where the moisture had settled into the tongue and groove. We cleaned up the best we could but there was no denying that Cyclops would not be the same from here on.
My energy was still holding out, even after a very long night, and I didn’t want those precious moments to slip by too quickly. So, unsatisfied with our unreliable rain shelters, I decided to throw together something that could at least cover the kitchen. Morning had broken and the rain had abated; so my friend and I, who had also been awake all night, got out some tools and set about putting together a simple wood frame that would hold a tarp taught. We were just putting the finishing touches on it when the first carload of volunteers arrived. I tagged out and went home to sleep while the others prepared for the coming day’s activity.
The workshops resumed at noon with a lecture about the road protests of the 90s and a presentation on theater of the oppressed, followed by discussions of summit protests, labor and environmental struggle in Chile, environmental activism in Stockholm, and that summer’s Climate Camp in London; members of Brazil’s MST and Sem-Teto even came to offer a presentation, and there was a meeting to prepare for the European Social Forum occurring in Malmö in 2008. I slept most of the day but returned in time to hear the Brazilians, who just happened to be traveling through with their samba group and knew somebody who knew somebody who had worked on Cyclops. The weekend concluded with a kids’ film from the 70s, Resan till Melonia, an animated dramatization of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” A few of us from Kulturkampanjen said a couple words to the twenty or so people who stuck around in humble gratitude, and the grand opening came to an end. We had officially raised anchor and our journey to the future had begun, our bearing as luminous as the slight embers rising from a bonfire into the star-filled night sky.
After the grand opening, things cooled down. All the members of Kulturkampanjen were exhausted after our sprint to the finish line; some even decided to leave the group for a while. With the pressure of the grand opening no longer hanging over our heads, we could all take some much-needed time to breathe. Besides, with the cold and dark of the Swedish winter looming again, volunteers were hard to come by.
Opening the house shifted our focus. Now we had to bring people in and get some activity going in the building, so our efforts included networking, getting the word out, and administrating events. It was slow going at first, but by the time spring rolled around we had semi-regular events and steady collaboration with several external groups. Today, a couple DJ crews throw regular parties, some DIY anarchists have arranged a weekly welding workshop, and a collective of artists rent one of the container rooms as a studio. This fits with our vision of Kulturkampanjen as an administrative body coordinating external groups who have their own ideas of how to use the house. At this point we can’t really offer these groups a problem-free activity space, so they have to have a little gusto to make it work. With several key details unfinished—we still haven’t connected to municipal water or insulated the roof—we have yet to reach the vision of a cultural center with activity every day, all year round. All the same, we consider ourselves well on the way.
Working with Kulturkampanjen has taught me a lot over the past two years. I suspect the difficulties we have faced are typical of most DIY projects. The most obvious challenge was our lack of technical knowledge. The carpentry work was a challenge I could handle, but we needed the assistance of structural engineers, welders, plumbers, electricians, fire technicians, and inspectors. We also had to figure out how to get the paperwork in order, navigate zoning laws, write building permissions, draw plans, and get them approved. Our operating premise was that if we really beat the carpets we would flush somebody out who could help us, and this proved true. For example, an acquaintance of a family friend knew how to run conduit and came out one day to explain it to two punk kids, who made that their summer project. In fact, we found that there were copious resources within the DIY anarchist community, and as word spread about our project many capable people came to us offering to help. There were things we couldn’t get around paying for—fire inspections, for example, had to be conducted by a certified technician—but we found our budget sufficed so long as we kept them to a minimum.
But our lack of technical knowledge engendered deeper problems. Early on, we realized that our collective skill in building was distributed strictly along gender lines, and we were going to have to engage that problem actively if we wanted to eliminate gender discrimination in our group. That was our intention, and we had a well thought out plan that was never completely fulfilled. As the only skilled laborer in the group, I arranged two weekend-long carpentry workshops for women only. Our idea was that those groups would go on to start separatist workdays, having used the classes as a springboard into the routine of working at Cyclops. We also planned to arrange gender workshops for Kulturkampanjen to attend as a group, but that didn’t pan out either. All in all we have been about 1/5 women in the core group and about 2/5 in the volunteer periphery, and I’m sure they have to fight for their place, and that many others have fallen by the wayside.
When I look back and ask myself why these and many other plans were never carried out, the answer lies with our collective relationships and our individual priorities. Some of us prioritized the building of our house over the maintenance of our group, and our collective has suffered as a result. Others in the group would have preferred to give precedence to focusing on the structure and organization of our collective and our personal relationships. These factions within the group had a hard time resisting the temptation to make value judgments about one another. Both factions were suspicious of each other’s intentions, which created tensions and distractions additional to those of building a house and maintaining a healthy collective. Finding the strength and inspiration to pick up a hammer day after day is difficult enough without having to navigate the treacherous waters of intrigue and mistrust. And when time is a scarcity, no one wants to throw away precious hours on a project that will not reach fruition. Poor follow-through on the part of those that claimed to prioritize relationships within the collective combined with the stubbornness of a goal-focused group led to the collapse of our plans and designs concerning gender equality.
