“Too Much Death” ABC No Rio 45 Years Post #4

This is the fourth post on the process of preparing the “ABC No Rio 45 Years” exposition, planned for the Emily Harvey Foundation in April of ‘25. Problems have arisen. They are technical, organizational, and, finally, emotional. Two important people have died: Steven Englander, director of ABC for 26 years, and Walter Robinson, an original member of the Committee for the Real Estate Show, and the Colab group. Creative production often hinges on key individuals. In a sense, our metaphysical building has been hit by two powerful blasts….
“Too much death,” he says. And so there is. Too much of endings, of collapsing supports, of anguish and crying. Open lament, in the world, and deep sorrows hidden away in our bedrooms. Our pillows are soaked with tears. In faraway hospitals they mop up blood, and spread disinfectant on piles of bodies which are made too fast to be buried. Feelings of bereavement are generalized.

As well as the most violent public massacre we have seen in the West in many a lifetime, there is all over the world now the smell of impendinig disaster. Will it be war or revolution? The most powerful government in the world is being devoured by fat happy worms, nihilists in charge. And the very structures that exist to sustain it are at this moment powerless to protect it.

Mr. Fish at clowncrack.com

The nightmare is like the customers held hostage in a diner by a maniac with a grenade. “You try something, I pull the pin and we all die.”

“Resist to exist”

The strategies of resistance which marginalized people have used in democracies for all my lifetime don’t work if the democracies themselves are failing. When the people are gone from the streets and only wolves remain, carnivals are not possible.

You can caper and rant and sing as much as you like, but they don’t want to watch. They don’t want only a bone. They want to rip your flesh, cause you pain, and watch you die in prison or, why not?, right here in front of your house.

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That’s what we’re feeling like. “We” meaning me. Speaking to you. As if you could do anything about it. As if you could come back inside the house, lock the door, close the windows, and make breakfast.

Still from "The Fifth Seal" ("Az ötödik pecsét" dir. Zoltán Fábri), a 1976 Hungarian film set during the Nazi regime. In Budapest in 1944, a watchmaker, a book seller and a carpenter are drinking in a bar with the owner, when they are joined by a stranger.

More Sleepless Nights

What you, me, we, can do is “art” about it. It’s what we’ve been up to all these many years, 45 in all, since the founding of ABC No Rio. There has never been, will never be a better moment to do that than now.
In what feels like the twilight of liberal democracy in the USA, in a city where the light shone most brightly, down the corridors of the long streets of Midtown, as the sun’s final fading bit of warmth falls upon us… We shall face the past, and shape it like an arrow to go forward.
Easy to say. But when the #ABCNoRio45Years project of representing and reconstructing creative positivity is riven with abstentions and conflicts, when begging folks from afar isn’t working, and things for too many people only seem to get worse –

”You've got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mr. In-Between
You've got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith, or pandemonium
Liable to walk upon the scene”
-- lyrics by Johnny Mercer, 1945, when the USA was killing fascists, not electing them

Exiting the Quandary

For the #ABCNoRio45Years project, it’s a more direct question. How can we… face up to the past and make it medicine for the future?

Fly Orr, "Future Farmacuticals Box Set" (2018)

What seemed to bother many ABC people within ABC today was the totality of the concept – the timeline, all the years crowding together in one room, putting one event against another unrelated, each artwork in competition with the another on the wall nearby. So, well, it’s 45 years, how else you gonna do it?
The key to that problem (IMHO) is to be aware of the arbitrary nature of event time as it is expressed in western institutions, and how that works against subaltern culture.
It’s hard for me to forget the timeline of Rammellzee’s career at a 2018 exhibition with its year-long holes, which in the context became aporias. Was he drugged out during those years?, or what? No, Ramm was just out of the running in the market during the years when “graffiti art” was no longer fashionable and the market for it tanked. The art institution recapitulates the art market, just as (Whig) history recapitulates (mainstream) journalism.

Decolonize Me, Before I Kill Again

At this point in our thinking, we sure could use a little dose of Decolonize Colonic – which I take from this rich text by a young artist and scholar, Youssoupha Féhé Sarr. He contrasts the immobilization and freezing imperatives of western institutional archives, museums and schools as against a conception of time within orality which “is inscribed in its movement… and thereby fulfils its circularity and inclusiveness.”

Meeting in Dakar. photo by Anna Karima Wane

It’s death we fear, and death we try to deal with by remembering, monumentalizing, archiving, institutionalizing. In the west. In the “former west”. And death has been happening to our crew since we have set out on this travel.
We and all our works are seeds, and we will pass, but we will also be coming back and in many forms.
This archival display project, this #ABC45Years is as it must be, a way forward. A way, in Sarr’s words, to be “cunning” with our “archival apparatuses”, to endow them with “a flexibility and fluidity that allows one to remain in motion. One does not fight against oblivion…. But above all, it is accepted; for it is indeed oblivion itself that makes it possible to have, individually and collectively, sufficient space to welcome irreversible renewal.”

Adelante juntos, semillas inolvidables.

LINKS

"too much death

Colin Moynihan, "Steven Englander, Leader of an Outsider Art Outpost, Dies at 63", Dec. 23, 2024
As director of the fiercely independent cultural center ABC No Rio, he led the battle to halt its eviction and later raised money to build a new home for the organization.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/23/nyregion/steven-englander-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qk4.wzmd.0AkDXK9ARUZq&smid=url-share

Deborah Solomon, "Walter Robinson, Exuberant Art-World Participant and Observer, Dies at 74", Feb. 14, 2025
A painter who took his subjects from pop culture, he was also the founding editor of Artnet.com and chronicled the rise of the SoHo art scene in the 1970s. [And a member of Colab, who showed and played often at ABC No Rio.]
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/arts/walter-robinson-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xU4.ooMC.qMu9TAc97Ds0&smid=url-share

Resist to Exist 2023! Germany Biggest DIY Festival in Punk, Ska, Hardcore, Rap

“Positivity”

Catholics "not like Vance” – next to go, at 88 y.o., a text on Pope Francis
“Building Universal Fraternity: A Utopian Chimera”
https://fsspx.news/en/news/building-universal-fraternity-utopian-chimera-47996

“Positivity 2” – Technical, Oh-So-Learned Career Positivity
(You can still do this in the EU, at least until the grant runs out)
Antje Daniel & Dieter Neubert, “Development as Utopia? Road to a Better Future Between Fiction and Lived Utopian Practice”
Pages 189-209 | Published online: 19 Feb 2024
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08039410.2024.2314279#abstract

LM Petersen, “Redistributive Solidarity? Exploring the Utopian Potential of …” yadda yadda
Sage Journals https://journals.sagepub.com › abs
de · 2023 · Citado por 3 — “We explore the possibility of redistributive solidarity, arguing that unconditional and universal redistribution may be a means of furthering the recognition…” Sure.

“Positivity 3” – Living in the Clouds (not the Metaverse)
Charming Utopian AI "slop" at
https://bsahely.com/2024/12/21/the-garden-of-becoming-cultivating-a-life-centric-future-of-unity-flourishing-and-transformation-chatgpt-o1/

And some more of this beeswax
TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE
"Knowledge always win in the end, but not unless and until it is known." – Professor John McMurtry https://bsahely.com/2024/12/21/the-garden-of-becoming-cultivating-a-life-centric-future-of-unity-flourishing-and-transformation-chatgpt-o1/
which is not to say that it is, at its root, undeniably true, correct and devoutly-to-be-wished-for. But the recent coining of the word “scholasticide” shows the outlook is not promising.

