ARCHIVE
Onafhankelijk Cultureel Centrum In It
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Contents
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Preface: Archive fever
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Poster archive 24 Part one
Interview w/ Sjoerd Stolk
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Poster archive 72 Part two
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (The Garbage Man)
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Preface: Archive fever
This publication is the result of a typography class assignment at KABK Den Haag which was led by Matthias Kreutzer. The first impulse was discovery of a series of posters in the IISG archive in Amsterdam for the former squat and now legal and still functioning venue OCCII (Onafhankelijk Cultureel Centrum In It). This led to further investigation and a visit to the club itself. Core of the publication is an interview with Sjoerd Stolk, who has been the embodiment of OCCII since the early 2000s. For years he’s kept OCCII going, by ensuring a high-quality program, running errands and taking on odd-jobs, with the help of a large pool of volunteers. The publication also contains a selection of posters from the OCCII archive and also from the Amsterdam IISG archive. Last but not least there’s a
text by Ilya & Emilia Kabakov – The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (The Garbage Man). Kabakov constructed the fictional character of a crazed hoarder: his room like a landfill of memories, full of all sorts of labeled objects, yet this mysterious occupant was almost never seen. “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away” can be seen as a fable of the internet era: the archive can now be expanded to hold records of all media. In addition to printed matter and physical objects in a material sense, it also includes dematerialized forms of intelligence, information and data. The concept of “physical evidence” has been challenged, and archives that exist completely in a material sense are undergoing yet another “death” – what the The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away leaves behind might only exist in cyberspace.
Poster archive
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Part one
In 1992 the OCCII started as community and a club. Since then thousands of posters and other printed matter has been created for the club. Some of the posters (around 350) can be found in the IISG archive. Biggest collection is stored in OCCII itself, but it is very unorganised. Almost all of the posters only have a day and month printed on them but sadly not the year, so it’s very difficult to even determine the age of the posters or who created them.
OCCII has no centralized programming, which means that the agenda is created by multiple groups. Different events are organised by different groups of people. Which means that the printed matter is also created by multiple people. On the following pages you can find a pretty much random selection of posters and other printed matter photographed be me (David Ĺ rot) in the OCCII and also posters found in IISG archive.
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Interview w/ SJOERD STOLK
Created: 27. 2. 2020 11:49
Kind: APPLE MPEG-4 AUDIO
OCCII AMSTERDAM
Duration: 41:39
Recorded by: DAVID Å ROT
File name: AMSTELVEENSEWEG 134.m4a
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➀T he Bijlmermeer, or colloquially Bijlmer, is one of the neighbourhoods that form the Amsterdam Zuidoost borough. The Bijlmermeer neighbourhood, which today houses almost 50.000 people of over 150 nationalities, was designed as a single project as part of a then innovative Modernist approach to urban design. Led by architect Siegfried Nassuth and team, the original neighbourhood was designed as a series of nearly identical high-rise buildings laid out in a hexagonal grid➁.
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lot of things going on here. We run this place together as a collective, people who live here and the other groups. Since 1992 the OCCII started as community and a club. DS: And you have been here back then? SS: No no, I’ve been here since early 2000. DS: So you started also as a volunteer? SS: Yes. DS: And then you just stayed and kept working here? SS: Yea, I come from a small village up north near the coast. Some people also come from a squat scene and others were professional bands. The scene there was really small so I always had to go somewhere else to find a stage. Then in late 90s I moved to Amsterdam, I lived in the south-east in Bijlmer➀, it's really outside of everything. My school was there so I lived like next to my school. But there was nothing else so I was going back to my village and we did shows every weekend. DS: And you studied maths right? I think I read it somewhere in an interview. SS: Oh yeah, I studied to become a teacher. DS: So you never did that? SS: No no, I never finished school. In late 90s I became part of the squat scene in Amsterdam. DS: How was the squat scene back then, it was big right? SS: Yes it was. I wanted to be a teacher but I was also active in some activist groups. Someday I found a flyer in a toilet of a bar for a show in a squat. It was near the zoo, there were japanese bands playing there and that was really fucking huge squat with rooms where bands played and a big wood heater for burning wood in the middle and there was a bar, cinema and a radio and everything was there and it was amazing. That squat got evicted
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SS: There’s a whole
