Posts Tagged ‘community’
This Is What 2012 Looks Like
by Ayesha Adamo
This is what 2012 looks like, in case you were wondering. I spent my New Year’s Eve in Liberty Square here in New York, ready to occupy the New Year. If you were there, then you know. If you weren’t, then let me tell you that as I watched the team from Direct Action swoop in and pull barricades down, winning a tug-of-war against the cops who were outnumbered for once, thanks to the festivities in Times Square, I knew that this was the best New Year’s Eve of my life.
I knew it even more so as I, with my fellow occupiers, climbed the great pile of barricades that the people had tossed into the middle of the park. We stood on top, looked out over the sea of faces that had gathered, and shook the ground. And you could just tell—the myths are finally here: this is what 2012 was always meant to be. This is what I’ve been waiting for all my life.
Later the NYPD battalions in riot gear would descend upon the park, kicking out the few of us who decided not to go on the march to the East Village, but it was already too late: the ground had already been shaken and the barricades had already toppled. The symbol, the ritual, had already been completed, set into motion…the magick button had been pressed and no matter how many arrests were made that night, nothing could change it. Standing outside the 9th Precinct at 4 in the morning to cheer our warriors as they exited the paddy wagon, and get an idea of names to pass on to the National Lawyers Guild, the night was winding down, but with the knowledge that nothing was over. Far far from it. Viva la revolución! Viva 2012!
View from atop the Barricades
Sweeping the Park, Sweeping the Nation
Yes, that's a broom in the air.
By Ayesha Adamo
Everyone has heard about the occupation. Everyone has seen the Youtube videos of police arrests and celebrity interviews. But on the eve of eviction, in the sometimes-pouring rain and thunder, in the middle of the night…there is another story to be told.
This is what you don’t get to see or hear as much about: the simple beauty of the exhausted, damp and nameless pushing brooms in a slow moving swarm from one end of the park to the other, here in the evening’s damp haze made shimmering by the remaining lights from the buildings above. This is when the celebrities and their spotlights and agendas are nowhere to be found (except that we were sweeping with none other than Santa Claus himself, all dressed in red). During the quiet moments, everyone’s a leader and no one’s a leader.
Part of me was thinking with concern about the runoff contamination from the cleaning agents in these suds, as we were mopping along a stream of soap bubbles, leaves, bits of salami and abandoned hair elastics, but it also seemed to be a necessary evil. It’s likely that the cleaning effort had a big impact on the city’s decision not to evict the protesters.
Throughout the night and into the morning, truckers would drive past and honk their horns loudly in solidarity, which was always met with cheers, no matter the hour. We slept on the plain ground covered with only a plastic bag to keep dry because the plan that night was to minimize the amount of sleeping bags and bedding in the park. As 5am approached, a girl came by giving out dry socks to people. Others passed around Sharpies to write the phone number of the lawyers on their body in case of arrest.
More and more people were showing up at the park, and by 6am, it was a sea of bodies as far as you could see in any direction—so far out that any statement over the people’s mic needed to be repeated in three or four ripples. So many faces, so many lights!—from cell phones, candles, video cameras…But when the breaking news came over the crowd—the news that the cleaning/eviction had been canceled—this enormous group was so unified that the words needed no repetition. From the cheers of joy alone, everybody knew. And everybody knew that they had just experienced something absolutely historic, I dare say absolutely spiritual.
The Beginning is Here
by Ayesha Adamo
With a clear blue sky and weather almost warm enough to go topless (and there were some who did), they couldn’t have picked a better day for a protest. On Wednesday 10/5/11, I came down to Occupy with the Columbia University contingent, a truly boisterous group that kept the chanting going non-stop using “the people’s mic” technique, which has proved so helpful in an action where no amplification is allowed (everyone repeats after the central speaker so that the message travels out to rings of people further and further away).
Down at Wall Street, all the groups seemed to melt into one another. There were union groups, student groups, a marching band with four tubas, a kindergarten class holding a banner together and chanting in tiny voices to share and not be greedy…just people of every sort imaginable coming together to express the need for a real change in the way things are now. And there didn’t need to be just one reason to be there because this is the new way of protesting, of understanding. This is the rhizome, like the world wide web, and the links and connections between one thing and another don’t need to make sense in a linear format. They only need to be. Just to be seen by the people in those tall buildings who don’t touch public pavement is a win, and a person would have to be cold-as-dead to look out on a crowd like this and not be moved. When I look around at all these faces—their eyes, hearts, the blood in their veins—I feel like I’ve been waiting for this all my life, and finally…The Beginning is Here.