The Work of Rammellzee
On the occasion of a career-spanning exhibition at Red Bull Arts New York....
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2018/05/jeff-mao-on-rammellzee

FORMER WEST (2008–2016)
This online platform makes publicly accessible the FORMER WEST research trajectory (2008–2016) archive, including an extensive video-archive of lectures, interviews, research gatherings, seminars, and exhibitions. https://formerwest.org/Front

search term = “facing the past fear of archives”
hits
Youssoupha Féhé Sarr (translated from the French Senegal by Adeena Mey), “The Archive and Time. Leaving the Fear of Oblivion”
https://www.afterall.org/articles/the-archive-and-time-leaving-the-fear-of-oblivion/

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ABC No Rio 45 Years #3 – “We’ve been working on the timeline, all the live long day…”

Fly Orr in the ABC No Rio Zine Library, before 2016 (building demolished)

This is the third post about the preparation of the “ABC No Rio 45 Years” exhibition to take place at the Emily Harvey Foundation in April of ‘25. To prepare , a group got to work on a timeline of the place and its activities. This proved a big task, and it will still be going on when the show opens in April. This post gets into the weeds over archival stuff, online databases, and the like. But the first product representing the vast occluded history of ABC No Rio is already online.

Marco Lanier is an archivist already working with Allied Productions, a partner on the “ABC 45” project. Marco took on the task of preparing the timeline. He put together a 125+-page – and growing – document of all the events he could find that took place at ABC No Rio from 1980 to 2024.

An impossible timeline…
by Marco Lanier

As part of the ABC No Rio 45 Years exhibition, I was tapped to create a chronology representing ABC No Rio’s expansive 45 years of activity. Those even vaguely familiar with the space will understand how difficult this task could be! How could one possibly encapsulate ABC through a rational sequencing of events? Conceived as a tool to guide and inform the exhibition’s collective curation, I sought to reconcile this tension and do my best to build a generative tool that would fulfill this purpose and contribute to any number of potential future projects.
In the early days of the project, as we were trying to figure out what the timeline might look like, I began to speculate on where it could go. I wanted a tool that was flexible, extensible, manipulable, and open to additions or edits. I was curious how the data I created as part of this work could be used to create a digital timeline or form the basis, down the road, for some kind of archival database or access platform (something like The Kitchen’s On File platform).
Thanks to David Potocnik, we have a digital timeline in the works – that’s up in beta form, and we are continuing to discuss ways to make this a friendlier tool despite our limited resources. The timeline, in the end, is a spreadsheet, filled with hundreds of entries that can be manipulated and rendered into various text-based and digital formats.
I oriented my research for the timeline towards archival collections spread across NYC. I wanted to know where the material history of ABC No Rio ended up, why and which materials made it to different archives, and how this related to the history of ABC itself.
In the end, I spent time combing through collections at MoMA, NYU’s Fales and Tamiment collections, Allied Productions’ archives, and ABC No Rio’s archives at The Clemente center. This process was arduous and manual, consisting of numerous research visits, pages of notes, dozens of accumulated photographs, and hours synthesizing this information into timeline entries.

Photo by Marco Lanier

ABC’s archives at the Clemente remain the most complete record of the space’s activity–though access was impeded for many months due to an elevator install and asbestos removal. Despite this, the archive is not lethargic. The recent and ongoing work of Scout, Claudia, Gavin, Steven (rest in power), and other volunteers to care for the zine and archive collections has preserved a pretty clear picture of ABC’s history.
This timeline is missing a lot! But we hope to open it up to the ABC community through the exhibition, giving space for folks to collectively contribute their own experiences and stories into No Rio’s historical record. Thanks to David, the digital timeline will also offer those outside of New York a chance to engage with the exhibition. My hope is that the tool will offer infrastructure for future digital, historical, and archival projects at ABC No Rio. FINIS

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Hanging Out in the Library

Claudia and Scout had been working in the Zine Library at ABC, a project which the late Steven Englander always held close. The “exile” office where he worked during the long years waiting for the new building construction to begin, is in the Clemente. That is a large cultural center with theaters, galleries, and many artists studios. Steven’s office there is stuffed with shelves of boxes of zines, which volunteers have been working with for years. As the new director, Gavin Marcus recalled, this was also an opportunity for people to hang out with Steven and listen to his stories.

Photo by Marco Lanier; drawing by Matthew Courtney
The Zine Library is a long-running project. It “began in the Spring of 1998,” the website relates, “when we rescued the Blackout Zine Library from a squat in the South Bronx which was to be evicted. Since then numerous individuals have donated their personal collections, and zine editors and publishers regularly send us issues.”

Foreign Content

I collect European squatting materials for the Interference Archive, and recently I sent a batch of zines to ABC as well. I sent some political zines, like the crusty @quedate_en_madrid (Stay in Madrid), which blasts local right-wing politicos.

“Quedate en Madrid” caricatures Madrid's rightwing mayor, a big evictor of social centers. He's wearing an Aznar t-shirt

The zine scene is popping in Spain. (I blogged about this in “Occupations & Properties”, events that took place in occupied social centers.) The gal who calls herself a “Punk con Cabeza” tables every week at Madrid’s rastro, the flea market. She’s strictly old school, with no online presence. She bangs out new copies of old Spanish punk zines from all over the country on a photocopy machine, and virtually gives them away at the anarchist book fairs here. I grabbed a bunch last year.

Punk is a very strong subculture in Spain. The MACBA museum in Barcelona did a show of it in '16 (the catalogue is online in ESP and ENG, URL in links below).

Hanging on Strings, Most Likely

Of course there will be zines in the “ABC 45” show. Folks who have worked in the ABC Zine Library have already organized shows of the collection in other venues, like "Zines+ and the World of ABC No Rio" at the Center for Book Arts in 2014. ABC regularly tables at events, like the East Village Zine Fair 2024 organized by Printed Matter on St Marks (they have now closed), and the 8-Ball Community. ABC has tabled every NYC Anarchist Book Fair.
Fly Orr (@fly_peops), an ABC No Rio’stalwart during the squatting era, has achieved some renown with her zine work. Her collection of zines is in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and her papers have gone to Columbia University.

It’s All There & It’s All Been Done

This “ABC 45 Years” show is conceived around the timeline. I imagined it would flow around the walls, like in a natural history museum, with different colors for different streams of activity. The artwork and artifacts of ABC’s colorful history would plug into it along the way. “What would that look like?” Marco wondered.

Artisanal: timeline pasteup

I spent last summer printing out and pasting up the provisional timeline Marco had prepared, that huge listing of events and incidents of all types – art shows, poetry readings, film and video screenings, eviction orders, demonstrations, monies raised, punk music concerts, anarchist book sales, silkscreen workshop, darkroom, full-building art shows called “Ides of March”, annual “haunted house” for kids….
We certainly missed quite a lot, maybe even most of it. Many years were entirely blank.
It’s not clear how it will look on the wall in the end. There will be a large format un-bound book which will have the timeline of a year on one page with the facing page blank for adding notations on-site, and pasting in photos and mailed-in art and what not.

How to Get the Stuff

The problem of assembling such a timeline/scrapbook for our “ABC 45 Years” show, to basically expand the timeline, is how to get those paste-ins for the big book? Mail art can be the answer. It was a key activity of the Fluxus movement, which the Emily Harvey gallery supported, and the foundation continues to exhibit. Mary Campbell, one of the Day de Dada performance group, has produced numerous mail art events. They’re part of the international neo-Fluxus movement. Our exhibition venue, Emily Harvey Foundation, arose from the classic movement. So we turned to Mary to design a mail art project.