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in early 2001. I think, I’m not really sure. And I found out that most people that were involved moved to this place which was already legal. DS: They moved here? To the Binnenpret➀? SS: Yeah. So the kitchen from there moved, they started a kitchen here. In OCCII they were looking for people to make a new program so the people started to do shows here. And I saw the first bands here I think in 2001. And I stayed in Amsterdam and I became a volunteer. I was trying to book shows. I was sound engineer. So I could help with the sound, there was always need for that. DS: There are more groups that make the agenda, right? Are you also in one of them? SS: At the moment I’m not sure where I am, but 15 years ago I was doing shows with a group and that group changed. People move in and out of Amsterdam all the time. So at the moment I don’t really have a group. I do organize shows like tonight but then I always try to find people to do shows with me. DS: So whats happening tonight? SS: The Legendary Pink Dots➂, it’s a 40 years anniversary tour. I think first time I saw them in mid 90s somewhere. They are not that legendary but they are cult band. They have their base of fans – old and young. Because their last record is really really fantastic. It’s all now digital. DS: Does OCCII also have a label? Do you release music? I have checked discogs and I found that there are some records listed. SS: We do. On the discogs you can find many. But it’s all self-released. So it’s not by OCCII, but people record live shows here and then they release it themselves. Then it’s listed under OCCII, so it’s a bit of a bootleg or something. So I try to keep
➀ Binnenpret is a complex of buildings with various political and cultural initiatives. On Friday, February 10, 1984, these nineteenth century draw horse stables designed by Abraham Salm in the Oud Zuid (Old South) area of Amsterdam were squatted as part of the “Day of Unrest”, organised by the Amsterdam squatters’ movement. This was a protest against the imminent eviction of the huge “Wijers” squat complex on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, to build a Holiday Inn hotel. Wijers was evicted four days later by a force majeure of the police➁, who had great difficulty due to the passive resistance of 1500 to 2000 squatters. Some people who were active in Wijers came to the newly squatted complex after the eviction. In the early days, the complex offered space for initiatives such as the Phenomena sauna, the Binnenpretjes playground, the Moroccan youth center Chabab, the Farafina bicycle workshop, music studios, the OCCII concert hall, the Kasbah café, the Wijnand Stomp children’s theater practice area (taken over by Teatro Munganga since 1988), the Bollox information center, the restaurant Zorro’s Zion (also under that name in Wijers, later became The Byre, now MKZ), five studio spaces, a few houses and a lush green courtyard. ➁
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track of this on discogs and now I have almost two pages of releases. And I always write to them and try to ask for a copy. DS: So you could say that OCCII is also a kind of a label. SS: Yeah. We also release a record last year for the 25th anniversary and we are going to release a 7 inch in may – four bands. We are still looking for a way to have more shows recorded live and put it on bandcamp or somewhere. But it’s a big mess. DS: Is there also a radio station here? SS: We now host Radio Patapoe➃. That’s a pirate radio station. DS: So they really hijack a frequency? SS: Not anymore because all the frequencies are sold. But we still have our old frequency 88.3 but the signal is really weak. We have an antenna, so I think you can hear us when you walk around the building. But it’s really difficult now to get really into the air again. But it’s been part of the squat movement since the 80s and it has been around for many years. DS: The building➄ was squatted in the 80s, when did it become OCCII? Was it music club right from the beginning? SS: No, it was really organic this whole building. There were some people with workspaces behind the stage and then there’s this hallway to the garden so we have a courtyard – there’s 2 buildings. I think in 80s this place where we are now was a squat bar. This has always been a bar and downstairs was a gym school and also a dive school. There was a 4 metres deep pool and you could take diving lessons there. In the late 80s there was a fight with the squatters and then they left so in 89–91 there was a bit of transition. The OCCII downstairs was empty and there wasn’t much that you
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could do there. Then some people from down the street who also lived in squat used it for rehearsal space. Then they did also theatre and performance art and music. But there was nothing in there – the floor was all gone, there was just sand. Then in 1992 the whole collective got a rent permit from the city. DS: So now you have a permit for how long? SS: Untill infinity. The whole collective can stay with the same rent for atleast 50 years. DS: Were you involved when there was the transition from squat to rent? SS: Yeah the same people that were involved are still part of it. Not all of them but few yes. In a way we all feel like one family. The thing is when they cut a deal with the counsel, the counsel said: “Okay, you will take care of the building and you will pay fixed amount to us because we own the ground.” So the price was fixed and it was less then any rent you could find in Amsterdam. But then you have to take care of the building. So they said okay lets unite and we’ll make a contract – you pay fixed amount but there’s also costs to maintain the building and that we have to do ourselves. We do a big checkup every 10 years. In past 30 years we did the roof, the floors, the walls, well everything basically. DS: The building is super old right? It’s a cultural heritage. SS: Yes its the first public transport depo – for the horse trams. Tram 1. It was build in 1880 and few years later electricity took over so it wasn’t used much until second world war when the germans came. Some local groups used it back then. After second world war the amsterdam housing company took over to start a carpentry maintenance business.
