Friday the 13th

The morning started out normal enough.  I woke up at 7:00, which is a little later than usual, turned on a Swedish children’s story called “Loranga, Masarin och Dartanjang” that I have on my Itunes, and went to the kitchen to make coffee.  I like listening to that story in the morning.  There’s a part in that story where the characters buy a thousand hotdogs on credit to feed a pack of tigers, which they keep in a barn.  Later they go to buy a thousand more.  When the hotdog dealer refuses on account of the previous debt not being paid, they give him one of the tigers in trade.  I love that.  I think it’s nice for my kid too, he likes to hear voices in the morning as he wakes up.  I let him sleep until about twenty after, then I shook him awake.  ”Yeah, yeah” he said, his hair a big blonde mop.  

We went to the kitchen and ate cornflakes with lingonberry jam.  Among other things, today is bring-a-toy-to-school day, which they have once at month at my boy’s elementary school.  So after breakfast he packed up his turquoise Nintendo DS.  It always makes me feel a little powerless, to witness the surge of products and ideas that just barge right on through my house, winking at me as I stand by, but I try to remember the joy I had in games.  Our striving as parents needs to be factual when it is so often passionate, and this can lead to illogical rules and consequences, which frustrates the family’s sense of order and safety.  Shit my son plays too many video games.  But limiting the amount of time he spends with his DS is not a contest of wills, but rather a search for a defined world.  Children need to know where they stand, and they’ll never let you forget it.  All this passes through my mind every time I see the lavish care my son spends in packing up his little games and styluses in the little purse he has for his game paraphernalia.  I think he’s just waiting for me to say something.  Like he can sense the world-view, the sermon, on the tip of my tongue.  But he knows he’s safe because this time his actions are school-sanctioned.  It is as if a whole non-verbal conversation passes between as we pull on our clothes.  

As is often the case, I forget that we need to brush our teeth until the minute we are about to walk out the door.  We often stand in the bathroom in scarfs and hats, brushing and spitting.  Earlier in the week we’d been to the dentist and I’d been scolded for not actually manually helping my 6.5 yr old brush his teeth.  To me that seemed totally insane.  The nurse explained that parents should help their children brush teeth up to the age of ten.  Ten!  Apparently that’s when their motor-skills reach the level of virtuosity that clean teeth demand.  Sitting in the dentist office I sheepishly agreed, but oooohhh I hate being told how to do my job.  I do help him now though, and I probably will far into the future.  In the end, his cavities speak for themselves.  That’s just plain physics.

We charged out into the snow.  A little snow anyway.  It was cold.  Cloudy.  My jeans felt thin despite my capilene long-johns.  I love walking with my kid to school because it gives me the opportunity to walk beside my son.  I don’t know if you others have noticed but parents seem to always walk like five steps ahead of their children.  Kids have shorter legs so their natural pace is slower.  Plus they have no reason to hurry and rush since they’re not responsible for getting themselves to school or their parents to work on time.  My kid doesn’t need to worry about what time my bus leaves.  Making the conscious choice to walk slow and hold hands with my son is like extending a big “fuck you” to my boss and the whole system that upholds his hierarchy.  That booming voice which echoes through all our clocks and telephones constantly asking “why aren’t you in production yet?”  Still, during the walk to school, my mind starts to make a transition.  It’s Friday, after all, which is the day I tag out as Dad and let Mom take over.  We are switch-hit parents, which is common here in Sweden.  On this walk I begin to think less about my son and more about myself.  Today is a big day for me, I know that already.  

After waving goodbye to the kid, I made my way back towards the subway.  Normally I would take a bus to meet up with a commuter-train and ride out to the job site in a southern suburb, but today is different.  First I call a co-worker to see where he is.  I’ll have to call him “S” since this is the internet and all.  S is and interesting character, I wish I could write more about him here.  A recovering heroin addict on methadone, S one of the most interestingly methodic carpenters I’ve ever worked with.  Sometimes I go back and look at things he’s built and marvel.  Not long on physics but with an overdose of enthusiasm, his damaged brain and neurotic personality often produce constructions more akin to art than house-building.  Most carpenters I know build like machines.  We are children of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, fostered to build clinical and efficient.  But S’s insane life as an addict and drug-runner has wrenched him free.  His style is honest, transparent.  You see how he thinks by looking at the stuff he builds.  I wish these characteristics would be valued but I fear they are mostly to his detriment. 