Wagons!
by Ayesha Adamo
Even before I got to Berlin, I couldn’t wait to go and explore the wagon community called Lohmühle that I read about on my Internet explorations.
For a gal who has never been to Berlin before, and was functioning entirely on tea-stained tourist maps, this place was not so easy to find. The Kotbusser Tor U-Bahn stop in Kreuzberg is probably the closest, though there’s still a bit of a walk ahead from there. It’s kind of in the middle of a park, so the roads I was expecting to take to get there were all wrong. I ended up just aiming for the general direction and suddenly the wagons appeared like a mirage on the opposite side of a canal.
Wagons!
When I finally figured out how to cross the canal and get to the wagons, I could already hear the sound of easy retro records sliding between the two turntables that were perched centerstage. There were posters up for upcoming events and shows, one for a performance of Macbeth that had unfortunately passed already. I threw several euros into the bake sale donation cup for a slice of vegan marble cake; the chocolaty part was better than the vegan part, to my semi-carnivorous palate, but the vibe was compensation enough for no eggs.
The people who live here have decided to name this community the “Gesamtkunstwerk” meaning a total artwork that involves many different artistic disciplines. The term was popularized by Wagner in his essay, “Art and Revolution,” and there’s clearly plenty of both here. Walking through Lohmühle, every home is a vibrant expression of Art, and of the part of daily living that is Art – both contributing to what has become a social public space. The Lohmühle folks are technically squatting on public land but have created a place where anyone is welcome to wander through and visit, enjoy the open-air café, music, and the regular outdoor movies in the summer, among other events. Proceeds from the events go to funding of the Lohmühle community and to charitable groups beyond the community. Also, when building the 
café, gallery, and stage areas of the grounds, the residents invited the rest of their neighborhood to join in, again making it a project that extends beyond the community wagon-dwellers themselves. Here, the total work of art has become a total work of connection between these brave artisans and their neighbors. The result of this ultimately functions as an alternative culture center that people from anywhere in Berlin – and even people from as far away as America – can enjoy.
I circled the grounds several times, mostly wishing I could speak more German so that I would feel less shy about jumping into one of the clusters of tea and conversation that seemed to blossom in rings of chairs outside the wagons. Some were talking government in earnest, but I felt like an interruption from a foreign-speaking stranger might disperse the bubble of their intensity, not that I wasn’t interested in what the people with pink and aqua anarchy symbols spray-painted on the side of their wagons would have to say.
I did get to speak to one of the residents who was tending bar at the café. He’s lived in the Wagendorf for 6 years, but is soon to move out to travel the world. Outside of the Gesamtkunstwerk, he works in physical therapy, I think, and from the sound of it, world travel is the only reason for him to want to give up his life with the wagons.
With the huge emphasis and basic need for community here (the winters are clearly not to be braved alone), those in residence seem to place a high value on creating a lifestyle outside of the anonymity of living box-to-box in urban apartments. Face-time appears to be the preferred mode of operations.
Environmental awareness also presents itself – not just in the way that the Wagendorf folks have blended their community into the environment, but in the group’s ideals concerning conservation of resources – ideals that are visibly practiced and not just spoken about. All of the wagons make heavy use of solar panels, and their residents are clearly conservative of water since there is no running water here.
I told the boy at the café that we don’t have anything like this in New York, though the Sanctuary in Brooklyn, which has come to be a sanctuary to me at times, shares some of the same ideals. For certain, there are others in the New York area who are working in this direction, though in New York it’s hard to 
even imagine doing what they’ve done at Lohmühle. The idea of creating a squatting community that is essentially illegal but has been accepted for long enough that it may become legal seems an impossibility in the Five Boroughs, or any other American city I can think of. And that’s what has been going on successfully at Lohmühle for nearly twenty years now.
Here is a link to the Lohmühle website, though you may want to use Google translate to get a better idea of it in English:
http://www.lohmuehle-berlin.de/LM_home.htm
Another site that has a couple of great pictures of what the Wagendorf looked like when it was the dividing line between East and West Berlin is this one (in English):
http://www.a-r-d.org/HamburgerB/Lohmuhle.htm