➀ The building➁ the OCCII resides in was built as a horse tram garage with stables in 1883–1884 by architect Abraham Salm (1857–1915), who also designed (together with his father G. B. Salm) the buildings where popular commercial venues Melkweg and Paradiso now operate. Visitors of OCCII often ask about the story behind the venue’s decorated facade. The general story is that the front of the building was an example of “folly architecture,” which basically meant that it was made to look bizarre without a purpose. In the late 18th century it was fashionable to build follies, and on the Amstelveenseweg there were more examples, which have now all been demolished. The story goes that this ornate architecture was to please the “rich kids” of the day who where parading around the Vondelpark and chic south Amsterdam with their horse and carriages on Sundays. ➁ OCCII building March 24th 1953
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was also a paint facility, right? they used it for all kinds of things until 1984 when they moved out and then couple of hours later it was squatted. It was one big day of chaos and anarchy in Amsterdam and they squatted all the buildings they could in Amsterdam. DS: I have seen the picture➀ when the deal was signed with the city, there’s this guy sitting in a mask. SS: Oh yeah, that’s a good one. There is also a “lookbook” somewhere, with photographs from the first days of the squat. The people were inside saying this is so fucking huge, help, we need more help! And now you can see how the whole neigborhood has changed in past 20 years, cos it was kind of forgotten area. DS: But now it looks like a nice place to live. SS: It’s impossible to live here anymore. It’s so expensive. We had really good neigbors, they had a dance school since 1930s and they all lived in this area but now they are all gone. They are either dead or they moved out, because the prices were too high here. DS: Yea I’ve heard that the housing situation is super shitty here. SS: And also the shops. There’s not many shops anymore it’s all restaurants now and the restaurants really are high standart, they don’t want you to get take away and so on. DS: So more about the music maybe... The building turned into a music venue in early 90s. Was it strict in terms of genres or was there all kids of gigs here➁? SS: I should have taken the posters out before you got here, they are locked over there. When I did some research also myself I found out that not much has changed in these past 30 years almost in terms genres. Only thing is that now there is more people helping and we try to SS: Yeah
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➁P rogramming at OCCII is “Do It Yourself” (DIY). This means that if you want to organize something, you have to arrange everything yourself. The band. the equipment, the food, a sleeping place. But also publicity, posters, flyers social media. A crew who runs the bar in the evening, and at the end of the evening everything is cleared away. If necessary, you will be accompanied by a volunteer from OCCII. Just like everywhere in the arts, for OCCII too there’s a struggle to keep it running financially. Raising the price of entrance tickets isn’t an option: written into the founding statute from 1992 is OCCII’s intent to ‘adapt entrance costs and consumption prices to unaffluent visitors’. And though independence has also been built into the identity – the name OCCII, ‘Onafhankelijk [independent] Cultureel Centrum In It’, asserts its independent position – this aspect doesn’t apply anymore, financially, at least, since 2013, when OCCII started receiving a subsidy from the town hall. Sjoerd doesn’t think that the subsidy affects OCCII contentwise, mostly it just enables them to continue putting together a good programme. “Many venues,” Sjoerd says, “have gotten into the ‘subsidy wringer’ twenty or thirty years ago, but OCCII has only started looking for possibilities a year ago.” It became necessary because acts have started to ask for more money. “That’s also a mentality that has changed, because more and more gigs are being organised via booking agencies.
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get everybody involved around this table more then in the past when it was like on the monday there was jazz, after that more rough stuff, thursday was like african percussion but all that didn’t really interact with each other. SS: But at the same time there were like 6 people, they had a job here paid by the government, so they had social benefits in the 90s and they did all the renovations and maintanence. They did isolation because this whole place has wooden carcass, so they made walls inside these walls. So 90s were more about like hmm... every week there was something happening but not necessarily, the bar was open every week like 2 or 3 times. So yeah, things happened but then most of the punks that were in Amsterdam in the 90s that were in bands wanted to do shows more than others. DS: The punk music was tightly connected to the squatters movement right? SS: Of course, there were many squats in town at that time but there was also a lot of changes happening faster than before and some people thought maybe we should keep OCCII open for benefits or for bigger bands or for bands that come on tour, because when you are on tour you have to book and pay in advance. So they started to book more bands in advance here to make some money for the scene. That was like from 1992 to 2000 there was a lot of things happening here but was also were local and very connected to the squat scene. DS: But it was still quite international right? SS: Yeah very international, but that’s Amsterdam and also the squat movement in the 90s. We had many refugees from Balkan,
➀ The first listed recording done in 1994 is cassette tape album called Encyclopedia Galactica➁ by a experimental, noise, post-punk band called GNOT from the Netherlands. There is not much information available online about the tape or the band. Only the names of musicians from the band and a tracklist:
A1 Deep Probe Expeditions A2 Nervennacht A3 Questions Pour La Main A4 Drawn Up / Blown Up A5 Illegal Date Machine A6 The Voice Of Glagolitia B1 Boulli Boulli Gh B2 Het Paleis Op De Vuilnisberg B3 Euro God B4 Flattsscchh! B5 Doing Life B6 Massacre Highlights
➁T he name of the album refers to a fictional or hypothetical encyclopedia containing all the knowledge accumulated by a galaxy-spanning civilization. The name evokes the exhaustive aspects of the real-life Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopedia Galactica first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s short story “Foundation”➂ (Astounding Science Fiction, May 1942), later republished as “The Encyclopedists” in the short-story collection Foundation (1951).
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➃S taalplaat is an independent record label that is located in Amsterdam with a separate store in Berlin. Founded in 1982, the company’s mission was to create a sound forum for sound artists, who write and perform new and experimental music.