We have been at maximum rpm since day one, and after four years we’ve barely succeeded in creating a space to have a show. If we had taken the time and energy to thoroughly address our relationships, would the Cyclops exist today? On the other hand, is it worth making a house if we have to perpetuate hierarchy in the process? As members of a collective, what demands can we make on one another? Can we demand a certain number of hours a week? Can we demand to be treated with respect? The answer to the latter question seems simple—but how deep are we willing to dig in order to get at the roots of institutionalized disrespect? This was the great question that kept reoccurring in our activities and our debates, the central question every group must answer for itself: who are we and what exactly are we trying to accomplish?
The harsh reality is that every collective must exist within the larger context of the world, and this further compounds the problem. Each member chooses how much time and energy to contribute to the aims of the collective, and it is the coalescence of these contributions that gives the group its pool of resources. For individual members, this is rarely a free choice. We have jobs, children, responsibilities, other commitments, other projects and goals. We give what we can and hope for the best. Gender, ethnicity, class, and background all play a role in how much we want to and are able to commit.
Inequities in the amount of time each person is able to dedicate to the collective pool of resources must be understood in their sociopolitical context. Every actor plays a part and no one’s role should be taken for granted; however, it can also seem that without the driving force of two or three central figures, this project would have never been realized. While some members take time off from the project to take care of themselves, others feel that if they ever stop giving 110% there would be no group from which the others could take a break. This dynamic has been detrimental for Kulturkampanjen. Unclear or miscommunicated intentions between members have led to frustration and loss of trust. We’ve experienced a shortage of people truly willing to throw down for the sake of Cyclops, and that increases pressure on the few who are. The sheer fact of this pressure led collective members to develop feelings of guilt, despite them having been clear with the group and with themselves about how many hours they were willing to work. The collective should, of course, not demand it’s members to be self-destructive; however, members must take responsibility for the projects they take on and be open about their competence and faculty. All too often someone was supposed to do something, some simple task, and a week would go by, two weeks would go by, and it just wouldn’t get done. No one enjoys being the cop after a consensus meeting, calling around to see if everybody is doing the things they’d promised.
We have also had our share of members whose idea of activism goes no further than a monthly consensus meeting, the minutes of which consist of a long list of broken promises. It is my opinion that these people should leave activist circles altogether and plague the boardrooms of corporations instead—they would do more for our movement there. To be clear, I’m talking about people who choose to join as collective members, not volunteers who show up to work for a few months and then decide to move to Gotland. One of the important roles of Kulturkampanjen has been to provide a place for activists to apply their excess energy; we don’t make demands on our volunteers—we are grateful for their valuable contribution. My point is that when you join a group and say you’re getting involved, you need to follow through. If you’re touring through activist circles for social or other reasons, don’t let collective members become confused about your level of commitment.
My experience in Kulturkampanjen notwithstanding, I hold to my belief that non-hierarchal, anarchist collectives can be more effective and powerful than traditional, oppressive ones, and I prefer the goal-driven focus of Kulturkampanjen to other groups I have been a part of who were too busy fine-tuning their infrastructure to actually accomplish what they set out to do.
These days when I’m at Cyclops, I can feel that the place needs my time, it cries out for my attention. And I want to give it. I feel that there is so much I could do for that place if I only had the time. But between raising my son, who is now six, working full time, and taking care of my friendships and relationships, there is not much time available. It’s a damn shame that such an important and meaningful project has to survive on leftovers. The amount of time we have to spend as we truly wish is a good barometer of our freedom. And I imagine that this is what all workers feel who have had the gumption, and the breathing room, to start their own projects: frustration at having to watch what is meaningful to them decay while continually pumping the majority of their time, energy, creativity, and skill into building apartments for the rich and earning millions for stockholders who never lift a finger. Those bastards! I wonder what fantastic buildings we could create if a gang of us were free from their yoke. Cyclops could be just the beginning! We are proof, I believe, that an emancipated work force does not cease to produce, but simply redirects its energy. My bones ache for the chance to run wild with my abilities, to work at Cyclops full-time! The next step for Kulturkampanjen must be to reduce the ratio of wage labor to creative autonomous activity in our own lives. Only then can the Cyclops, and our more ambitious future projects, begin to reach their full potential.
A couple weeks ago I helped arrange a party at Cyclops, collaborating with a group known for throwing clandestine disco raves at various locations around town. On my way there I thought about how far things had come since that December morning washing dishes with the two kids from Kulturkampanjen, all the people who have passed through my life since then. When I looked back, I saw all the different forms my activism can take: learning construction, selling beer, borrowing microphones and amplifiers, calculating and comparing the weights of different roof systems, brewing coffee, sleeping at a construction site, sweeping up sawdust, arranging to borrow generators, sorting through extension cables, learning how to tie and untie knots. I started to wonder what actually separates my activism from the rest of my life. As I walked towards Cyclops, like so many times before, and saw the ridge of the roof crest out above the shrubbery beside the path, the answer was clear. There is no difference.
No relation to Clark Olofsson, to our knowledge.