All This History Shit

The first organizing group for the “ABC 45” project dissolved in disenchantment with the historical project itself. Playing with history has become so much a part of contemporary art practice in recent years I forgot not everyone is into it.
I know the historical project is suspicious; it’s inherently fraudulent, to timeline a project as dynamic as ABC No Rio. As Stefan Tanaka writes in “History Without Chronology”, "history must embrace the richness and variability of different times that exist throughout our lives, [which] are evident in nonmodern societies and historical writings about them.... To conflate time and chronology is to succumb to what Michel de Certeau calls an alibi — to make ‘use of time without reflecting on it’ ”.
We can’t just wine and dine Chronos without giving due attention to Kairos.
Still, timeline organization has explanatory value. For people who don’t know ABC to get a picture of what this “anti-institution”, this self-constituted and self-sustained center of the “culture of resistance”, has been and will be – the past of the place needs to be told. The overall project of ABC No Rio needs situating historically not only as an art and entertainment venue, but as the outcome of a global militant movement of occupation for cultural and political provision – called, variously, “squatting”, “occupation”, and “commonsing”.
The often valorized Lower East Side commonsing movement is not jusut the squats and their present-day low-income co-op owners (some ex-squatters) – it’s also the activity centers – ABC No Rio, MoRUS, Bullet Space, La Plaza Cultural. That last, as the MoRUS museum serves to remind, is an outcome of the “avant-gardening” of public green space. All of it was and is DIY, and done well.

LINKS

The Architect’s Newspaper, “ABC No Rio is moving back to 156 Rivington Street”, 8 ago 2024 The new 4-story building will have galleries, a kitchen, offices, a darkroom for photographers, a print shop, a zine library, a computer lab, a rooftop garden, ...
https://www.archpaper.com/2024/08/abc-no-rio-156-rivington-street-paul-castrucci-architects/

ABC No Rio Zine Library
https://abcnorio.org/facilities/zine_library.html

"Zines+ and the World of ABC No Rio"
https://centerforbookarts.org/book-shop/catalogs/zines-and-the-world-of-abc-no-rio

Fly archive at Columbia
https://library.columbia.edu/about/news/libraries/2023/2023-noteworthy-acquisitions-digitization-conservation.html

Ian Karp, “Rebel voice: Inside the Fly Zine Archive, a chronicle of punk, queer, and DIY counterculture”, July 29, 2021
https://new.artsmia.org/stories/rebel-voice-inside-the-fly-zine-archive-a-chronicle-of-punk-queer-and-diy-counterculture

"PUNK. Its Traces in Contemporary Art" - MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2016 https://www.macba.cat › exhibitions
Catalogue PDF at
https://www.madrid.org/bvirtual/BVCM019193.pdf

Day de Dada performance group website
Posts Tagged ‘mail art’
https://daydedada.wordpress.com/tag/mail-art/

Stefan Tanaka, “History without Chronology”, 2019
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11418981

Not all paper: "Rubble with a Cause", jarred 2006

“ABC No Rio 45 Years” Sleepless Nights Far from Home

An occasional blog on the jobs of organizing “ABC No Rio 45 Years” for April of 2025. Second post, in which the producer succumbs to 3a.m. despair, then pulls himself together by remembering the hard travel road that led us to here.

A Blowout on the Concept Level

Yes, it’s AI. “A dark room in which there is an old chair on which a tired [old] man sits, burning photographs and papers, on the floor puddles displaying a trace, on the window Cloudy” stablediffusionweb.com/es/image/20394546-a-tired-man-burning-documents-in-a-dark-room

The committee which was organizing the “ABC No Rio 45 Years” exhibition has dissolved. This shit is now up in the air. The two of us who conceived this project for April at the Emily Harvey Foundation have been thrown back on our own resources.
I’m having sleepless nights on this, with an anxiety that mounts commensurate with that of others’. We can’t be waiting for someone to sort it all out – a “Jim Dandy to the rescue”, no. The leader of ABC for the last near-30 years has left the building. And I do so miss his deep knowledge and sharp intelligence.
The problem with this project, a synoptic history of the culture of ABC No Rio in one tiny room, is that it can’t be true. To be true it would have to be Borgesian, a map the size of the territory, or years of Groundhog Days, whole lives lived over.
I can’t blame those guys for bailing out. It’s reasonable that no artist would want any part of constructing histories. Diogenes’ lamp is a heavy burden.

The Duty to Organize

Still, in the settler English manner, we gotta and we gonna muddle through.
The walls of the exhibition are fairly pretty clear now. The show is about the place, the building, what we wanted and what we got. And all that went on there. As I learned during researches in Andrea Callard’s Colab files, there was disagreement within our late ‘70s Colab group about having a space, a place to do shows and mount projects. Even then the burden of maintenance was viewed by many as a distraction from the job of creation and making art.
In the end, after the “Real Estate Show” occupation of one ideal space for artists to work in – which we couldn’t have, they said, I guess because it was better to become an enormous luxury shopping center which it is today – the City of New York gave us a vacant rundown storefront. And so it all began….
The artist activists who took over in the place we started and called ABC No Rio went through a similar crisis in the later ‘80s. They were the third wave of users. Under heavy pressure from the City to take back the building that had been so unwisely ceded years before, a bunch of ABC folks decided to pack up and leave.

We’re Out of Here

Thus began the caravan phase of ex cathedra ABC history, in which a band of folks toured around the region bringing their punkified creative presences to the people. A sort of Magical Mystery Tour for the Reagan era, an adventure experiment in chaosmosis, vaguely alluded to in Fly’s 1998 book Chronic Riot Spasm from Autonomedia.

The local punks back home, however, the Loisaiders, didn’t want to let go of the only venue they had for making noise and moshing. So they held on…
Soon the 156 Rivington building was squatted. “No, we won’t leave.” Don’t care about your court order. That made eviction a serious project for the City during a time when there were a good score of similar squatted buildings throughout the Lower East Side.

We The People Won’t Go sign on a Lower East Side squat c/o Amy Starecheski (at 99percentinvisible.org)

Then Steven Englander came in (came back, actually), an experienced squatter “war leader”. I remember walking into the place during those days. Steven was sitting in the front room with Frank Morales and Seth Tobocman. All of them had taken arrests during building defense actions. It was an intense meeting.

Thanks to Resistance, ABC Is Still Here...

It would be great if cities allowed their citizens to take constructive actions to better their circumstances, to gather, to hang out, to make art, music, culture, in places and times of their choosing. Even better if they could be allowed to improve their basic living conditions by themselves and with each other. But the urban worlds of neoliberal capitalism are not Who-ville. Control must be maintained, control by law and control by dollars.

Struggle, and Incredible Persistence…

Not always. And not in the case of ABC No Rio. But money will have its way. The building was decrepit. To be in the basement during the “punk matinees”, when hardcore music by some band from out of town was playing upstairs, and the floor was literally bouncing up and down was architecturally educational.

The floor of ABC No Rio, in a photo on the Wikipedia page. As I recall, it was painted by Vandana Jain.

In ‘97 the City said, “You can have the building, but you have to fix it.” And so began the “long march” through the halls of capital, the raising of the money to – well, the building could not be fixed. It had to be torn down and rebuilt – keep ABC No Rio an alive thing.
A capital campaign is an entirely different animal than organizing to fight the cops on the street. But Steven managed it, bringing the long-standing, long-suffering, incredible anti-institution he was leading to the point of reconstruction.

A Great Story

That’s a great story, and it has been often told. Most recently and most lucidly in architect Nandini Bagchee’s text Counter Institutions: Activist Estates of the Lower East Side (2018).
There is a museum in NYC dedicated to that period, when squatters tried/failed/succeeded to hang onto homes for themselves and spaces for culture in the Lower East Side, and gardeners fought to hold their flowering plots in vacant lots. It’s called MoRUS – the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space.
MoRUS has a permanent display commemorating that resistance, and the Critical Mass bicycle organizing, which led Mayor Bloomberg to finally make NYC bike-friendly like so many European capitals.
Around the corner from MoRUS, at East 9th Street and Avenue C is La Plaza Cultural, a large open community garden named for Armando Perez, one of the CHARAS group which ran the nearby boarded-up public school that was once a major Loisaida social center – El Bohio.
Lash LaRue Mayor Rudy succeeded in putting the Big Kabosh on that place in ‘01. Debilitated DeBlasio didn’t dare to bring it back. And Adams… well. So Loisaida’s biggest public cultural center has been empty all these years. And ABC No Rio has been raising money all these years.