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eastern Germany and Hungary and in Spain there was connection with Catalunia. So it has always been kind of international. DS: Do you know when the first recording here was done? Because I found a casette tape➀ on Discogs which was from around 1994. SS: In OCCII? Yeah that must be the first probably. I know there was a collective in Amsterdam called Staalplaat➃, they are now in Berlin but they used to have a shop in Amsterdam and they did performance art kind of parties between 80s and 90s and I heard stories that when they came in this whole place was empty. They had to bring their own soundsystem and do everything on their own and of course they were all on drugs so shit was really going wrong, sometimes people didn’t show up and so on... And some of these people are still connected to us, I’ll probably see some of them tonight. I can ask them if they have ever recorded anything in here. SS: Like I said in the beginning people weren’t that much connected to this place, but to the scene. When I came here around 2001 it was more like same people taking care of the bands and the volunteers here. And the we also used the restaurant where we cooked every week for the bands but also for the people in the street, in the neighborhood. Now we have a recording studio in the building. I found many old posters and agendas from that time. DS: Do you think that there is like a certain visual identity or style connected to this place? Was there ever one person that did all the stuff, all the printed matter? Or did the bands do it themselves? SS: It varied. I heard that in the beginning, there was a guy called Baz and
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I think his father had a print shop so he went there to print. And you see in the beginning it was very colorful. Very big offset posters. And then they became smaller but even more colourfull and then untill the late 90s it hadn’t really changed. Then a friend of the people who ran this place – Mike, came and he did silkscreening. And he did different sized posters and they were really popular. They were very beautiful. DS: Did you hand them out at the concerts? SS: No, I think they just printed around 100–150. They were A2 printed two at once and then cut apart. We did the distribution ourselves. We went to all the squats and other group houses also in the streets. But mostly in the different buildings. We had a list of every neighborhood in Amsterdam there were like 50 places you could go to at that time, that was 20 years ago. SS: I remember – it was around 2004, we squatted a building near the Westerkerk➀ and then we went in they took out all the ceilings and you could really look up high there was only one way up and we went there and there was a wall covered with OCCII posters. And this was already a squat years before. I saw like posters from the 90s from this place. DS: Do you think there is a copy here of every single poster made for OCCII? SS: No not anymore. DS: So you didn’t archive them? SS: The posters that Mike made, they were so popular that people just took them to their own personal collection. I tried to collect them for the IISG (international institute of social history in Amsterdam)➁. DS: So it was you who gave them to the archive? SS: Well when I came to IISG there were already a lot of them in the
➀ The Westerkerk is a Reformed church within Dutch Protestant Calvinism in central Amsterdam. It lies in the most western part of the Grachtengordel neighborhood (Centrum borough), next to the Jordaan, between the Prinsengracht and Keizersgracht. Couple of fun facts: Rembrandt van Rijn was buried somewhere under a tombstone in the Westerkerk on October 8, 1669. The exact location of the grave is unknown. The tower, called the Westertoren (“Western tower”), is the highest church tower in Amsterdam, at 87 meters (±286 feet). ➁ The International Institute of Social History (IISH/IISG) is one of the largest archives of labor and social history in the world. Located in Amsterdam, its one million volumes and 2,300 archival collections include the papers of major figures and institutions in radical leftist thought. The IISH was founded in 1935 by Nicolaas Posthumus as an independent scientific institute. It is part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The archive is also the place where I have found all the OCCII posters and thanks to that this publication exists.
➂ Bookshop “het Fort van Sjakoo” has been situated in the center of Amsterdam since 1977. At first in a squatted house on the site of a planned highway through the inner-city and legalized since 1988. The Fort of Sjakoo Jacob Frederik Muller was born in Hamburg in the year 1690. He was the terror of early eighteen-century Holland. Probably the name of Jacob had been corrupted to Jaco, or Sjakoo when he was a young man. As early as
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archive. I think around 350. But there’s a book shop in Amsterdam – Het fort van Sjakoo➂, in Waterlooplein. And that’s a radical bookstore. People that work there have a strong connection with the Binnerpret, OCCII and also with the IISG archive. So there were people there taking down the old posters every month and they gave them to the archive. DS: Oh okay so you think all the posters in the archive come from these people from the book shop? SS: Yeah, that’s what I think. When I was there with Matthias Kreutzer, we did a book around 2009 or 2010, there was already a lot of posters there. Then a friend of mine started to work there and she said give us more so we can digitalize them. But then I think some funds got cut down or they didn’t have the time, money or people to digitalize it. I haven’t really checked in past 5 or 6 years, but I think it’s still kind of the same collection. SS: Anyway I have a huge archive here now and I really try to keep 1 of atleast every monthly poster but also from the other events. DS: Who makes these posters? SS: Since 3 years ago it’s Rogier, he’s a volunteer here, before him it was Karoline, she had a connection with Rietveld academy. Before it was Johan, german guy that moved in also for the Rietveld academy. DS: These people made all the posters, for every band? SS: No, the OCCII makes monthly programs and posters so we are talking about these now. Every evening there are different people and bands, so they are free to make whatever they want. So there are also different posters for all these events. I try to collect them, take them off the wall. We have connection with two printshops in
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1714 he had to appear in court. He was flogged and branded, and convicted to 25 years in a house of correction. He soon escaped and formed a gang in the eastern part of Holland. Within a year he returned to Amsterdam, and took up residence at the Elandsgracht. Soon the numbers 71-77 were known as the ‘Fort of Sjakoo’. The houses were provided with escape routes, secret passages, hidden trapdoors and box beds that could be reached by way of two separate rooms. But the houses were not a fortress as such. “Fort” was a name frequently applied to a group of houses towering above smaller neighbours. Sjakoo was arrested again in January 1716. He managed to escape in May, but made the mistake by celebrating his regained freedom lavishly in the outskirts of Amsterdam. In the middle of his carousal he was hauled in. His execution took place in public on the 6th of August 1718. He was decapitated in Amsterdam after having been broken on the wheel. His remains were tied to a wheel, and his head stuck on a pin in the gallows-field until they would be decayed. The Dutch author Justus van Maurik visited the notorious part of Elandsgracht some two centuries after Sjakoo’s residence there, just before the houses were to be pulled down. They had fallen into decay, not in de last place due to the persistent rumour that Sjakoo had hidden a treasure somewhere on the premises. In their desire for money the occupants had left no stone unturned. Meanwhile, after a few generations, the image had arisen of a Dutch Robin Hood, of a noble man, who only stole from the rich.