S told me on the phone that he’d gone straight to the Company Office as soon as his shift was supposed to start, and waited there until somebody official showed up.   He said I should come there too, so we could get our paperwork in order.  That seemed like a good idea.  I was also encouraged buy the fact that the office was still in existence.  We had heard that an eviction was pending due to unpaid back rent, which sent shivers down my spine because all the company phones had been turned off for the same reason and it was starting to seem that the actual physical office was the last link between us, the workers, and them, the owners and administrators.  The company seemed to be running out of tigers to trade.  And paperwork is very important here in Sweden, especially when it comes to Unemployment.

When I arrived at the Office I was handed a fresh cup of coffee by S, who seemed to have already had several.  He was harassing a secretary, trying to get all our sacred documents together, printed and signed.  Pay stubs on deposit, formal documentation of our total hours at the company, etc.  We need these to get our social unemployment insurance.  There was some protocol confusion around what to do with the company’s tools we’d taken out.  Particularly concerning the really expensive dual-tank air compressor and pneumatic screw and nail guns I’d been using for the past half-year.  When you borrow a tool, the company makes you sign a waiver giving you formal responsibility for whatever happens to said tool.  Theoretically the company can try to make you pay damages if something happens to the machine.  I wouldn’t put it passed my swine boss to send me a bill for 50K Swedish so I wanted to have some kind of official document transferring responsibility over to another employee.  This took some time.  

Eventually, S and I managed to get all our papers in order and we headed out.  He decided go home but I needed to go back out to the job site to get my tools and clothes.  We sat at the bus stop together and had what will probably be our last conversation.  We talked a lot about the Company and the jobs we’d worked on together.  Last year we framed and sheathed a roof during the winter months.  We had a lot to say about the foreman on that job.  Our most recent project had gone much smoother: partition walls in a new apartment complex.  I think we’d both grown during our time together, but that’s not what we talked about.  We shit-talked the bosses and foremen who’d supervised us and discussed new tools and materials.  I, for one, had never worked with a pneumatic nail-gun that could shoot into concrete.

I arrived out at the job site by around 11:30.  There was nobody there from our company.  Either they’d gone home early or they’d never shown up in the first place, I couldn’t tell which.  It wasn’t exactly the grand send-off one might hope for, but in a way, quietly excusing myself out through the back door while nobody was looking seemed a fitting way to exit this world.  I felt more like an escape artist than a laid-off construction worker.  

First thing I did I cleaned out my locker.  I threw all my work-clothes in a plastic sack except the pants with holes in the knees which I threw in the container for burnables.  I went down to the foreman and said adios and that I would keep his number for future reference.  He asked if I had anything new and I said I did but not right away, which is partly true.  He said I should call him if I needed work in the spring.  I might.  Then I went down to the container where we keep our tools.  I took all the hand-tools out of the masonry bucket I use to carry my stuff out onto the site and put them into the box I use to transport tools from site to site.  I dragged the box out to the street and left it there and went up to get my sack of clothes.  I threw the sack over my shoulder like Santa Claus and went back down and sat on the box to wait for my ride.

My ride showed up after about fifteen minutes.  I was thinking he had a Land Rover but he didn’t, he had an old beat-up white station wagon with a cracked windshield.  I have to say that explained a little discrepancy in his personality I’d been wondering about these passed few days.  Anyway this guy had agreed to help me drive my stuff, which was really nice.  When I tried to give him gas money he replied that it was his sacred duty as a car-owner to help the carless, referring to the inherent immorality in owning a car.  This is a refreshing perspective for a Swede, though this dude isn’t technically Swedish, and it reminded me of home.  Here, in contrast to the States, the mainstream idea is that cars actually damage the planet.  Not that there isn’t a significant car-culture here as well, but at times the rebel in me doesn’t quite know where to turn, and I catch him sometimes wanting to buy a pickup.

