Monday, 2 August 2004
Le Squat
Many weeks back, an artists' squat took root in a building down the street from our office. Nothing really remarkable about its arrival, to the extent that I never really gave writing about it more than brief consideration before forgetting about it again. Then, a little over two weeks ago, brawny security guards and metal-wielding (and welding) workers converged on the place like flies.
Squats are an interesting part of life in France, especially Paris. With real estate so overpriced, it's hardly surprising that there are unoccupied spaces - sometimes, whole buildings. Their owners rarely seem to be in much of a rush to do anything about it. And why should they be, considering that many of the owners are insurance companies. These are, after all, people who've built their business on waiting for you to keel over and die.
Of course, in the meantime, people need a place to live. So those who can't afford to rent one of the high-priced spaces will sometimes swoop in and occupy one of the vacant properties. Often, this seems to be done by artists collectives, mixing their own brand of political and social protest for a pragmatic answer to the question of, "where should we create our art?"
Once in place for 48 hours (or thereabouts, I don't know exactly), squatters cannot be legally evicted until the property owner has gone through a relatively lengthy legal process. In wintertime, no eviction is possible at all. This is a side-effect of laws passed to protect renters.
Like any law, tis one can be abused. For example, someone who stops paying rent stands a good chance of being able to stay put without a legal eviction. Smaller owners (for example, one person renting out the one property he owns) typically won't go through the hoops required. That doesn't mean that there will be no eviction: Large, muscle-bound men sent a-knocking on "your" door are a high probability if you sufficiently annoy your landlord.
Large, muscle-bound men (daytime incarnations of bouncers, from the looks of it) are also handy to enforce legal evictions, such as the one I witnessed the other week (or at least, saw the end of). I'd be hard-pressed to decide where I stand on artist-squatters. On the one hand, they provide a certain amount of lively chaos to a sometimes gray and over-planned city. After all, what good had that empty building done these last three years?
On the other hand, "art" is in the eye of the beholder, and the urban guerrilla ethic that drove these artists to occupy the building also seemed to have a hand in their creations. Give me graffiti any day over pretentious found-object art, please. Spilling out onto the sidewalk like a yard sale, this group's work was more a curiosity than interesting.
So, after hours of cutting and grinding and welding, a metal barricade covered the two-story entrance to the building. All the other weak points, like the window above a neighboring awning, were also secured. The workers, as well as the temporary wall of muscle, moved on.
Within hours, "everyone is innocent" was spray-painted - in English - on the front of the metal-gated entrance. Indeed, everyone must be. Hmm. But was it just "everyone" who had been there, or "everyone" in general? In their a so-very-artistic way, only "no one" was left to explain.
And yet, someone (surely an innocent?) was camped out behind the metal grate less than a week later. I stole a glance, unsuccessfully, through the pattern of holes in the metal. Though I couldn't see far enough into the dark, I did hear a very clear, "leave me alone!" shouted out.
Some trick: a commandeered space, visible from a public area, becomes the de facto private space of its illegal occupant. Sounds like someone needed to pay more attention when studying "negative space"...