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Amsterdam, they do Riso prints and one of them also can do full color and there is also a third printshop. One of my friends who plays in punk band for 40 years and he has a collection of letterpress letters but it’s a kind that you can use only once. It looks like a really oldschool stamp but its actually a sticker. But he also gave them to my friend Rogier who is more into drawing and crazy figures➀➁ but he’s using the same letters, because they share the collection which they have for 20 years already. DS: During the squat era, were there some printshops operating from squats? SS: In 90s most of them were printed by Baz, I don’t remeber the name of his printshop. DS: Was it a squat printshop? SS: No it was a regular printshop. But then when I was involved with the squat scene in early 2000s we had a place called Stencil Kelder, it was a basement in squat with a lot of stencil machines. We made like a monthly book/zine for the squat movement with articles which we cut out of newspapers and then we collected that and we shared that. But we also printed many posters and booklets, zines, pamphlets there. There were 2 or 3 bigger printers like Kaboem. He has also offset and he can also do full color and he’s also been involved since 80s. He was also one of these people who had like a social benefit. SS: So they print for the community without making any money. You just pay a little bit so they can take care of the machines. And at the moment we as OCCII kind of give him a loan so he can pay for the machines and so we can print there. We kind of help each other to survive these crazy times. Printing was always part of the scene. The paper jam is
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kind of new they are also located in the east, there’s not a squat anymore but they print a lot. I don’t know how they do it but they are cheaper then anybody else in town. They just have the normal digital printers, but they are growing really fast. At the moment they also reprint all the anarchist magazines from 80s and 90s to keep them going. DS: I have also found a really interesting magazine called Vital➂ in the IISG archive. Have you ever heard of it? It’s about experimental electronic and noise music. SS: Yea Vital weekly by Frans De Waard, he’s coming to the show tonight probably. He’s really dedicated guy. He also worked for Staalplaat in 80s and 90s and he wrote a book about that and he had presentation about it here in OCCII few years back. SS: But I have never seen a real copy➃ of the Vital. It’s called Vital weekly now and it’s only online. He had a big cassette tape archive, he was into cassettes a lot in the 80s. But i was mixing him up with this Oscar guy who had a tape archive. Frans did a lot of reviews he started in magazine I think it was called vinyl and they are also doing some kind of restart – reprint. The thing tonight – Legendary Pink Dots they come from that area around Nijmegen. SS: Frans has been doing this nonstop since the 80s. DS: On the vital website there is around 1200 issues already. It’s just text website, really interesting. SS: He is saying for years already that he’s going to stop because it’s all volunteer dedicated work. He only reviews hard copies. So you have to send in a tape or cd or whatever. DS: So he doesn’t do digital? SS: No because he doesn’t want to do that. And also when it’s not his cup of tea he sells the records, so
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➂V ital is a magazine focused on experimental electronic music. It started in 1987 as magazine on paper. It’s simple xeroxed form ensured a free copyright and everybody was encouraged to make copies and distribute them freely. Up until 1995 44 issues were made and with the arrival of the Internet, Vital changed into a pure e-mail review newsletter and since then it appears weekly. Still as a free service and still without copyright. Some of the issues are also archived in IISG Amsterdam.
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that’s how he makes some money atleast. He’s really dedicated he listens to music every part of day and he reviews everything that people send him. SS: When I got here, in like 1996 they had a shop, a bookstore and Staalplaat was in the basement and I was there almost every week. But Staalplaat and the shop ended up in a fight. That’s the same bookshop that we were talking about earlier – Fort van Sjakoo. Staalplaat later moved out. DS: There is also a library here in the Binnerpret right? SS: Yeah it’s from an anarchist group, open every saturday. It’s part of the infoshop The Bollocks, which is open every day. DS: There is around 350 posters in the archive. But thousands must exist somewhere right? SS: Yea we do around 140 shows a year. Not every show has poster but most of them do. It’s been 30 years. It would be nice to make a call–out and collect all the printed material. Make collection and a catalogue maybe. That would be nice. But you have already seen what is at the institute IISG? DS: Yes, i went through it but it’s difficult because they are very strict about handing out the physical items. They have it all scanned in high resolution so you can download these images when you go to the archive. But they don’t give you the physical poster. SS: Few years ago we had a 25th anniversary and I was talking to some people and then I got number of one of the guys that works there. And he said that I could bring my laptop and he would give me the files. But there were a lot restrictions if we want to use it for printing. DS: I don’t know how it works but it’s copyrighted by the archive. SS: There’s this guy Eric, former
➀ The anarchist library➁ is an initiative of the AGA ( Anarchistische Groep Amsterdam). The AGA is a group of people who cooperate in the creation of solutions and alternatives for problems encountered at work and in society. The AGA strives for a world without hierarchy, exploitation and repression, in which people produce according to necessity and not according to profit. If you would like to meet them or exchange ideas, please come to the library and they will welcome you there. The anarchist library is open every Saturday from 14:00 to 18:00 in cafe The Bollox @ De Binnenpret. They have an extensive collection ranging from anarchist classics to the lastest publications on economic theory, queer perspectives, radical art, government infiltration and squatting. Other topics are anti-fascism, animal liberation, feminism, ecology, history, biographies and prison struggle. ➁
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➂S joerd Stolk on the day of the interview – 27. 2. 2020
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squatter and he made a book Bucket and paint. He is the head of one of the departments in the archive I think. He told me that it was possible if OCCII would use the material from the archive for a publication. But he said that it’s not possible to have it published by any publisher and to make money out of it. DS: Okay let’s have a look at the posters then!➂
Poster archive
Part two
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ILYA & EMILIA KABAKOV The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away The Garbage Man On the table, when I started to straighten it up in April.