We took a quick walk through the site.  Two large buildings that will house 81 1-4 bedroom apartments, built with prefabricated concrete modules, not unlike a house of cards.  In fact this past summer, a couple of the modules actually fell apart and one of the assembly dudes was almost killed.  Until they are welded together and new concrete is poured across the knotted rebar, the modules are held together by their own dead load.  Unfortunately I was wearing my Peltor FM Stereo Receive Headset, probably listening to Britney Spears at the time, so I didn’t hear the crash.  Too bad cause I heard it was enormous.  It is rare that a friend of mine comes to see where I work so I had no shortage of anecdotes to tell.  I filled him in on everything as we walked and he commented on the undesirability of living in such lifeless boxes as well as the undesirability of concrete as a building material.  He himself lives in some kind of geodesic dome made of birch twigs.  Do I need to say he has a beard?  After a quick walk-through we drove to my place in Skarpnäck and he helped me to unload my toolbox.  He stuck around a while and we drank coffee and talked about our fucked up love lives.  

At 14:00 I had an appointment to be at band practice in Bagarmossen, so between stories of broken promises and frustrated hopes I had to start getting ready.  I’d been working all week on a demo version of a song about having oral sex at the top of a tree, so I wanted to burn my band mate a copy and transcribe the lyrics.  Walk into the forest, lay down in the bark/ see the life of birds, of wings and cries/ creature of two legs you can be home among the flies/ seek the balanced weight, the branch and the spine.  Not that I admit to having engaged in this type of activity (not that I deny it either), but I hope this metaphor will serve to illustrate the difficult nature of Swedish (and perhaps all Scandinavian) culture.  Seen in the context of this country’s Lutheran moral environment, what could be a more free act than to not only have oral sex, but to actually do it at the top of a tree?  Then again, who could possibly bear to be even partially naked at the top of a tree in Sweden in February?  You see the quandary here.  Feel along your throat, the long wind of blood/ rhythm of the flex, pulse of the run/ catch the evening starlight on your tongue/ follow the mother’s voice when the last song is sung.  Bury me, suffocate me, in the wide-open air.  I realize this must say more about myself than about any culture, but I’m down with that (no pun intended).  Poetic pretensions aside, I feel that even if we’re not breaking it, we should at least be looking for new ground, but as Steve Buscemi’s character in “Big Fish,” the stagnated poet Norther Winslow, admonishes us apropos the creative process: “never discuss a work in progress!” 

The practice space we use in Bagis belongs to Musikföreningen 128, a loosely-knit group of musicians I joined in the fall, who have remodeled a derelict garage into rehearsal rooms.  The place has a clandestine feel to it, owing to it’s DIY nature.  Like most volunteer-driven groups, Musikföreningen 128 has it’s core group and it’s periphery, and is always hungry for more hours.  For the past few months I’ve been working there nights and weekends, trying to fit it in between all my other on-going projects and relationships.  Part of my secret plan is that I can dedicate a lot more work time to projects like this now that I am unemployed.  It’s sort of against the rules to think like this, but I have high hopes for the coming months.  Employment is rolling back like a curtain, revealing a whole world of places to be and things to become.  I don’t have to stop being a carpenter, there is plenty of stuff to build.  But I can become a musician.  A poet.  A painter.  An activist.  A writer.  Showing up for band practice, in the middle of the afternoon on a Friday, I began to realize what unemployment could mean for me.

Our band doesn’t have a name yet, but our form is beginning to take shape.  It appears we will remain a two-piece, drums and guitar, a setup identical to my favorite band: The Usa Is a Monster.  Noise rock ala Providence, RI is an undiscovered genre here in Sweden, I’m not sure why, but it is a good starting place for us.  Sweden may still be living under the misconception that a two-piece can’t effectively cover the spectrum, even just purely sound-wise, and if it is my destiny then I will be glad to liberate them with my amazing rig.  But playing the only melodic instrument in the band has some advantages for me personally.  When it comes to key changes during improvisation, for example, I can be totally self-absorbed.  This is of course a disadvantage as well.  Part of the most interesting thing about seeing a band is watching the communication between musicians.  The two-man setup suits my chromatic style, at least initially, and I’m satisfied with its simplicity.