A Hopeless Task

But it’s only part of the story we seek to tell in April at the Emily Harvey Foundation. What woke me up so early this morning was hearing in my mind’s ear the soundscape of those days, the water pouring into the bucket from the broken plumbing in the earliest days, the junkies breaking the wall to get in (actually, we didn’t hear that), and squabbling over drugs in the hallway. The COMA jams of aleatory sounds, the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Miguel Piñero. Food Not Bombs banging pots and pans. Sweeping, shoveling, cleaning up beer bottles. Keys clicking in the computer lab and the zine library. Winchester Chimes’ rhyming declamations at Matthew Courtney’s open mic. Punk thrash from Washington, D.C. Musicians setting up and breaking down. Artists taking a look and taking notes. Curious internationals wandering by. “Can we come in?” The silence of the house cat moving through the hallways.
It’s too much to show, but we’ll try. It’s too late to back out now.

“ABC No Rio 45 Years” at the Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway, 2nd Floor April 2025

LINKS

ABC No Rio history on WikiP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_No_Rio

Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space
https://morusnyc.org

Around the corner at East 9th Street and Avenue C is La Plaza Cultural
https://www.laplazacultural.com/

“Squatters of the Lower East Side” (2019) on 99percent Invisible website
Audio of 22 minutes; text and photos
Producer Delaney Hall spoke with Dr. Amy Starecheski, author of "Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City". The episode also featured oral history interviews, conducted by Amy Starecheski, with former squatters Maggie Wrigley and Peter Spagnuolo. Thanks to Paul DeRienzo for recordings of the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riot and to WNYC for additional archival tape. Thanks also to Dr. Alexander Vasudevan, author of The Autonomous City.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/squatters-lower-east-side/

This is the wall, broken up by doors and openings, which awaits this part of the story to be shown

"ABC No Rio 45 Years", April 2025

The ass end of history; the infamous toilet at 156 Rivington. Photo by Jade Doskow

One of these annoying Facebook groups specializing in NYC "back in the day" photo nostalgia posted this snapshot of a white girl, a brown boy, and a black boy on a stoop in the East Village with an awkwardly painted "SAMO©" tag on the door behind them.
Naturally I asked Al Diaz, the other half of SAMO if that was him and Jean-Michel when they were kids. "No," he replied; some people even asked him if the white girl was Madonna.
Hundreds and thousands of folks are prompted every day to look back on the days when celebrities, great and small, walked among them. Before their elevation into the mediatic stratosphere, the gods of modern times were like you and me. They hung out on the stoop of your neighborhood.
Being in art and making culture means trucking in fame. That’s the shiny gold star on the top of tree. If you don’t grab hold of it, maybe you get to be one of the lower ornaments. And if you don’t get even that, you might quit. Or you might just keep on for the love of the life.

And You Don’t Stop

NOT Jean-Michel Basquiat and Al Diaz, his co-conspirator in the SAMO graffiti campaign. And also NOT Madonna! (Photo by John Maher)

Keep on trucking, keep on keeping on – this is what we did back then. We did our thing, got together with friends, opened places to do it together. This, rather than the brass ring, was a kind of utopia, a terrain of possible actualities in the ‘meat world’, when celebrity was made on printed paper and on TV. (Both of which we did, as ‘underground’ magazines and cable TV.)
Now, a bunch of us are launching a project of remembrance around the Lower East Side of 1980 and after. That’s “ABC No Rio 45 Years”, which kicks off at the Emily Harvey Foundation space in Soho during the month of April, 2025.
ABC No Rio, as you may know, is a collectively-run nonprofit arts organization on the Lower East Side of NYC, running on Rivington Street. It's had several generations of leaders and key players, both artists and activists.
We are planning this show now. It’s a process of drawing together people from multiple generations, with very different perspectives on their experiences and what they mean.

Jean-Michel Basquiat Did Not Sleep Here*

For some striving young artists in the 1980s, ABC was a stop on their fast tour of the alternative art world, a flashing self-launched star place boot-strapping in a Latin American neighborhood.
ABC No Rio has an art collection which we will mine for exhibits. There’s work by Keith Haring, Richard Hambleton, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, and many more established artists. Some of them played organizing roles at No Rio, and others have been steady friends of the place.

Could Call it “GayBC”

ABC’s next stop on the fast moving train of NYC sub- and counter-culture was the dynamic grounded queer art and performance scene generated by the crowd around Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, Matthew Courtney’s “Open Mic”, and other refugees from the Pyramid Club.

The angry young kids moved in during the ‘90s to mosh and thrash as the ABC punk music collective took over management of the decrepit building. ABC became a legendary venue in the international hardcore punk music circuit, and soon a key node in the anarchist squatting movement on the Lower East Side.
This radical history is recalled today in the MoRUS (Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space), an unofficial partner in the “ABC 45” exhibition. Activists from No Rio were part of the crowd facing off the cops as the police tank they called “Little Rudy” after our own Lash LaRue city mayor, moved on the squats of 13th street.

“Squat or Rot”

ABCers fought for their own building, which was squatted by then, and surprisingly acquired rights to it in 2006. Immediately thereafter began the long arduous trail of fund-raising under the steady hand of Steven Englander.
All those years the music roared on. The poets and singers declaimed. Artists celebrated collaboration, international networks, and the radical causes they held dear.
In 2016, the building at 156 Rivington Street came down. Fly bottled the rubble as artistic therapeuticals. Today the long-for new building is at last under construction.
Those few coming weeks in April will be a rare opportunity for as many who care to, as many who can stand to do it, to face up to it, to share their truths, their dreams so fondly remember or so rudely dashed.
Social media is littered with obituaries, ephemeral pixel memorials to friends, lovers, comrades, colleagues, gone who mattered to us. A few words, a “care” emoji, and on we go into our own darkness.
I fell upon one today looking at this photograph from our 1985 book. That’s Marc Brasz, who was a link then between ABC No Rio and Fashion Moda when both were new. “The Moda” was the South Bronx art space that played a vital role in the art and culture of NYC. Marc Brasz was an artist and jazz aficionado from New Orleans, who certainly hung out with Juma Santos, who was running Fashion Moda after founder Stefan Eins moved on.

The crowd at Marc Brasz’ show at ABC No Rio in 1981. Left to right, Delano Greenidge; ?; Fiona Templeton; ?; ?; (below her) Jody Culkin (?); Kevin Wendall; Franz Vila. Paintings by Marc Brasz.(Photo by Lisa Kahane; posted at 98Bowery.com)

Stefan at one point had the money to make a book like ours, ABC No Rio Dinero, but he spent it on something else. The pieces, which are many, shiny and varied, have yet to be picked up.
Like everyone, artists pass will. They leave behind in their work a shimmering hole, an outline of the kind of life they loved and lived for. We shall gather this spring for ghost dance and an augury of the future. You may want to join us. It will be fun – and a challenge for the young folks too.

* Yes, No, Jean-Michel didn’t come to No Rio, so far as we know. But he did participate in Colab’s Times Square Show in the summer of 1980, both as "SAMO©" and with his first exhibited painting. Colab produced the Real Estate Show, and supported ABC No Rio for the first couple of years.