I was cutting out a photograph.
A strong spring rain was falling.
I ate sausage.
April 17.
I was sharpening a pencil.
In the evening.
I cut out a newspaper.
I was eating a bun.
I ate an egg.
I was sewing something.
From a flower.
I was sharpening a pencil.
I was peeling potatoes.
From a flower.
From a lemon.
I was sharpening a pencil.
I cut out an article.
I ate a candy.
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I don’t know. I was sharpening a pencil. From a shirt. From a pen. A telegram. I don’t know. From a magazine. I was picking my teeth. He never threw anything away The Garbage Man Sitting in his corner (he lived his life in a small room located at the very farthest corner of an enormous communal apartment), he almost never went out anywhere, except for work, from which he would quickly return home. He lived completely alone. Spending all his time in his room, he would come out to the kitchen and other common areas only in the case of extreme necessity. What he did in his room remained unknown to all the inhabitants of the overcrowded communal apartment. The communal apartment was located in an old building which hadn’t been renovated in years. It was occupied, as a rule, by occasional tenants who would quickly move to other apartments, and their places would be taken by new ones. Despite regular cleaning – both weekly and major – in the corridors, kitchen, and the common room (that’s what the tiny kennel was called where the tenants stored oversized things that didn’t fit in their rooms, like chests of drawers, trunks, old refrigerators, etc.), there was always a heap of undiscarded things. No one knew who these things belonged to, what they were for, nor was it known whether the
owners of these things still lived in the apartment or if they had left already. These things were scattered in all the corners, hung on the walls, standing along the entire length of the hallway. Because of all of this, the apartment acquired the appearance of a mysterious cave, full of stalactites and stalagmites, with a narrow passageway between them leading to the always open kitchen door in the distance, illuminated by a 20-watt bulb. Many such incidental things, abandoned and forgotten, were also lying in the stairwell of our fourstory building, in the two main stairways and the two back ones. Near the large discarded things (big wardrobes, cast-iron stoves, couches, and other household junk) smaller things were piled up on all sides and on top (pipes, crates, boxes, old buckets, bottles, both broken and whole)... The line of these things, like some sort of uninterrupted procession, reached the semi-circular gateway of our building and even spilled out onto the street. It seemed that this variegated crowd of things sort of peeped out from above, as though waiting for someone or hoping to set off on some distant journey... That’s why no one in our building, and even more so in our apartment, could be surprised by any kind of garbage whatsoever – neither by its appearance or quantity. And nevertheless, there came a time when even the residents of apartment No. 8 in building No. 4 on Pryanishnikov Lane, people who were so accustomed to garbage in all of its forms, were truly shocked. This happened under the following circumstances. For many years, a ‘water meter’ lived in our apartment. This was known to be a fact, although no one had ever seen it. When the children misbehaved and ran screaming through the corridor, they were told that it would jump out and eat them. It resided in the room of that same resident which we spoke about in the beginning of the
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story. Once, when it had already gotten quite cold and it was necessary to check the heat, we were visited by three grease-covered men with wrenches in their hands demanding that we tell them where the ‘meter’ was located. Uncle Misha, who was the senior tenant responsible for the apartment, pointed to the door where the ‘meter’ supposedly lived. The door was locked. The grease-covered men were ‘doing their jobs’ and they had to ‘get the building on line.’ Since the senior tenant and witnesses were present, it was decided to break down the door, which was done in an instant. The ‘meter’ was not in the room. The people with the wrenches left, but all those who had entered the room along with Uncle Misha couldn’t regain their wits for a long time, and they stood transfixed, looking around in amazement. The entire room, from floor to ceiling, was filled with piles of different types of garbage. But this wasn’t a disgusting, stinking garbage dump like in the courtyard or in the large bins near the gates of our building, but rather a gigantic warehouse of the most varied things, arranged in a special, one might say, in a carefully maintained order. Flat things formed a pyramid in one corner, all types of containers and jars were placed in appropriate boxes along the walls. In between hanging bunches of garbage stood some sort of shelves, upon which numerous boxes, rags, and sticks were arranged in strict order... Almost all the shelves were accurately labeled, and each item had a five- or six-digit number glued on it and a label attached to it from below. There were also lots of things on a big table standing in the middle of the room, but these things did not have numbers or labels on them yet: piles of paper, manuscripts... Senior tenant Uncle Misha bent over one of the manuscripts and read: Garbage (article).