I’ll be using a Boss OC-3 Super Octave pedal to cover the low frequencies and plan to stay for the most part in drop-D tuning.  Our songs so far seem to be either riff-based or atmospheric, which provides a satisfying contrast.  I love contrast in music.  Juxtaposition.  I look forward to being able to engage in a deeper creative process musically than what I’ve had…  fuck that.  You don’t go out there thinking it might take you somewhere, you think about where you can go within yourself.  Go in uninhibited and if some product flops out, withhold judgement, and think of the next path.  Look always to the path.  This is the opposite of manufacturing.  I want to stand like a tree with waving limbs, with melodies and energy flowing from my leaves like hale from a tropical storm and I am inside the eye, staring at some shape or design.  Sometimes I feel like a tree.  I like that.

After band practice I went home to drop of my guitar and take a shower.  Then I took the subway into town to Kafé 44.  On the way I listened to (the French) MAGMA.  When I arrived the meeting was already under way and the group was in deep discussion.  One of the problems we had with the old Cyclops group (see “a world of wings and cries”) was that nobody took time out to document what was happening.  We have relatively few photos, interviews, etc. and now that the new Cyclops seems to mean something to this town, there is a new interest in an ongoing documentation of events.  We talked a while about what type of documentation we wanted to get into and how we might store all this information in a central location, so that other groups within Kulturkampanjen might be able to access material they could use in their individual projects.  I was more into the idea that we would actually make small documentaries, zines or films or posters or something.  We could have our own youtube channel for example.  Or we could make posters, not in the sense of an advertisement for an event, but more like a band might make for a record or something, like something for the kids to put up on their walls.  Consensus within the group tended more towards the collection of material, focusing on input rather than output.  I guess technically this is yet another sign of the deep difference between me and everybody else, at least in relation to how I perceive this project and how I relate to projects in my life in general, but I figured whatever, it could still be fun to do some interviews and of course I can make my own youtube videos whenever…

After the meeting some friends and I went to System Bolaget, Sweden’s answer to Aunt Bettie’s Cupboard.  I bought three Urquell beers because it’s on my list of beers with a gluten count of less that 20 parts per million, which is under the threshold for food products to call themselves “naturally” gluten free.  Check it out: 

http://www.slv.se/upload/dokument/risker/allergi/0510_WEBsorttillverkare.pdf

I can imagine that other celiacs out there might get pissed to know that in Europe we allow ourselves to drink Czech pilsner, but the jury is fucking out scientifically, you have to admit it.  The bottom line is that only chemists can actually debate this stuff and nobody normal knows anything for sure.  The best advice a doctor can give you is to experiment, and be prepared, with religious trepidation, to take drastic measures.  Pizza?  No.  Bread?  Nope.  Pasta?  Nejdå.  Urquell?  Ok.  Corona is also on that list…

Anyway, we had some time to kill before the Crow Bar party, which was supposed to start at 11, so we decided to go to a friends house and sit around drinking and listening to music.  On the way we stopped at Amida’s and ate, which was dope as always.  They cook all the food there over a huge charcoal grill and it’s about the only place in town where you can get a vegetarian plate that will stick to your ribs.  By the time we made it back to the apartment we were a gang of three.  We sat around and talked shit.  I read some song lyrics aloud.  They told me they thought it was muddled and spacey.  I think I’ve read it too much not to like it.  By now it answers to it’s own expected rhythms, but I don’t have any high ambitions for it, I just like it.

Child of the night your eyes are singing
cornea lenses shine like a jungle cats
everything you know, chaos of motion
school of run, your heart is born
in the first rays of the new rising sun
cup your young soul in your hands
can stare out across the valley
in’s innocence may pass into you
sleep in the grace of the valley
and pray you may wake to run again
a wild galloping horse, free on the plain
shot by a tank, exploded
the guts of the free horse hang from sunflowers
bent and puking their seed on the barren ground
step in the mud of the blood-soaked desert
like drunk cattle, innocent and holy, wondering
is this where I belong
searching for the ones who name the sky
lords who wait in robes of polished skin
eyes awash in their alters holy light
in the alters holy light

fingers on the buttons, masters
rulers of cold power
in throes of self-defense
unleash their wills upon the land
believed in the ghosts of plows
who bow to no one
who forget the lover’s tongue
like waves upon your eyelids
the unknowable suns of foreign worlds
setting in the middle of the day
seek the rings of the cave
remember the cold of the floor
feel the press of the wide ocean
and the shells under your feet
sea-drenched monster of the sea
water eyes like a fish scales gleam
clones upon clones upon clones
a vibrating pulse of creature
contained in a drop from the pupils lens
a drooling hole of vision
pour your tears across the hearts of hunters
who long for the keys to the casket
who camp at the center of our village
and dream of flames
and dream of flames

