Squatters are… the architects of utopia
At dawn of October 31 2022 the building of Ntougrou Squat was surrounded by cops of all
units and afterwards color. Riot police, Special Police Teams for Crime Prevention and
Suppression , motorcycle and undercover cops and even firefighters(when all the above units
failed to breach the door and enter the building) being escorted by a district attorney and
journalists, all these people where ‘recruited’ to manifest the evacuation of Ntougrou Squat,
which counted collective ‘steps’ of insubordination for seven years in the city of Larissa. At
about 06:45 we heard kicks and aggressive interjections, threats and curses towards the
squatters from the undercover cops, while the phrase “evacuation order” was the one that
kickstarted the collective procedure of answering the burden of violence that follows this
warrant.
The people that were inside the building defended the squat with all the means that we had
chosen, refusing to surrender the building while at the same time people where gathering
outside in solidarity and they started chanting slogans, each of them showing that social
solidarity is not just what is left from the destructive attack of neoliberal capitalism and
systemic violence, but it is whatever prepares and brings to fruition the ‘vision’ of another
world where no one will be alone, a world where actions and ideas resist the enforced end of
utopia, extending in this way the sphere of what is possible.
We judge it’s important at this point to reverse the media’s point of view that tries to justify
the actions of the cops, establishing that during the evacuation they threw choking/tear gas
inside the building, bullied and hit comrades and also used gendered threats to try and bend
our resistance and actions.
The operation lasted about 2 and a half hours, with our collective negations being impressed
until the last moment upon the heads of those that always fantasize about a city ‘clean’ from
any ‘hotplate’ that doubts the vulgar city planning and the routine that is structured within it,
in terms of exclusion and violence towards the outcasts and pariahs within their normality.
The people and the animals that were inside the building, gathered at the rooftop from where
the arrests of the 8 comrades were made and they were driven to the police station.
“Are there indeed tools that have not been invented, which we must invent in order to build the
house we want our children to live in? Can we go on from what we know now, or does what we
know now keep us from learning what we need to know? To learn what people of color, the
women, the poor, have to teach, to learn the knowledge we need, must we unlearn all the
knowledge of the whites, the men, the powerful? The most powerful such tool is the
imagination — the ability and willingness to imagine alternatives to reality as we know it,
which is always the first step toward making different and better realities possible.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Who are we that met 1, 10 a thousand times inside the space of Ntougrou Squat and defended
it with all the means and ways we had chosen, both inside and outside the building?
Within the space of the squat we met and coexisted being poor, jobless, workers, “lost kids of
precarious work”, students, queers, trans folk, feminists, total army objectors and non human
animals from various ‘tendencies’ of the anarchist and antiauthoritarian community, forming a
‘multitendency’ collective body. In these 7 years that the squat has existed we have created
within it, communities that housed our needs and desires in multiple ways, creating structures,
sharpening its antiauthoritarian cause, searching for means to ‘extend what is possible ‘. On
the level of the city we have built ‘fields’ of antifascist, anti-nationalist, working class and
antipatriarchal resistance, contributing to the creation and dispersion of a competitive to what
exists cause. We have stood side to side and in solidarity with assertions that concern the
‘downtrodden’ in general.
The starting agenda of the squat and the action of the people that ‘hugged’ it, giving life to the
-for years abandoned – building of Tzavela 52, was concerning the denial of reconciliation with
the narrative about the “legitimacy” of property as a determining factor of the possibilities
and impossibilities of usage of buildings and the violent reality of class, in which needs such as
housing and access to goods such as power and water, are commercialized. The “appointment
at empty houses” that was written on the first poster of the squat has constituted the first
rupture with the certainties that structured this city, “closing the eye” towards all the new
possibilities of life, action and relationships that have come and keep coming from within
(and) the squats. The proposition of refusing to pay for vital needs and its opening within
public discourse has brought, in later time, experimentation and the creation of housing
structures and communal symbiosis within its spaces.
Living inside the building, refusing to pay for housing, power and water, building relationships
of mutual aid and comradeship, beyond what is dictated by family relations, that exceed and
tear apart the model of relation being the only basis for supporting and caring for each other,
we have provided for the collective and for the act of existing in this world as always-morethan
one person. The community of mutual aid that breathed experimentally within the
housing structure of the squat, and beyond that, in our assemblies, was a source of survival for
us that we were willing to defend despite all costs.