Marc Brasz, "Portrait of Noc" (@noc167) from "fashion moda: 35 years later" at wallworksny.com

#ABCNoRio45Years
#EmilyHarveyFoundation
#ABCNoRio

125 Delancey Street, the occupation that began it all in 1979

Our German friend, Peter Moennig, out front of the "Real Estate Show"

Bibliomania at the Mira Look Fair

"What Problems Can Artist Publishers Solve?"
This Half Letter Press book was translated and published in Spanish by the Martin Wong Fund, Solo Foundation. It was premiered at Mira Look Books in Madrid.

This post is a report on the recent Mira Look Books fair in Madrid. Your blogger sits with his pubs and others as an Anglo leftie in a fair full of other Americans from Spanish-speaking countries. Things to think about while twiddling one’s thumbs.

Right now I am sitting at home with a cast on my broken leg, downloading zines to print out for the 22nd Madrid anarchist book fair in early December (6, 7 & 8 at La Prospe popular school // #encuentrodellibroanarquistamad).
Like last year, I have a position there. (I blogged my 2023 experiences here.) So I’m trying to get a good selection of printed matter together.
With the help of a shipment of books from Minor Compositions, desperately wrangled from Spanish customs, my setup at October’s @MiraLookBooks fair in central Madrid was fairly ample. Anglophone theory and radical books may not have many customers in the Spanish capitol – (which is why mainstream Anglophone distributors ignore the Peninsula entirely) – but methinks it’s important to show the flag.

RU Confusing Art and/or/with Politics?

Mira Look is an art book fair, so I’m posting about it on “Art Gangs”. Increasingly “Art Gangs” content is converging with my “Occupations & Properties” blog on squatting, as you’ll see below. My schizo-studies is becoming contemporary reality.
So an Anglo is showing the flag, eh? It’s a lot of work just for that. How did this mania for book fairs begin? Never mind. I’ll just tell what happened.

Bibliophilic Solidarity: A Book Fair Journal

Friday, 25 October – I’m set up at the Mira Look Books fair at last. It was a struggle to get here as I broke an ankle earlier in the week. But with the help of my partner we trucked all the books, zines and table furniture to the fair.
Getting the books from the UK was another saga. Those from the USA still haven’t arrived after over a month in transit. (Getting material shipped from the colonies, is worse than it’s been since the 17th century.)
Blanca gave me a great position, directly in front of the main entrance. Things were slow at first. Very few folks. Only two conversations. As in a bookstore, readers accrue one by one. This seems a terribly laborious way to gather them. At 3:30pm, a post-lunch crowd at last drifts in. It’s a strain, sitting hour upon hour with the my leg propped up under the table. But it’s certainly a way to get some reading done!

I dug into the recent Cindy Milstein anthology, Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy. It’s quite informative on self-organized projects, occupations and the like.
A herd of young girls passes. I am a type of elderly spectacle.
The institutional exhibitors were on the terrace above us. I hobbled up there on my crutch and found a catalogue of action photos of the Grupo Zaj, a Fluxus-affiliated group which performed in Spain during the Franco dictatorship. I was amazed when I learned of their existence, and that they had performed in courtyards and taverns in the town near Franco’s palace. The artist Esther Ferrer was a member of that group.

Esther Ferrer, El hilo del tiempo (the thread of time). 1978; interartive.org

On a later foray I found a lovely catalogue of the Grupo de Callejeros who did escraches in the streets of Buenos Aires against retired militaries who had directed the pogroms of leftists during the dictatorship. (47 has promised the same for the USA; “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” t-shirts feature among his supporters).
My neighbor in the tables is Rodrigo, an artist from Portugal. On the other side are artists from Peru, the Ediciones Valientes doing a good business in posters and zines. I faced an assembly of tables arranged in a square. Books from numerous Latin American publishers were displayed, many beautiful and intriguing things. A few folks in the center of the square did the selling for all of the consorted publishers.

Touch Don’t Touch

I love how the early evening visitors finger and flip the books. Many exhibitors don’t like that. Get greasy fingerprints on my limited edition, will you? But I’m happy to see people engage.
There is something profoundly relaxing.about watching crowds of people wandering through an art book fair. Most of the crowd is young. These days book fairs, zine fairs, all kinds of non-elite art and art-adjacent events are immensely popular and growing.
I enjoy the dance of glances with individuals. Do I engage with a comment? Generally after a touch, a leafing-through, or of course a direct question. One gets better at judging after a day or so. If they touch, I talk.
Sometimes you can see that a person wants to browse in peace by the little flinch they show when you look at them as they approach.
If I talk, it’s usually about the books of my publisher Minor Compositions from UK. I announce: “All of the titles from this publisher are available on the website as downloadable PDFs. For free.” Maybe this doesn’t help sales? Well, sure, but sales are besides the point for me. Plus I know a lot of folks don't have money for the books they might want.

Cardboard Consciousness

I spent Thursday doing prep. I made little book stands out of folded cardboard. I hobbled to the photocopy shop to make signage, and wrapped up the books ready to go.
Saturday, owing to a demonstration on the main drag blocking traffic, the cab driver let me off at the top of the bookstall street at the end of Retiro Park. I had to crutch down several blocks to the fair, past the book stalls of the Cuesta de Moyano. Downhill, fortunately, but still not the best for the broken leg. I found Kerouac's Desolation Angels, which I hadn't read.

Folks Show Up

Almost immediately as I returned the new director of the Reina Sofia was at my table. We chatted about Martin Wong since he had run the CA2M museum where Martin’s retrospective made its first European stop. I gave him a copy of the humble zine we made, still the only publication on the artist in Spanish.

Sitting immobile behind a table, it was great to see friends and comrades appear. Eli Lorenzi showed up, and Antoine Henry-Jonquères appeared with his hyper-active little boy. The kid was finally distracted when Antoine put his film camera in his hands. Shortly thereafter a guy passed by with a film camera hanging from his neck, and a vinyl record under his arm. Time and date?
Begonia Santa-Cecilia came by. She was involved in Occupy Wall Street, and although I was gone from NYC by then, I know her and her partner Luis virtually from the 16 Beaver Group online assemblings.
Later that afternoon, the director of exhibitions for the Fundación Juan March came flying by and bought my memoir. I was stunned! It was the only sale….
They have a Saul Steinberg show up now, and when I’m a bit better I’ll rush over. He was Anton van Dalen’s mentor, and the artist I first loved as a child.

The Mysterious Second Floor

I knew that the PichiFest people were in the fair, but I had no idea where they were. (My main fault on the fair was the lack of signage.) The Pichis had just concluded a fair at ESLA Eko in Carabanchel. Sadly this year my leg issues kept me away. I participated in their last fair and blogged about it, plus did an interview with them on my other blog – although it as well belonged on this one.
Finally I realized the Pichis were on the 2nd floor, hidden away in what used to be the Medialab auditorium. That floor was the most crowded, with zinesters and other publishers all jammed together. The Pichis were right inside the door, all cartoon animals and talking flowers.

An octopus (pulpo) eating itself. This is a very funny image in Galicia.

Besides the Pichis I ran into Carlos Sanjuan holding down the #leeressexy (Reading Is Sexy) table. Carlos is in Malaga, and heworked to set up the printing facilities at the bookstore and multi-use space Suburbia. I was recently there for the INURA meeting.
Carlos is also closely involved with the beleaguered social center Casa Invisible. I’m hopeful we can make a publication about that, together with SqEK comrade Miguel Martinez.
Meet, greet, and cook up schemes is what these fairs are good for.

“Back to Your Post”

I gimped back down to where I had draped a Casa Invisible book bag over the chair. I was just in time to catch the guy from @Holaporque wandering the fair with a silkscreen setup on a cart offering to print a new cover for your periodical. I had brought the London Review of Books, and he inked it with the motto of the day. I’m looking forward to the arrests.

