Origins – Part 2

After all the clearing, cleaning, fixing and building we had a studio at the Cozy. I had had an amazing time with the crew, I felt welcomed and I enjoyed the groups dynamic of a dysfunctional family of organised chaos. The people, the stories and everything in that place hooked me completely. Some of them I knew from before, seen them in demonstrations or at the first Mancunian squat I visited at the Corner House, some I even knew from uni, but most of them were complete strangers to me when I started working there. On top of that, the environment suited my art practice perfectly: work with site specific installations and found objects would both be abundant if our collaboration with the crew were to continue.

On the other hand, the thoughts about what we wanted for modestly ambitious didn’t quite work in this space. The squat seemed like too precarious a frame to invite artists from very far especially if we couldn’t pay for their travel expenses. Also, having a lot of big heavy machinery for the workshops would not work in the squat if we had to move all the time. Personally, the thought of an eviction wasn’t fully real to me, since the crew had had conversations with the owner of the building and apparently he had religious reasons why he did not want to evict us. I gathered that is a fairly safe position to be in. Alas, I was wrong.

We had just finished our space and I had managed to get some bits and bobs together for my own sculptures, but didn’t have anything quite finished. I had a studio visit approaching fast. I was going to be part of an exhibition coming up in Castlefield Gallery in July and my first studio visit with the curators Ian Rawlinson and Michael Penderguss were going to be on the nineteenth of April. On the 18th, I got a call at 7 am that we were being evicted and I should run to the squat to get my gear out of the building. I am the worst morning person but that got me up quick.

 

Sophia and I went to the Cozy straight away. By the time we got there, the eviction was well on its way. The first words I heard were that we had less than an hour to vacate the premises and that they got in through our basement door. I felt utterly stupefied: all that hard work we put into fixing up the place, all the work that the crew had done to make that place their home and a place to facilitate art, music and all the other activities they hosted there. All of it was gone. Not only that, I felt horrified and guilty because our door had been the one they got threw, whereas the front door barricades withstood an axe. We had fiddled with that door just a few days before, didn’t open it but we were looking at how to get it open and build a new barricade behind it so we could open and close it safely whenever we needed to. Apparently, that door had never been able to be opened by anyone so we were investigating on how to do it. I was struck with guilt by the thought that we might have done something to give them easier access knowing very well how paramount secure barricades were at the squat. This was the first eviction I was part of and I was utterly shocked and on top of that, I was panicking because I was supposed to have a studio visit there to show my work the very next day! The crew though, were not. They told me how it wasn’t my fault, that the bailiffs would’ve got in any way. Despite just losing their home, they were consoling me and promising they’d find another building by the evening and I had nothing to worry about for my studio visit. Jamil gave me a beautiful speech about how these things happen, telling me stories about earlier evictions and how they always found their feet. Buildings come and go, but because the people stay, whatever we are doing will be taken over to the next building and the one after that. So I put my faith in the crew.

In the end, we got more than an hour to carry out our things, as long as we needed actually. The security guards and the bailiffs helped us carry out some of the gear as well. It seemed to me that they were genuinely saddened to throw us out. By 5pm, the crew had found a new place they had been scouting for a while, a beautiful old naan bread bakery less than 100m from our original building, which was convenient since the amount of gear we had was astounding: lights, instruments, amps, kitchens, bedrooms, tools, materials, tents, decorations and everyone’s personal belongings. A solidarity call was sent to other squatters in Manchester and throughout the day we had loads of people coming in to help us carry things and occupy the new building.
Taking over the new building went very smoothly. There was some excitement when we realised that the building was owned by the same person who owned Cozy and he was outraged at us. He came over personally, took photos and video of us and tried to evict us straight away with the court order for Cozy’s address. The crew calmly explained to him that we have a legal right to stay on these premises and that his court order does not apply to this address. He insisted on calling the police but when they showed up, they only confirmed that we were right and wished us a good day. Later in the day when the police got off their shift, they swung by to see that we were ok and the security guards brought us pizza, profusely apologizing for having to through us out. Even today they sometimes bring us fruits and all kinds of food. I was surprised by the solidarity and wondered at this weird balance of squatters and authorities charged by evicting us and keeping us in line, but who actually are not very keen to see it through. I heard stories of evictions going down in very different ways, sometimes they get out of hand and had violent altercations. I wonder how big of a difference it made to the attitudes of the authorities that most of us talked to them like people to people and that it was an event squat where very clearly people had made a great effort to build something for themselves.

 

Once the building was secured, we got to work again. Bringing everything in and looking around. Half of the crew stayed up and helped me to clear the other side of the building that they had thought to become the studio and event space. After the space was cleared I started making new work. I slept two hours that night, but by the time of my studio visit the next day, the space was a studio and I was quite happy with the work I had done. It was an exhausting 24 hours, but it was so amazing! I was struck by the attitudes and spirits of the squatters to carry on, the solidarity and the way everyone came together to make it all work. After that day, I was even more convinced that I had ended up in a place with people I really wanted to stay with. Don’t get me wrong, there are loads of people with difficult pasts, mental health and substance abuse problems so the social setting is not always functional or harmonies, but people are so acutely themselves that I just appreciate any challenges to be a necessary part of the whole of it. Mostly though, I have met interesting, talented, smart and beautiful people. Some of them have come to the squats as a political act, some have come because there is nowhere else to go. I’m not going to make any effort to simplify or summaries it all since there seem to be as many reasons for people to squat as there are squatters.

After all this, many evictions followed that week. Other squats all over Manchester were evicted barely days apart and many of them ended up temporarily into our new building since we had loads of space. The piles and piles of peoples things took over the studio, people slept anywhere and everywhere and naturally everything to do with the studio stood still because peoples housing and comfort always comes first. Amongst all this though, Bald Paul threw in a comment of how I should call the studio Tape Modern since that’s the first aid fix to anything, loads and loads of gaffa tape. It gave me a good laugh, but the more I thought about it, the better it was and the name stuck. Tape Modern was born even though it took a few weeks before I actually got to any work.