Our erratic deeds, our wild thoughts, our risky dreams, our endless protests, the exhausting
assemblies, the spontaneous “strikes” within our normative roles, the insubordination and our
brave negations, within the cities of individualism and fencings, redistributed the balance
between need and desire, and have searched for a way of escaping the debt and duty towards
the homeland, family and state, looking to create a path towards somewhere else.
The constant and open creation of new conditions of existing and meeting, but also the
improvisation for the improvement of life and creation of radical collective points of resistance
within the map of the city that consumes and is consumed at the altar of profit and national
purity, was and is a practice that is formed within the spaces of struggle and antiauthority, to
whom has and will always belong the building of Tzavela 52.
So for us, on the morning of October 31st, repression didn’t only come for the 8 people that
were woken up abruptly by the aspiring gravediggers of the history and action of people from
“bellow” and their multiform movements…since for them our real crime was not contained
within the “wooden” law jargon of the case file.
Our real crime was the expansion of the sphere of what is possible in antiauthoritarian terms.
Our own status as participants in horizontal, anti-hierarchical structures, our experimentations,
the relationships -we create and put forward- in themselves, are that which makes us”
criminals”.
It was not important to them what we did during the evacuation, but the prophetic power of
cops and court personnel to predict the future crime of spreading our means, the fear of
illuminated loft apartments, the soundscape of laughter, music and conspiracies of those that
nibble the foundations of Their morality, the open front door.
In closing, for us, squatters, reclaiming the term, are architects of utopia, since they build
networks that pass through and question the rationalized logistic/logic of neoliberal
expendability and the leftist logic of “the trodden path”, in unpredictable ways. If then we
must talk apologetically about “victories” and “loses” of the movement, we will answer
unorthologically and beyond these dilemmas, answering that “we have danced on the edge of
the world” and that our squatting rhythm keeps growing and echoing at the timespace of cities
and fencings.
SOLIDARITY WITH SQUATS AND SPACES
THAT ARE THREATENED BY STATE, PATRIARCHY AND CAPITAL.
NTOUGROU SQUAT IS HERE TO STAY,
THE FIRE THAT WE STARTED CANNOT BE PUT OUT.
At dawn of October 31 2022 the building of Ntougrou Squat was surrounded by cops of all
units and afterwards color. Riot police, Special Police Teams for Crime Prevention and
Suppression , motorcycle and undercover cops and even firefighters(when all the above units
failed to breach the door and enter the building) being escorted by a district attorney and
journalists, all these people where ‘recruited’ to manifest the evacuation of Ntougrou Squat,
which counted collective ‘steps’ of insubordination for seven years in the city of Larissa. At
about 06:45 we heard kicks and aggressive interjections, threats and curses towards the
squatters from the undercover cops, while the phrase “evacuation order” was the one that
kickstarted the collective procedure of answering the burden of violence that follows this
warrant.
The people that were inside the building defended the squat with all the means that we had
chosen, refusing to surrender the building while at the same time people where gathering
outside in solidarity and they started chanting slogans, each of them showing that social
solidarity is not just what is left from the destructive attack of neoliberal capitalism and
systemic violence, but it is whatever prepares and brings to fruition the ‘vision’ of another
world where no one will be alone, a world where actions and ideas resist the enforced end of
utopia, extending in this way the sphere of what is possible.
We judge it’s important at this point to reverse the media’s point of view that tries to justify
the actions of the cops, establishing that during the evacuation they threw choking/tear gas
inside the building, bullied and hit comrades and also used gendered threats to try and bend
our resistance and actions.
The operation lasted about 2 and a half hours, with our collective negations being impressed
until the last moment upon the heads of those that always fantasize about a city ‘clean’ from
any ‘hotplate’ that doubts the vulgar city planning and the routine that is structured within it,
in terms of exclusion and violence towards the outcasts and pariahs within their normality.
The people and the animals that were inside the building, gathered at the rooftop from where
the arrests of the 8 comrades were made and they were driven to the police station.
“Are there indeed tools that have not been invented, which we must invent in order to build the
house we want our children to live in? Can we go on from what we know now, or does what we
know now keep us from learning what we need to know? To learn what people of color, the
women, the poor, have to teach, to learn the knowledge we need, must we unlearn all the
knowledge of the whites, the men, the powerful? The most powerful such tool is the
imagination — the ability and willingness to imagine alternatives to reality as we know it,
which is always the first step toward making different and better realities possible.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Who are we that met 1, 10 a thousand times inside the space of Ntougrou Squat and defended
it with all the means and ways we had chosen, both inside and outside the building?
