General Assembly at Macao, May
2012.
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On Saturday, May the 5th many citizens and workers in the fields of
arts, entertainment, and culture entered and occupied the tower Galfa, in
order to create MACAO, the new arts center in Milan. The tower is owned by Fondiaria Sai, whose honorary reference is Ligresti. The tower is located in a historic office skyscraper in the centrum of Milan, which has been left abandoned for more than fifteen years. The exceptional creation of this new space for arts involved thousands of people, who since week one have been working hard to make this space livable and visible. A lot of us every day come to Macao and experience the sharing of purposes and vision, which is enabling the emergence of a brand new perspective about the creation of an arts and culture center in the city. We are receiving numerous requests, by academies, universities, and intellectuals that want to participate to this project in MACAO, by sharing their knowledge, providing their own means of production, carrying whole classes and workshops in a space that, increasingly, is emerging as an previously unimaginable situation of cooperation and cultural enrichment. We believe that this process of participation,which we experience with wonder and enthusiasm can represent the birth of a new perspective and a way to rethink the culture, especially during these times in which, too often, culture itself is considered as something relegated to secondary importance, because of a generalized crisis that continues to prevent us from imagining a future full of chances. We, instead, believe that Macao is showing, with strength, tenacity, and vision, another concept of thinking about power relations and another way of understanding life in our times. All this is contagious. That said, the threat of imminent eviction is very heavy and we should not leave this wonderful process in the hands of the logic of police repression. WE ASK ALL OF US, ALL CITIZENS, ARTISTS, AND THINKERS, TO SHARE AND SPREAD THIS APPEAL TO PROTECT MACAO. Send an email to proteggiamomacao@gmail.com to sign the call of support. About MACAOMACAO, the new arts centre in Milan, is a great experiment in building with a bottom up approach a space in which to produce art and culture. A place where artists and citizens can gather together in order to invent a new system of rules for a common and participatory management which, in an autonomous way, will redefine time and priorities of their work and allow them to experiment with new common languages. We are artists, curators, critics, guards, graphic designers, performers, actors, dancers, musicians, writers, journalists, art teachers, students, and everybody who works in the field of art and culture. We’ve been mobilizing for one year, meeting in assemblies to discuss our situation as precarious workers in the fields of artistic production, entertainment, media, entertainment industry, festivals, and the so-called economy of the event. A world increasingly hostage of the finance that exploits and absorbs the primary task of culture, which is to be an economy of sharing. We represent a large share of the workforce of this city that has always been an outpost of advanced service sector. We are the multitude of workers of the creative industries that too often have to submit to humiliating conditions to access income, with no protection and no coverage in terms of welfare, not even being considered as proper interlocutors for the current labor reform, all focused on the instrumental debate over Article 18. We were born precarious, we are the pulse of the future economy, and we will not continue to accommodate exploitation mechanisms, and loss redistribution. We opened MACAO in order to let the culture strongly regain a piece of Milan, in response to a story that too often has seen the city ravaged by public procurement professionals, unscrupulous building permits, in a neo-liberal logic that has always humiliated the inhabitants and pursued a single goal: the profit of few excluding the many. Since last spring, many citizens, artists and cultural workers have given life to new experiences through practices of occupation of public and private abandoned spaces. Such experiences are proving to last in time, by taking care of culture, territories, work, new forms of economy, and new forms of collective intelligence. The artistic production must therefore be entirely rethought, we must take this time and this right in a serious and radical way, directly taking care of what is ours. MACAO is this, a space for everyone that must become an active laboratory where art, entertainment, culture, education, and information workers are invited. Here artists, intellectuals, lawyers, constitutionalists, activists, writers, film makers, philosophers, economists, architects and urban planners, neighbourhood and city inhabitants should take the time to build a social, common, and cooperative dimension. We have a lot of work to do. We must transform these words into real practices, more and more constituent and effective, in order to build alternative models to those in which we live, and everything depends on us. We should not take anything for granted, producing competent inquiries, debates, analysis, and confrontations concerning all the territories that produce inequality and expropriation of value, not to mention the new forms into which the capitalist ideology is disguising. We need to have joy and humour to transform this commitment into a human, collective, and liberated moment. We should take care of this space so that it can host everyone. It is fundamental that in this space art and communication cease to be ends in themselves. Just the opposite: they must explode and find their motivations in this fight, building new imaginaries and bringing into light the world that we see. Viva MACAO and keep up the good work! MACAO fought alongside and within this network: Lavoratori dell’arte, Cinema Palazzo in Rome, Teatro Valle Occupato in Rome, Sale Docks in Venice, Teatro Coppola in Catania, L’Asilo della Creatività e della Conoscenza in Naples, and Teatro Garibaldi Aperto in Palermo. www.lavoratoridellarte.orgwww.facebook.com/macaomiwww.facebook.com/lavoratoridellarte |
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