At around 22:30, we started to talk about how we were going to get out to Finntorp, where the pontoon housing the Crowbar Club was supposedly docked.  C and I wanted to walk but the third musketeer said it was way too far.  He went off to meet up with some others who were going to take a bus.  C and I bought a hog leg for the road and set out.  It was cold and clear.  A long night walk can be the perfect caesura from the hectic socialization of a friday night.  And, knowing the party would go on all night, we didn’t have to hurry.  We walked along the water across from Hammarby Sjöstad and smoked and talked and walked.  I don’t remember everything we discussed but I believe it was some serious fucking shit!  This walk was straight out of a Richard Linklater movie.  We didn’t actually have directions to the pontoon but C felt she knew the way intuitively.  I was totally convinced we were lost and made no secret of it.  We seemed to be wandering among apartment buildings belonging to the elderly.  That’s just a feeling I got.  One time we saw the silhouette of a strange animal under a bridge.  C claimed it was a fox or a baby reindeer.  I maintained it was a feral hare; they are fucking enormous around here.  We followed it under the bridge but came out on the other side at the gate of a cemetery.  It was a little too Sleepy Hollow for us so we turned back.  To my amazement, we eventually stumbled upon a giant crow doll made of wire, electrical tape, and scraps of cloth and we knew we were on the right path!  From there we followed the signs and eventually we arrived.

The party was a benefit event for an artists collective known as Kråkan, the crow.  Some of the people from Kulturkampanjen are involved there so it was kind of an act of solidarity to show up.  Lasers and smoke and lemon shots, we were doing our duty.  The pontoon consisted of a single cuboid hall, where the group had set up a few bars and some DJ room effects.  Unfortunately, and to my chagrin, you could not feel the boat sway while standing still on the dance floor, which I had automatically assumed was the whole point of having a clandestine disco rave on a boat.  Weird people were captured by the strobe in strange stop-motion poses.  They were using powered speakers, 12′s or 15′s maybe, with horns and portholes.  Whatever it was it sounded pretty damn good.  Loud as shit.  

After warming up the dance floor and having a few drinks, C and I got into some serious shit: dance charades.  The idea is not complicated.  It’s the same as normal charades, but you can’t just do the obvious thing, you have to dance at the same time!  That means moving to the beat, waving around, whatever, expressing yourself!  And the others hang around dancing and watching and trying to guess what the hells it is you’re doing!  This is more interesting than normal charades because the resulting interpretive dance provides an interesting look into the mind of the dancer.  You see how this person thinks about objects.  When you’re guessing you have to think about what type of object this person would choose to dance about.  I recommend everybody try this.  In the beginning we were totally on the same wave-length.  The first like five or six guesses we got right away.  Then we kind of lost it after C couldn’t get my “satellite.”  We danced until there was nobody left and the Crow people started sweeping up beer cans.  By the time we got on the subway it was the morning of the 14th.  We decided C should stay over at my place in Skarpnäck because in just a few hours we were both due at another Kulturkampanjen meeting in a nearby suburb.  A meeting about consensus techniques, that is to say, a meeting about meetings.  

So that’s it, that was my day.

A World of Wings and Cries

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.

Dry-Toilet 1, politics and shit

 

For our first meeting, Olof and I sat down at a local café here in our suburb of Skarpnäck, on the outskirts of Stockholm, Sweden.  We opened with a discussion of what it is we actually want to build, and why.  One of the first things you learn about the Cyclops is that “damn I should’ve remembered to crap before I came.”  With the exception of certain events which have justified the rental of a port-o-john, we have been shitting in the woods or not at all.  Not that I have a problem shitting in the woods, mind you, but the situation does pose a certain problem in terms of who I might bring with me.  My Mom, for example, would probably find it a drawback.  It has also been brought to my attention that I am gifted with the right physique for a particular type of squatting down that helps after you’ve dug the hole.  Apparently there are people who can’t squat.  They fall backwards.  So the question is partly one of inclusion.   People with a different body-type, age, and class background than mine should be given the opportunity to hang out at the Cyclops without going around the whole night clutching their bowels.

