Last Tuesday I found myself into a squat in Camberwell watching an ArtEvict event. I knew nothing in advance; I came across ArtEvict website and I had this gut feeling that something interesting is going on there. I emailed them and they sent me the address of the event at my mobile. I arrived outside a concrete building which didn’t write anything at the door, neither had a bell. I text Kiki, the girl who organises the events, and she opened me. She dragged me into a labyrinthine building full of vintage old furnitures, crafts and placards. People were hanging around, eating at the stairs, drinking in a converted bar-living room, chatting, smoking, sleeping, doing their stuff or doing nothing. I walked through the rooms and everybody was friendly and relaxed, greeting and smiling at me. It was nice.
I went into the room where ArtEvict was taking place. Two performers were sitting in a suitcase hitting rhythmically their chests with their fists crossed straight to their hearts. After a while their chest was bleeding. I noticed that they had pins on their palms. After the piece was over I met Ben, one of the performers and Kiki’s partner, and I asked him to show me his hands (aouts).
Ben Sebastien (The Greestone Group)
The second piece was by Fabiola Paz (The Greestone Group) and Annalaura (Leibniz). They stood one opposite the other and they ‘tortured’ a gum, stretching it as far as it can go… (Actually there wasn’t only one but four gums)
An awkward duo entered the room. They could be engineers, scientists, crazy, technicians, married, whatever. They made noise and light. Then drunk some wine and left. Pourquoi pas?
The whole night the place were busy. Artists were doing their thing. There was no proper stage or seats, neither a program or ‘concept-project-theme’, there wasn’t any need. Everything went on naturally, in a totally self-managing and genuine way. The need of expression and the feeling of the space was enough to create what we call ‘community’. The audience consisted of both young and old people -artists, squatters, visitors, friends and or just curious.
As Ben explains in an article he wrote: “This is what ArtEvict is all about; support, yet more specifically supporting body. All too often within art industries and institutions there is still a marginalising or exclusion of live and body work, with the exception of a certain few, key figures. New generations and scenes of artists, our generation, this scene, do not get a look in. So we don’t bother anymore. We make our own and we support each other and share and talk about what it is where doing, that is why the alternative communities of squats have been some instrumental in ArtEvict.” (Benjamin Sebastian)
