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[ ITALY’S CULTURAL UNDERGROUND ]
Adam Bregman
Some are draped with
spectacular works of art, while others provide shelter and services for new
immigrants. For many young people, especially in small and medium-sized
towns, social centres provide an ideal hangout, which is the only alternative
to expensive, sleazy discos. The movement began in
1975 when some radical communists snuck into a dilapidated building in a poor
neighbourhood of Milan, cleaned the place up and issued a manifesto stating
what they hoped to accomplish. The neighbourhood lacked a preschool,
kindergarten, library, vocational school, medical clinic and spaces for
organizing meetings and concerts. They invited city officials and the local
population to their social centre, called Leoncavallo, where they eventually
opened a carpentry workshop, a sewing school, a theatre and other facilities.
Leoncavallo, Italy’s first and most famous social centre, has been shut down
and forced to move locations several times. Today it is a giant structure
covered with magnificent graffiti, containing a concert room, a disco, a
skateboard ramp, a documentation centre to help immigrants and several bars.
The folks who run it are into hip-hop (which is still yet to hit it big in
Italy) and Public Enemy chose to play there recently rather than a
traditional concert venue. During the ’80s, the
social centre movement was spurred by punk rock and in the ’90s the rave
scene was a prominent influence. Currently, Italy has approximately 150
social centres, but there is a basic philosophy that governs almost all of
them. “Social centres are
supposed to be open to any form of expression,” says Andrea Borgioli, a
university student with dyed black hair and shaved eyebrows who digs Marilyn
Manson and Korn and can’t find anyone who will rent him an apartment in
Bologna because of how he looks. “Like if I wanted to do an exhibition
somewhere else, I would need lots of money, but I could go to a social centre
and they would let me do it for free and anyone can go there and do whatever
kind of art they want.” Unlike anything
else in Italy, social centres are also supposed to be open all the time to
provide a refuge for anyone who needs a place to sleep or just somewhere to
go, though often they are closed for security reasons or because no one is
around. Distinct from practically any other place one would go to have fun,
social centres are non-profit, anti-capitalist entities. The social centre
movement was mostly given form by communists. (Communists in Italy range from
your typical jargon-spouting Marxist-Leninists to what most of the world
would more accurately call socialists, and from a major political party that
still uses the hammer and sickle as its symbol—but more closely resembles the
United States’ Democratic Party—to young, radical communists who occupy
buildings and create social centres.) Their anti-capitalist tradition means
that most social centres use any profits from events to pay their minimal
expenses or to help their comrades who have been arrested. At most social
centres, entry to a concert or rave is $3, beer or drinks, maybe $1 and food,
probably free. But more recently, a number of social centres, like Link in
Bologna, have strayed from these basic ideals. “Link is not an
occupied place,” says Lorenzo Costa, a literature student who lives in the
hilly countryside just outside of Siena. “They managed to have Link given to
them by the mayor. Artistically, it’s quite interesting. In all Europe it is
known and as far as music and video, it’s done very well. But even though
they try to remain in contact with the movement, everyone knows it is not a
social centre.” The often ill-spoken-of Link charges a whopping $8 for
concerts and raves. Social centres are
free autonomous zones where the government and police have no jurisdiction
and where folks should feel free to indulge in whatever they like, a stark
contrast to the hundreds of ridiculous laws that apply to any sort of
entertainment-related business in America. “Inside you can use
drugs, but not sell them,” says Borgioli, “which is not because of problems
with the police or for the safety of the social centre, but for social,
idealistic reasons, because they don’t want someone to get rich selling drugs
to everyone and exploiting people. At the same time, they want people to be
free to do what they want.” This freedom means that at many of the smaller
social centres, almost any band can set up its own gigs. Also, travellers can
usually find a free place to crash. Though sometimes
tolerated, social centres are, of course, illegal in Italy and so they are often
scattered on the edges of town. In my travels, I spent numerous hours
unsuccessfully trying to locate social centres by foot and by car. One
evening in Florence, I spent many hours circling around Parco delle Cascine,
a huge, scary park populated mostly by Brazilian transvestite hookers. I was
searching for L’Indiano, a social centre that is the hub of the local
techno/house music scene, but was not able to find it. In Genoa, I walked
across half the length of the city, through dark, narrow, snakelike streets
which live up to their seedy reputation, only to find that my destination,
the social centre Zapata, was on top of a mountain and unreachable. On a
particularly bad night in Turin, I walked miles to Prinz Eugen (a social
centre known for publishing some excellent books), where they turned off the
light and pretended they weren’t there when I knocked. So I decided to walk
to the other side of town to Asilo Occupato, where I was greeted by a mustachioed
French guy in a turtleneck and two dopey-looking Mohawked guys (one
immediately antagonistic), who told me they didn’t, as a policy, speak with
journalists. I tried to explain that I was down with their cause, whatever
that might be. But the mustachioed fellow told me I could try and come back
the next day and there might be someone who lived there who would talk to me,
but probably not, and that in general, Turin’s squatters would not speak with
journalists. This proved not to be
true. In fact, these were the only unfriendly social centre folks I met. The
next day I hopped on a tram which dropped me off way in the south of the city
at the doorstep of Turin’s renowned anarchist social centre, El Paso, which
is housed in an 18th century villa and has been around for 12 years. A little
nervous about knocking on the door, I hung out by the back door next to a
20-foot-tall metal monster made from mufflers and scooter parts. Soon, a girl
emerged from the door and invited me inside and a fellow who spoke a little
English and had lived there for 12 years gave me a tour. The interior was
magnificent. There was a handmade metal fireplace, a concert hall where a
bunch of big-name touring acts had played (including their friends Mano
Negra, who had drawn a crowd of thousands), a loft with a pool table and an
infoshop packed with anarchist propaganda, records, videos and porn
magazines. Outside, there was a garden with a homemade swing and a front yard
piled with salvaged metal, old signs and 50 giant wooden doors. But what
really blew me away was the bathroom next to the bar, which was a folk art
masterpiece. It had gorgeous iron lamps made from pipes, a stone sink, and a
homemade piss trough and it was completely decorated in colourful, intricate,
Gaudi-like tiling. I also visited a
couple of small-town social centres. While Milan has approximately 19 active
social centres and Rome about 27, you can also find social centres across the
whole of Italy in towns such as Verona, Bergamo, Arezzo, Alessandria, Ravenna
and Asti. I found one that was recently occupied in Lucca, an attractive
Tuscan town situated behind towering medieval walls. Just outside of the
walls, is Ex-Safill, which is currently housed in an old aluminium factory
and is run by a group of young radicals who have been kicked out of three
other locations in several months. Their main activities include conferences
on a lot of the usual social centre topics (Chiapas, Kurdistan, the
Palestinians, the WTO protests in Seattle and of course, Mumia Abu-Jamal) and
large-scale dub, breakbeat, funk and house concerts, which have drawn up to
500 people. Lorenzo Costa spent
most of his college years deeply involved with the social centre movement in
Bologna. Somewhat of an expert on the subject, Costa explained to me how
difficult it is for many social centres to survive. Page 1 2 |
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