STRATEGIES FOR TEMPORARY USE
ABC No Rio mural. Photo: cmonster
Lecture delivered at the conference ‘The Temporary Use of Urban Voids’ held at the Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona (CCCB) on 24 November 2014. In winter 1979 on the Lower East Side of New York a group of artists broke into an abandoned building to stage an art exhibtion, protesting the city’s real estate policies. It wasn’t the intention in the beginning, but a cultural centre grew up in that building on the back of that initial action, and that centre was called ABC No Rio. They started hosting poetry readings and punk bands, art exhibitions, set up a zine library and built workshops for photography and silk screen printing. A community started to grow up around the centre. The owner was the city and after a while an agreement was made that ABC No Rio could rent the building at a very low cost on the condition that they left if and when the owner wanted the building back. Throughout this period, which lasted right through the 80s and into the 90s, relations with the city were quite strained. The rental agreement, finally broke down over a dispute about maintenance and the city wanted to evict. In the mid-nineties ABC
No Rio decided to take things into their own hands, to have the freedom to fix the heating when it broke. A group squatted the upper floors of the building to secure the building and they rallied the community for support. The city relented. And this situation carried on for a few more years, with the city seeking to evict and ABC No Rio fighting to stay. Things finally came to a head in 1999 after a final eviction attempt and major protests on the part of the cultural centre. The city offered to sell ABC No Rio the building for the sum of $1. There two conditions – the squatters had to leave and the organisation needed to raise the $5 million necessary to refurbish the building properly. That last bit was a struggle, not least because it’s hard to raise money to refurbish a building that you don’t own, but somehow they managed it. Their network helped. One day they even opened a letter and found an anonymous cheque for $1 million. They still don’t know who gave it to them. ABC is now busy constructing their new building on the site of the original one. In many ways it’s an exceptional story and in many ways ABC No Rio is different from the temporary use projects that we typically see in our cities, but there’s a key way in which it’s not different
Magic is something that we expect of temporary use projects. And that’s not good enough.