Within the space of the squat we met and coexisted being poor, jobless, workers, “lost kids of
precarious work”, students, queers, trans folk, feminists, total army objectors and non human
animals from various ‘tendencies’ of the anarchist and antiauthoritarian community, forming a
‘multitendency’ collective body. In these 7 years that the squat has existed we have created
within it, communities that housed our needs and desires in multiple ways, creating structures,
sharpening its antiauthoritarian cause, searching for means to ‘extend what is possible ‘. On
the level of the city we have built ‘fields’ of antifascist, anti-nationalist, working class and
antipatriarchal resistance, contributing to the creation and dispersion of a competitive to what
exists cause. We have stood side to side and in solidarity with assertions that concern the
‘downtrodden’ in general.
The starting agenda of the squat and the action of the people that ‘hugged’ it, giving life to the
-for years abandoned – building of Tzavela 52, was concerning the denial of reconciliation with
the narrative about the “legitimacy” of property as a determining factor of the possibilities
and impossibilities of usage of buildings and the violent reality of class, in which needs such as
housing and access to goods such as power and water, are commercialized. The “appointment
at empty houses” that was written on the first poster of the squat has constituted the first
rupture with the certainties that structured this city, “closing the eye” towards all the new
possibilities of life, action and relationships that have come and keep coming from within
(and) the squats. The proposition of refusing to pay for vital needs and its opening within
public discourse has brought, in later time, experimentation and the creation of housing
structures and communal symbiosis within its spaces.
Living inside the building, refusing to pay for housing, power and water, building relationships
of mutual aid and comradeship, beyond what is dictated by family relations, that exceed and
tear apart the model of relation being the only basis for supporting and caring for each other,
we have provided for the collective and for the act of existing in this world as always-morethan
one person. The community of mutual aid that breathed experimentally within the
housing structure of the squat, and beyond that, in our assemblies, was a source of survival for
us that we were willing to defend despite all costs.
Our erratic deeds, our wild thoughts, our risky dreams, our endless protests, the exhausting
assemblies, the spontaneous “strikes” within our normative roles, the insubordination and our
brave negations, within the cities of individualism and fencings, redistributed the balance
between need and desire, and have searched for a way of escaping the debt and duty towards
the homeland, family and state, looking to create a path towards somewhere else.
The constant and open creation of new conditions of existing and meeting, but also the
improvisation for the improvement of life and creation of radical collective points of resistance
within the map of the city that consumes and is consumed at the altar of profit and national
purity, was and is a practice that is formed within the spaces of struggle and antiauthority, to
whom has and will always belong the building of Tzavela 52.
So for us, on the morning of October 31st, repression didn’t only come for the 8 people that
were woken up abruptly by the aspiring gravediggers of the history and action of people from
“bellow” and their multiform movements…since for them our real crime was not contained
within the “wooden” law jargon of the case file.
Our real crime was the expansion of the sphere of what is possible in antiauthoritarian terms.
Our own status as participants in horizontal, anti-hierarchical structures, our experimentations,
the relationships -we create and put forward- in themselves, are that which makes us”
criminals”.
It was not important to them what we did during the evacuation, but the prophetic power of
cops and court personnel to predict the future crime of spreading our means, the fear of
illuminated loft apartments, the soundscape of laughter, music and conspiracies of those that
nibble the foundations of Their morality, the open front door.
In closing, for us, squatters, reclaiming the term, are architects of utopia, since they build
networks that pass through and question the rationalized logistic/logic of neoliberal
expendability and the leftist logic of “the trodden path”, in unpredictable ways. If then we
must talk apologetically about “victories” and “loses” of the movement, we will answer
unorthologically and beyond these dilemmas, answering that “we have danced on the edge of
the world” and that our squatting rhythm keeps growing and echoing at the timespace of cities
and fencings.
SOLIDARITY WITH SQUATS AND SPACES
THAT ARE THREATENED BY STATE, PATRIARCHY AND CAPITAL.
NTOUGROU SQUAT IS HERE TO STAY,
THE FIRE THAT WE STARTED CANNOT BE PUT OUT.