Garbage Usually, everybody has heaps of accumulated papers that stream into our homes daily piled up under their table, on their desk, on their telephone table. Our home literally stands under a paper rain: magazines, letters, addresses, receipts, notes, envelopes, invitations, outlines, programs, telegrams, wrapping paper, etc. We periodically sort and arrange these streams, waterfalls of paper into groups, and these groups are different for everyone: a group of valuable papers, a group of momentous, a group of pleasant recollections, a group for every unforeseen occasion – every person has his own principle. The rest, of course, is tossed out in the rubbish heap. It is precisely this division of important papers from unimportant ones that is particularly difficult and tedious, but everyone knows that it is necessary, and after the sorting, everything is more or less in order until the next deluge. But if you don’t do these sortings, these purges, and you allow the flow of paper to engulf you, considering it impossible to separate the important from the unimportant – wouldn’t that be insanity? When is this possible? It is possible when a person honestly doesn’t know what is important in these papers and what is unimportant, why one principle of selection is better than another, and what distinguishes a pile of necessary papers from a pile of garbage. A completely different correlation arises in his consciousness: should everything, without exception, that is before his eyes in the form of an enormous paper sea be considered valuable or garbage, and then, should it all be saved or thrown away? Given such an attitude, the vacillations in making such a choice become extremely agonizing. A simple feeling speaks about the value, the importance of everything. This feeling is familiar to everyone who
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has looked through or rearranged his accumulated papers: this is the memory associated with all the events connected with each of these papers. To deprive ourselves of these paper symbols and testimonies is to deprive ourselves somewhat of our very memories. In our memory, everything becomes equally valuable and significant. All points of our recollections are tied to one another, they form chains and connections in our memory, which ultimately comprise our life, the story of our life. To deprive ourselves of all of this means to part with who we were in the past, and in a certain sense, it means to cease to exist. But on the other hand, simple common sense tells us that with the exception of important papers, memorable postcards and other letters which are dear to the heart, the rest is nothing valuable and is simply junk. For after all, this entire pile of papers consisted of paid receipts, old movie or train tickets, reproductions which were given as gifts or bought, a magazine or newspaper read long ago, a note about something that either has or hasn’t already been done, but in any case, can’t be fixed now. But where does this view come from, a view cast from the sidelines onto our papers? Why must we agree with this detached view and allow it to determine the applicability or uselessness of these things? Why must we look at our past from today and not consider it to be our own, or what’s worse, to reproach or laugh at it? Yes, but who can, who has the right to look at my life from the outside, even if that other is that same I, only at ‘that’ instant, at the moment that these papers are viewed? Why should common sense be stronger than my memories, stronger than all the moments of my life which are connected with these scraps of paper which now seem funny and useless? Here, of course, one might object that these memories exist only for me,
while for others who don’t know my memories, these papers are simply trash. Yes, but why do I have to part with my memories that are contained in such scraps that externally resemble garbage? I don’t understand this. Grouped together, bound in folders, these papers comprise the single uninterrupted fabric of an entire life, the way it was in the past and the way it is now. And though inside these folders there appears to be an orderless heap of pulp, for me there is an awful lot in this garbage, almost everything. Moreover, strange as it seems, I feel that it is precisely the garbage, the very dirt where important papers and simple scraps are mixed and unsorted, that comprises the genuine and only real fabric of my life, no matter how ridiculous and absurd it seems from the outside. Uncle Misha raised his head and in a sort of bewilderment looked around the small room. He saw his neighbors who were swarming in the diverse garbage. He mechanically went up to the shelf where brown folders were packed tightly together, the kind of folders that are usually used for files in book-keeping departments. He pulled out one of these at random and read: Garbage Novel, volume 19. It consisted of carefully bound pieces of paper on which were glued the most diverse nonsense – receipts, envelopes, simple scraps of paper or cardboard, strings, etc. Under each scrap there was a number and above it an asterisk which usually indicates a footnote. Uncle Misha glanced at the back of the book, and actually saw that the last pages were devoted to commentaries on these garbage scraps. So, the note corresponding to the tram ticket under No. 8 read: “I went to Maria Ignatievna’s with some things, it was raining and I didn’t have my raincoat, I had left it at home.” Another commentary corresponded to a needle glued along with a thread under No. 48: “I found this on
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February 17 under the table, but I didn’t need it anymore... It seemed that Uncle Misha was beginning to understand what was happening around him. Now, going up to large bundles of old boots, tin cans, and similar junk which were hanging on long ropes attached to a nail driven deep into the wall, he could already guess what might be written on the white square tied to each of these things. In fact, these were also commentaries: under a pair of old shoes was written, “I took these from Nikolai last year, but didn’t return them, I forgot for some reason...” Under an old rusty can containing sprats in tomato sauce was this: “Volodya and I had lunch last year when he was passing through on his way from Voronezh.” For some reason, the senior tenant didn’t feel quite himself. He looked around. There was no one left in the room but him. The tenants of the communal apartment, apparently not considering the affairs of this resident to be sufficiently interesting, had wandered back to their own corners. The senior tenant also decided to leave quickly, especially since it was getting dark and less and less light was penetrating the dusty, though large, window of the room. But near the door, struggling through dozens of cardboard boxes filled with numerous papers, documents, certificates, and the like, and on which was scribbled Book of Life, volumes 18-26, he again stopped near an enormous heap of manuscripts. Having decided to satisfy his curiosity for the last time, Uncle Misha took out his glasses, leaned over and read the following: The Dump The whole world, everything which surrounds me here, appears to me a boundless dump with no ends or borders, an inexhaustible diverse sea of garbage. In this refuse of an enormous city one can feel the powerful breathing of its