My newspaper stamped. Thank you, ICC!

A Fashion Parade

Every fair and its crowd has a different temperature. This one was very middle class. I saw almost no punks, and only two trannies. The fair was not so large that the visitors couldn’t take a good look at every post. Most of the browsers had only a casual interest in what they were seeing. (As a jaded pro, I tend to bomb in on only the things that interest me in a fair like this, and pass by everything else.)
Like all artistical events, many fashionable folks were drifting by. Some loud patterned costumes were paraded. Hooray for them! All props to the fashionistxs.
My favorite bookbag –
BIENN
NNNN
NNALE

Afterword: Melancholia in La Serreria

It was fun, the Mira Look fair. Still there is a good deal of sadness for me to be in La Serreria Belga, yes, a former sawmill, but a building purpose-built for the Medialab Prado. That was an important center for collaborative media work, programming, innovative technology, and much more besides.
Ana Botella Serrano, Madrid's mayor from 2011-15, tried to close it during her term. (She was spouse of the radical right prime minister José María Aznar.) There was an international campaign to oppose that, and she backed off. I never understood it then, because Medialab Prado was such a clearly important think-tank and practical lab for technological progress. It was unique; it won European prizes.
The new mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, elected without a popular vote majority in 2019, succeeded where Botella failed. The left electoralists split, of course; otherwise the center-left Manuela Carmena would have taken the position.
First Almeida evicted La Ingobernable, the social center across the plaza. That building, he promised would be several things – a library, a health center, a museum. Naturally it remains vacant.
Very shortly thereafter he came for the Medialab Prado. It was closed, its staffing skeletonized and moved outside of the center of Madrid. Now Medialab does pimping programs for AI in the Matadero, the Slaughterhouse.
I blogged on this in ‘21 as it was developing – (“Tearing It All Down: The Twilight of the Citizen Participation Movement in Madrid”), and there’s no reason to go into it again here.
It just makes me sad. While I always love to see beautiful things, provocative books, and the people who make and enjoy them wandering together in herds, I know I'm also walking over the glittering shards and bones of a lost future.

LINKS

Grupo de Arte Callejero – "Aquí viven genocidas"
Lots online about them, but the exact book not yet
https://grupodeartecallejero.wordpress.com/2001/03/24/aqui-viven-genocidas/comment-page-1/


Mira Look art book fair
https://miralookbooks.org/

Grupo Zaj
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaj

“Martin Wong: Travesuras Maliciosas”
Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, 2022
https://ca2m.org/en/exhibitions/martin-wong-malicious-mischief

Suburbia, bookstore and multi-use space in Malaga
https://www.sub-urbia.es/

Entrevista a la Librería Suburbia
https://lanaveinvisible.com/2022/07/09/entrevista-a-la-libreria-suburbia/

@Holaporque
https://holaporque.com/historia/

Leonard Abrams, "¡Presente!"

Photo of Leonard recently, by Angie Sloan

Last night was un poco loco, sitting in a hotel in a beach town in Catalunya in the middle of the night, watching the live stream of the memorial for Leonard Abrams in faraway NYC. Despite the many absences of friends and influenced (those whom Leonard enabled), the event at the Bowery Poetry Club succeeded in evoking the spirit of our dear departed friend. I am sure a few cocktails helped those present. I wrote a text for the memorial, which I’ll shape up later, but for now I’m posting a text by Leonard himself.

In 2022, Howl gallery hosted a panel discussion for my book Art Worker, and Leonard spoke then. I found the text he read odd, but he rolled around to explain it at the end. His sudden death a year later was a shock to the Lower East Side creative community. He was a key figure, a linchpin there, a person who never ceased to engage with the recollections and continuations of that golden period in American art and culture which the the magazine he ran chronicled. Leonard’s passing in the spring of 2023 marked the unraveling of the first-hand knowledge of our bohemia.

“I still can’t believe he’s not here with us. It’s like a bird swooped down and carried him off.” – Bonny Finberg

The Broken-Open People
by Leonard Abrams
What I wanted to talk about today was the importance of breaking things open. One of the reasons there was so much creative activity going on in downtown New York in the 1970s and ‘80s is that there was a convergence of people that had been broken open in some way. And this allowed a lot of stuff to dribble out. It was the kind of thing we all find so interesting because the typical state of people and other living things is to cover up your brokenness so as to present an unblemished, impermeable exterior to the outside world so that the outside world would be less prone to destroying it. And we love looking at broken people because it saves us the hassle of being broken open ourselves at any given moment.
I’m not suggesting that these broken people were just dying to turn up in New York and show everyone their wounds. Perhaps it’s more likely that they thought they were doing a pretty good job of covering them up, but maybe their wounds were easier to see than before. So I’m saying that New York became a magnet for broken open people. Why? Well maybe it was because New York had gotten such a bad reputation that the broken people thought: Well, hey, I can’t make it any worse. Or maybe their brokenness caused them to look for a place in which it was easier to survive because so many people didn’t want to live there. Or maybe their brokenness caused them to see it as some kind of paradise instead of the godawful wreck that John Q. Public thought it was.
In any case, all these cracked, bleeding [inaudible] people came here to play out their lives in relative peace and anonymity. Or to make a project out of their brokenness, to use it as a starting point for some kind of narrative about the condition of all of us. Of course every good artist’s drive depends upon the kinds of wounds that tear the facade away from themselves and those around them.
Now this is not to imply that everybody making some kind of art in the inner city neighborhoods of New York came here with that purpose in mind. Some had nowhere else to go, and some were just born here. But ask yourself, what would make you climb over a barbed wire fence and risk electrocution and getting crushed to death just to write your name on a train? Or pull apart a 100 amp streetlight to power a block party sound system? Now if you calculate that the risk of not painting a train or throwing a party was worse than getting killed, you take it. That’s just common sense. Of course this works better with teenagers.
Pretty soon comes the unbroken people, or rather the ones who have hidden their cracks and breaks better, and have no interest in showing them to anyone else, but prefer building up layers of armor to displaying their soft spots. And these folks do a pretty good job of displacing the other ones. And this is when the party starts to end. By “party” I mean a real explosion of creativity and more than a little bit of bacchanalia, and chances are we won’t see anything like it for a while. Unless of course things fall apart again. I wouldn’t mind seeing that happen, but not everyone is with me on that one.
– recorded at Howl Happening Gallery, May 2022 by Stephen Zacks

LINKS

EV Grieve, April 4, 2023
RIP Leonard Abrams
https://evgrieve.com/2023/04/rip-leonard-abrams.html

Marc H. Miller, “Leonard Abrams (1954 – 2023): Remembering the Publisher of the East Village Eye”, April 6, 2023
https://gallery.98bowery.com/news/leonard-abrams-1954-2023-remembering-the-publisher-of-the-east-village-eye/

East Village Eye, 1979-1987 - Gallery 98
https://gallery.98bowery.com/exhibition/east-village-eye/

Leonard's East Village Eye website news section chronicles his continuous festive organizing around the community his magazine brought together
https://www.east-village-eye.com/news.html

Leonard's film "Quilombo Country" website
https://www.quilombofilm.com/
"We can't leave, because if we leave we could lose our land. So we have to stay in our place. If we leave to work, we lose the land. Because farmers from outside will come in and take the land." Sounds like NYC.