 

Those with insider knowledge of the planning of the Cyclops will pipe up and say “but wait!  What about the toilet we have planned inside the house!”  Yes, indeed construction is underway for a toilet inside.  Interestingly enough, one of the first things we bought when we started building back in 2006 was a 3,000 gallon fiberglass septic tank, which now lives in the utility room in the lower-right container, together with the fuse box and the battery row.  The plan is to connect a regular porcelain toilet to a pump, like you would use on a boat, and collect the piss and shit in the tank.  When the tank fills up we call a company who comes with a truck and empties the tank and drives the shit away.  Cyclops is required by zoning laws to provide a handicap-accessible toilet, so, as opposed to connecting to municipal sewage or burying the tank, the built-in septic tank seemed smart, is smart.

 

However, from an ecological perspective, the built-in tank leaves much to be desired.  The fact that you use a truck to drive away your poo means that you are expending energy to remove a potential energy source.  We have to stop thinking of shit and piss as waste.  Not only are we losing valuable nutrients, we are paying someone to take them away.  Without the presence of a dry-toilet alternative, Cyclops will have institutionalized both the loss of compost and the cost of it’s removal.  Depending on future levels of activity, this could turn out to be an impressive expense.  

Several cups of coffee later we were really getting into it.  Olof took out pen and paper and started drawing a mind-map.  We discussed the ideal toilet, and came up with a wish-list of qualities it should have.  They are as follows:

 

the dry-toilet should generate nutrient-rich compost

it should be warm and comfortable to crap, even in the winter

we should be protected from mosquitoes when we crap

we should be protected from inclement weather when we crap

it should be cheap to build

it shouldn’t stink too bad

and finally,

it should require very little maintenance

 

We also considered the possibility of making the whole operation portable, which would allow us to make use of the toilet at other events and would allow us to distribute the compost around town, so to speak, if we decided we didn’t want the compost collected in one location.  What would it be like to build the thing on wheels?  This thought changed the nature of our discussion.  We began to examine the technicality behind our ideas.  I must confess, I love this part!  This is where art meets physics, the delicate back-and-forth between architect and engineer, where dreams and ideas are not merely born, but take the first tentative steps toward realization.  What fun to have the opportunity to play both at once!

Some things we already knew, other things would require research.  One thing we knew was that in order to aid the effective breakdown of pathogens in human feces, it is a good idea to separate urine.  This suggested that we needed dual drop chambers under the seat, one at the back to collect solid waste and one in the front to collect or alternatively to lead away pee to a safe location.  Olof pointed out that urine is extremely nitrogen-rich and needs to be diluted before it can aid plant growth.  He also noted that there are certain plants that thrive in nitrogen-saturated soil.  We began to plan for a type of pool where our excess nitrogen could be put to good use.  We had to consider location.  Behind the Cyclops is a huge mountain and in times of heavy rain a lot of water is collected at it’s foot in a sort of ditch.  Could this be a good place to release the front chamber?  We considered the idea of building the toilet in the woods on the mountain, that would certainly provide good conditions for pee run-off.  

 

Discussing the woods position brought up another concern.  As usual in this bullshit society, we are not acting in a free environment.  We don’t have permission to build in those woods, or anywhere for that matter.  Were we going to do things by the book?  We definitely didn’t want to put the house at risk or ruffle the feathers of paper-pushing bureaucrats, those fuckers!  Building in the woods would provide cover from possible inspectors, those bastards!  As if they have nothing better to do than hassle a serious group of DIY folk-scientists busting their asses improving the fuck out of a forgotten and neglected parking lot in Högdalen.  The future of the Cyclops is just as uncertain as all other projects of this nature.  What exactly would we put at risk in building in the woods, and how high of a risk would we then be running?  Who knows, but still..  an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

 

We also discussed the warmth issue.  We liked the idea of building a small wood-burning stove in or around the toilet.  This would not only provide warmth, it would help to hide the smell and it would provide ash, a good high-alkaline structural material to add to the shit.  You have a little bucket of ash beside the seat and you sprinkle a bit over the mound of dookie after you wipe.  That’s cozy as fuck.  We could steal the scoop for it from a candy store!  We theorized that we could find an old rusty cast-iron wok and build a little chimney for it out of limestone bricks that would store warmth and distribute it slowly over time.  Part of opening Cyclops for business would be going to the outhouse and making a fire.

A week after our first meeting, Olof and I went out to the Cyclops to check the lay of the land in closer detail.  Our theories about the mountain and the ditch seemed to hold true.  However, the more we thought about it, the more we leaned towards building the thing on a trailer.  In addition to the benefits already mentioned above, the trailer idea would also exempt us from zoning restrictions because of an interesting loop-hole in the law.  Our outhouse would then be designated as a vehicle, falling into the jurisdiction of the department of transportation, not the zoning commission.  We could fix up a little area where we could park the trailer and we could move it if the bureaucrats started giving us the chaff.

 

We also began to discuss the problem of light.  Day time light could be provided by windows in the walls and roof, but what about nighttime?  Candles?  Olof threw out the idea of mounting a small solar generator hooked up to a car battery that could power a low-watt light bulb and possibly a small fan to help disperse methane from the back chamber.  Since neither of us knows anything about electricity, this would provide an excellent opportunity to learn about it!  But how much would something like that cost?

 

To be honest, all this discussion made me dizzy.  What a fucking job this is going to be!!  I wonder if a project feels most impossible when in it’s formative stages.  I feel like these decisions are difficult to make, maybe once we’ve chosen a direction it will easier to carry out.  I guess we’ll see!  Do any of you people reading this have any suggestions or insights?  Anybody out there ever built one of these things before?  I definitely enjoy the thrill of figuring things out on my own, but at this point I doubt my joy would be decreased by a little guiding wisdom.  

 

To be continued!

Back in the Light

We lay down to cuddle before reading a story.  He reminds me of that beforehand.  I curl up around him like a gigantic bear and he nudges himself into my embrace like wild hare coming in from the cold.  We both relax completely after the day’s various trials, together we are finally isolated from the pressure of the world, nothing exists outside the cuddle, there is nothing but the incredible feeling of being off our feet.  I go somewhere in my mind, it could be anywhere.  Sometimes I think of things I want to build, or I think of alternate futures to the one I believe most likely.  I drop everything: emails awaiting reply, dishes in the sink, toys akimbo all over the floor, perhaps even laundry…  all the things I can do with my evenings alone.  

Our bed is afloat in a private sea of dreams and thoughts.  When I come back to myself I see his face in profile, the long lashes pointing out from around the cheek.  I see him lift his brow, in a gallant attempt to hold up the now heavy curtain of his eye-lid.  Now I know for sure he will drop off.  We hadn’t had a chance to read!  Then, slowly, as he descends and gradually disappears, things start to come back.  Suddenly I’m not as comfortable there as before, lying decadently wasting time.  I listen to his breathing to judge when it is safe to get up.  The bed will get joggled around, the door may squeak, if he’s not properly down for the count, these distractions may rouse him.  So I listen, and start to have ideas.

I want to build a dry toilet at Cyclops.  We need one, even if the indoor toilet with the septic tank gets sorted out (which we are required by zoning laws to have), we still could use a dry toilet outside, one that separates urine and feces, that can effectively break down pathogens, hell yeah, I want to do that!  I lay there in the dark listening to my son breathe.  I have a vision of a dry toilet I once used in the middle of the night in Belgium.  I remember the sight of the sky through the shadow of leaves, shitting by candle light.  I’ve always been curious about how that stuff works, it will be interesting to learn.  This could be a good project for me, and I think I know someone who might want to help!  He can be my partner, we can do it together.  Yes, this will be a project for the fall.  We won’t work on it obsessively, won’t let it take over, we’ll do it so the toilet is ready in the spring.  We both have tons of other shit going on, after all (no pun intended).  I wonder if he’ll be interested!  He knows about composting and pathogens and shit like that.  I’ll ask him soon!  No one will dictate our direction or focus, we do what be believe is best based on what we believe is true.  

Yes, we will build a dry toilet at Cyclops.