Via expatriate ex-Eye comrade Tony Heiberg -- "Here’s my tribute to my dear friend Leonard Abrams that will be shown tonight - along with many other testimonials - at his memorial in New York at the Bowery Poetry Club. I hadn’t intended to post this here but technical requirements meant it was necessary before I could send it on to Leonard’s sister, Bethany Haye". Tony's tribute did not play in NYC, but you can see it here --

Chris "Daze" Ellis, Club Amazon, MCNY, Martin Wong collection

Pichifest Speaks: Lifting the Lid on Spain’s Underground Zine Scene

Page of a Pichifest zine, 2021

An interview with the Pichifest crew, producers of a series of zine fests in unusual venues in Madrid. The Pichis are a non-hierarchical collective working outside of state institutions. In this interview they tell why they don’t ask for cultural subsidies, but follow the “DIY/DIWO ethos”. In a followup question, I asked them to describe the zine scene in Spain. They responded with a blizzard of info on festivals nationwide. I’ve tried to provide the hyperlinks in this text.

Back in November, I set up at the Pichifest fanzine festival at the squatted social center La Enrededera. I blogged about it, not here on my art-specific blog, but at my squatting blog “Occupations & Properties”. I was amazed that this non-political artistic event, crowded with ordinary folks, was taking place at an occupied resistant venue. It seemed like a crossover moment, and a revelation of a new underground.
I asked the Pichifest crew for an interview some time ago. Now the dynamic Madrid-based cultural animateurs have responded to my queries in perfect English.

Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview. I had such a fun time at your November ‘23 event at La Enrededera, even being on the periphery. It was clear that much more fun was had at the after-party, the talleres, etc. I have many questions to ask you guys, but first, can you describe your project in your own terms?

No problem, Alan, it's our pleasure. Glad you had a good time :)
Pichi Fest is an independent and self-managed fanzine festival that has been held in Madrid since 2017 in the Espacio Sociocultural Liberado Autogestionado Eko, with the latest edition in 2023 being held at Centro Social Okupado La Enredadera de Tetuán.

Around 50-odd [self-publishing] projects pass through each edition of Pichi Fest, which we choose giving priority to affordable prices, originality, and zine spirit. Our festival is transfeminist and anti-oppression. We try our best to provide a platform and a safer space overall for non-hegemonic/underrepresented groups and individuals, foster newcomer zinesters, and tackle accessibility issues. Our aim is to run the festival following a DIY/DIWO ethos as well: we are a non-profit, non-hierarchical collective operating with no official cultural funding or external financial support whatsoever. We try to run our events as low cost as possible and make them self-sustainable while not charging exhibitors for tabling and keeping admission totally free.
We also celebrate several other events throughout the year, such as:
“Mini Pichi”, a smaller, one-day festival where we give priority to new and local projects in a more intimate space. Past Mini Pichi editions have been held in Vaciador (now defunct) and Ateneo La Maliciosa.
“Pichi Cafés”, relaxed meetings to share fanzines, snacks, and good chats.
Workshops and talks related to the world of fanzines
We celebrated Pichi Fest 2023 on November 3-4th, and we are planning the next edition in October, as well as a series of zine-making workshops for this spring.

I run two blogs, “Occupations & Properties” mainly about squatting, and “Art Gangs” primarily about artists collectives. What thrilled me about the Pichifest project is that your group sits in the middle, equally at home in art and solidarity with the social movement of squatting. Can you explain why you have been holding your festival events in occupied spaces in Madrid? Other zine fests and artist book fairs have been in institutional venues. Why did you not try to go that way? Are you seeking public money to support your project? If not, why not?

We are not and will not be going the institutional route, as we believe that would compromise our core values, especially being completely independent and not having to pander to the prevailing political agendas or deal with any sort of cultural bureaucracy that we think doesn’t belong in the zine scene. We feel our festival should be as DIY as zines themselves and we’ll stick to that.
One of the ways Pichi Fest may deviate from other fellow festivals is that we try to focus mainly on zines, as opposed to a more broad interpretation of self-publishing and self-produced art. Actually we try to actively stay away from the idea of the zine as an art object but that’s a whole other discussion. Also, as an event, we don’t really have growth plans. Our aim is just to make the festival better but not necessarily bigger. Given that we often operate in squatted spaces, we would hate to act as involuntary gentrification agents while doing all this.

La Enrededera social center in Tetuan

We have to point out that we don’t always celebrate our events in occupied spaces. Past Mini Pichi editions have been held in Vaciador, a self-managed underground venue, and Ateneo La Maliciosa, an independent space with ties to several local social initiatives. And during the pandemic we put together La Ruta del Fanzine, which was held across several local bookstores. We have also hosted Pichi Cafés and talks at La Oveja Negra (a vegan tavern) and Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, CNT’s archive library [CNT is the Spanish anarchist union]. Plus casual meetings aimed at zine-sharing in different open air parks, the Pichi Picnics.
We think our bottom-up approach ties in nicely with squatted social centres, initiatives that we stand for and are much needed in this city given the problem with the obscene rent prices, the amount of vacant housing and abandoned spaces, alienation and hyper-individualism and the subsequent demand for local cooperation.
We believe they can also act as spaces of resistance against lackluster, hegemonic, greedy and boring mainstream cultural offerings. Squatted spaces allow us a freedom we know we won’t find in other places. This of course presents its own problems, for example a lack of running water or the tables and chairs needed for all the stalls. But we have somehow made it work so far, and the feedback has always been positive despite the drawbacks.

Historically, dating back to some violent conflicts in the Amsterdam movement of the 1970s, squatters with cultural interests (artists, musicians, etc.), and activist squatters have often been in conflict, or at least have not had an easy time together. Politicals are suspicious of artists, and artists are exasperated with the politicals. Did you experience this kind of tension in your dealings with the assemblies at ESLA Eko and CSOA La Enredadera?
If you did not, maybe you can explain this new mood among artists and squatters in Madrid?

Not really, but we experienced what maybe was an echo of that tension when we were first starting. There was this preconceived notion from squatters that a zine and self-publishing event would mean self-employment and profit, and anti-capitalistic squatted spaces are of course strongly against that, at least if the potential gains are not in favor of a social cause. We took our time to explain that in zine culture the returns, if any, are mainly to sustain the production itself, that we were looking for projects and artists that adhere to that principle, and that content-wise we wanted to feature as many political and critical thinking zines as we could. During all these years we have hosted several projects that directly supported different social causes. It has always been a priority for us.

Crack! annual festival of comics-oriented artists’ zines in Rome, at the enormous squatted Forte Prenestino social center, 2023. The Pichis participated recently. This photo from a gallery of photos from one 10 years ago.

In general, our experience so far has been rewarding in every way to say the least. Some of us were not familiar at first with the squatted spaces in our own city and a whole new world opened. We have also brought in zinesters and fans that probably up until that point were just attending institutional events, and some squatters felt encouraged to get more into zines by coming into direct contact with a scene that thrives in Spain and moves through the network of graphic self-publishing fests.
We’d say the mood is shifting. Maybe it's because squatting has been persecuted and demonized in this city that these counter-cultural events can serve as a hint of what these spaces have to offer. But apparently in other squatted spaces they saw and still see zine events as self-employment, and we have heard stories of other festival organizers, past and present, that haven’t had the welcoming experience we had at El EKO or La Enredadera and had their proposals rejected.

Maybe you could spell out a little the "scene that thrives in Spain", and the "network of graphic self-publishing fests"?

There are several zine fests currently going on in Madrid: Autozine (our good pals who are also taking the non-institutional route), Fanzimad, Guindazine, the Feria de Fanzines events at La Maripepa or Periferia Silvestre in Alcalá de Henares.
[LINKS: @autozinefest on I'gm; doing stuff here early next month; fanzimad.com, festival just past; @guindazine on I'gm, late fall fair; "Feria de Fanzines" impulsed by @LibritosJenkins on Twtr/X; @periferiasilvestre on I'gm]
We’d also like to mention our local predecessors: MEA, which lasted for a run of 3 editions and had a remarkably anti-establishment and DIY philosophy that served as a huge inspiration for us, and last but not least the one-shot Breve Encuentro de Fanzines in 2017 put together by Bombas Para Desayunar and Aplasta Tus Gafas de Pasta which was the spark from where Pichi Fest was born.

[LINKS: MEA, meamaravilloso.blogspot.com; Breve Encuentro of 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170328120902/http://breveencuentrodefanzines.tk/; http://bombasparadesayunar.com/ (blog of Andrea Galaxina); https://aplastatusgafasdepasta.bandcamp.com/ (musical group, "smash your big pasty glasses", a signature of Spanish yuppies)]

As for the rest of the country, and just to name a few: Tenderete (Valencia) – the longest running graphic self-publishing event in Spain – Gutter Fest (Barcelona), Skisomic (Sevilla), Guillotina Festa (Donostia), Autobán (A Coruña), Vaia Vaia (Lugo), Turbo (Guadalajara), Nosotros Feriantes (Cuenca), Entropia (Málaga), Pliegue (Tenerife), Mallorzines (Mallorca)…

[LINKS: tenderetefestival.com/, January, website includes interviews with participants; @gutterfestival on I'gm, mid-May in BCN; @gutterfestival on I'gm & http://gutterfest.org/; skisomicfest.tumblr.com, Sevilla; @guillotina_festa on I'gm, Donostia, aka San Sebastián in Basque country; autoban.gal & @autobanbd on I'gm in A Coruña; @vaiavaia.lugo on I'gm in Lugo; @turbo_guadalajara in Guadalajara; Nosotros Feriantes amosa.es/actividades/eventos/159_nosotros-feriantes, Cuenca; Entropia in Málaga, @entropia.llll on I'gm; Pliegue in Tenerife, teatenerife.es/actividad/pliegue-6/2787; @mallorzinesfira on I'gm; and "dot" "dot" fucking "dot"!]

Before the pandemic we were reaching a point in which there was a zine festival in every province, or at least some small self-publishing market. Now a similar situation seems to be slowly developing again. Of course some fests just disappeared or are struggling to make a comeback. Such is the nature of these events, as they are mostly run by one individual or very few people, and burn out is common. However, new ones keep emerging. Zinemaking has a very infectious energy and the existence of festivals is a direct consequence.

That’s amazing. Actually, it’s rather overwhelming.

I wonder if you have any thoughts on the difference of the zine scene with say, the artists' book network of the 1970s (e.g., the NYC bookstore Printed Matter, Ulises Carrion’s shop in Amsterdam, etc.) that became institutionalized, grant funded, acaddemically collected, etc., and the countercultural media movement of the '60s in USA and '80s in Spain (e.g., Pepe Rivas Ajoblanco, et al.). Maybe that's too geeky historical.

We are sorry to say we lack the historical knowledge to give a proper answer, and besides, we feel we are very distanced from those examples both as a festival and as individuals. The Pichi Crew has grown over the years to become quite a diverse group, some of us are just too young to have had any direct exposure to such cultural moments. Others are Latin American immigrants in Spain, and we each have a different relationship with the arts, if any. As an organization we constitute a mixed background that is Spanish-speaking but doesn’t necessarily always look to the Spanish scene nor is solely influenced by it. The only common ground is that we met each other in this city and our shared love for zines. Sorry, at some point we had a zine historian that could have given a good reply but they are not in the house right now, hahaha.

Ulises Carrión at Other Books and So, Amsterdam, 1975-79. Courtesy: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

However, we’re not strangers to the phenomenon of institutions co-opting the zine scene – zinesters seen as fodder to provide institutional events “content”, and people using zines merely as portfolio flex to try to get into the art world (something that apparently art schools have been pushing in the last few years). We won’t judge how anyone tries to make a living as an artist, but this is not our approach to zines nor is it something we want in our festival and the scene we are building. We also get a lot of submissions that are someone’s master’s thesis in the form of a zine, and many people that ask us questions as research for class papers, so definitely there seems to be a buzz around zines in art schools.
There’s also the topic you pointed out in your earlier email about a permanent space for zine related activity in Madrid – it is something that has been discussed and proposed several times in our circles – but rent is still the main problem. There are some ongoing zine archive initiatives both in the city and nearby, but it's hard for them to get established to the point of having a permanent space to check or borrow (there are notable exceptions, like Marcablanca or the Local Anarquista Magdalena). And as far as commercial spaces go, Madrid lacks something like Fatbottom Books in Barcelona, which also serves as a meeting point for zinesters and cartoonists.

[LINKS: La fanzinoteca de @lasosteniblealcala on I'gm; http://marcablanca.press/; https://localanarquistamagdalena.org/; https://fatbottombooks.com/]

Sure, zines have acquired a wider presence in the last few years, but zines are still usually found scattered in the least pleasant shelves of comic-book shops, alternative bookstores or anarchist spaces. They are never the main attraction.

About other questions you mention in the email, we think it would be especially interesting to talk about the possibility of a permanent space for zine-ifying in Madrid.
Thanks, and talk to you soon!
Gracias a vosotrxs!


Epilogue:
Clearly the zine scene in Spain is on fire.
From my perspective, there seems to be precious little room for independent non-commercial culture in this thoroughly neo-liberalized (and recently rather obviously corrupt) capitol city. Since the right-wing regained power in Madrid, watching the few bright spots fall away and be closed has been too depressing to blog. Moreover official Madrid culture has gotten really boring. The Pichifest is a bright spark of spirit in the gloom of this city.
Libros Mutantes, the Madrid Art Book Fair, will take place 26-28 April. That's cool; it's very crowded; it’s fun, and there was an open call. But it’s much more attuned to a normative “artists’ book” scene which the Pichis are at pains to disavow (curricula, grants, juries). Libros Mutantes is held in the administrated institutional space La Casa Encendida. (Few remember that the programs in that place were inspired early on by the late-'90s self-organized squatted social center El Laboratorio.)
For the most part, this elderly Anglo is seeing only two ends of the cultural spectrum, the institutional and the self-organized left. I got hip to the Pichis through following the okupa ESLA Eko’s activities. As the blizzardly rundown of Spanish zine fairs above makes clear, I simply did not get the memo.
It’s been some months since zine fever gripped me. I took positons in two festivals, one artistic and the other anarchist. “Tabling” fairs is a bunch of work for these old bones. But I love it. I love setting up my stuff, seeing other exhibitors, sitting and watching the browsing crowds. I love the ticklish engagement (or not) with a person looking closer, which might become a conversation, or just a “humph!”. Working a book table at a fair is something preciously real in our meat-starved screen-driven world.

LINKS

My blog post, “Art + Squat = Pichifest”
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
http://occuprop.blogspot.com/2023/11/art-squat-pichifest.html

Pichifest – @pichifest is everywhere – Tumblr, Instagram, "X", YouTube, podcast, woof!
See – https://linktr.ee/pichifest
(“link” what? Right.)

Espacio Sociocultural Liberado Autogestionado Eko
https://eslaeko.net/

Ateneo La Maliciosa
A meeting place run by Ecologistas en Acción de Madrid, Fundación de los Comunes and Traficantes de Sueños bookstore. They host regular events and classes.
https://ateneomaliciosa.net/

Ulises Carrión, 2016 exhibition at MNCARS, "Dear reader. Don’t read"
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/ulises-carrion

Exposición: “Ruptura, contestación y vitalismo (1974-1999)”; about the journal Ajoblanco and its times
https://www.ajoblanco.org/historico/exposicion-ruptura-contestacion-y-vitalismo-1974-1999-2-2

For links to the blizzard of zine fests referenced by the Pichis, see the text above. Most are on Instagram, so I’ve given the @hashtags only.