entire past. This whole dump is full of flashes, twinkling stars, reflections, and fragments of culture: either some sort of book, or a sea of some magazines with photographs and texts, or things that were used by some people... An enormous past rises up behind these crates, vials, and sacks; all forms of packaging that were ever needed by man have not lost their shape, they did not become something dead when they were discarded. They cry out about a past life, they preserve it... And this feeling of a unity of the entire past life, and at the same time the feeling of the separateness of its components, engenders an image... It’s hard to say what kind of image this is... Well, maybe, an image of a certain civilization which is slowly sinking under the pressure of unknown cataclysms, but in which nevertheless some sort of events are taking place. The feeling of a vast, cosmic existence seizes a person at such dumps. This is by no means a feeling of neglect, of the perishing of life, but just the opposite – a feeling of its return, a full circle, because as long as memory exists that’s how long everything that is connected to life will live. But still, why does the dump and its image attract my imagination over and over again, why do I always return to it? Because I feel that a person living in our region is simply suffocating in his own life among the garbage since there is nowhere to take it, nowhere to sweep it out – we have lost the border between garbage and non-garbage space. Everything is covered up, littered with garbage – our homes, streets, cities. We have no place to discard all this, it remains near us. I see all life surrounding me as consisting only of garbage. Since it just moves from place to place, it doesn’t disappear. In the entrance to our building, a person goes downstairs with the garbage pail, losing half of its contents along the way, and he himself can’t
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quite understand where and why he is carrying it, and he throws away the pail, having never reached his goal ... And this merging of the two spaces – the place from which the garbage must be taken and the place to which it must be taken – this kind of ‘unity of oppositions’ which we were told about when we were still in school, functions as a real unity, a genuine indistinguishability of one from the other. How does a construction site differ from a garbage dump? The building across the street has been under construction for 18 years already, and it is impossible to tell it apart from the ruins of the other buildings which were demolished in order to build this one. This new one, which has been a ruin now for a long time where some men occasionally swarm about, may at some point be finished, although they say that the blueprints are very outdated and have been redone many times and it even seems that they have been lost, and the first floor is covered with water... Looking at it, it is difficult to understand whether it is being built or torn down, and it may be both at the same time... Of course, one may look at the whole unity from an optimistic point of view. A dump not only devours everything, preserving it forever, but one might say that it also continually generates something: this is where new growths appear, new projects, ideas, a certain unique enthusiasm arises, hopes for the rebirth of something, though everyone knows that all of this will just be covered over with new layers of garbage. But still, sometimes one must wonder – are there no such enormous dumps in other countries? Is there no garbage, are there only ‘clean products?’ I once went to visit my relatives in Czechoslovakia and I remember that the biggest impression was made on me by the cleanliness there. Why, why is it so clean there? I deliberately
looked in the corners – our corners are especially dirty and unswept – and they were just as clean as the middle of our rooms. After all, we – I remember from childhood – clean up only the middle a little bit so there is a place to sit and eat, and the edges and corners we clean sometime later, since after all, you can’t see them and no one looks there anyway. But in Czechoslovakia, you don’t need to look in the corner either, but it’s clean, too. It’s as though they clean all the time, scrubbing, taking out the garbage – where do they get the time! – and everything is taken to some other place and not left nearby, everything is taken out, carried off somewhere ‘far away.’ And then it hit me: how can they discard things close by when the building is so clean, and next to it and behind it is also so clean – and there is nowhere to dump the things, they have to be taken somewhere far away ... In our country garbage is discarded right next to the building. All you have to do is to take it beyond the threshold, no man’s land. All the neighbors sweep and discard things in the backyard – look how much land there is that belongs to no one. And what about this land which belongs to no one behind our house and has become a dump? Won’t it return to us, doesn’t it loom threateningly beyond our walls, like an enemy surrounding a fortress, returning over and over again to our building, submerging it? And what if it’s even worse than that? It’s frightening to even think about it: our entire place, all of our enormous territory is a dumping ground for the garbage from all the rest of the world? It had already gotten dark in the room. “The occupant should arrive any minute now,” thought senior tenant Uncle Misha. He made his way to the door, stepped out, carefully closed the door behind him and in place of the broken lock he securely tied the two latches on the door together with a piece of paper twine he had in his pocket.
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He carefully inserted a piece of paper into the knot which read: “Opened by order of the ZhEK at 12:20 to check the heating system. For information, contact the office of ZhEK.� Senior tenant responsible for apartment No. 8. Parkhomenko, M. O.
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Colophon
This publication is the result of a typography class assignment at KABK Den Haag in summer semester of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concept, editing & design David Šrot www.zdaar.com Printing & binding www.lulu.com Typefaces Circular Pro Akzidenz Grotesk Pro Thanks to Sjoerd Stolk Matthias Kreutzer Image credits pp.7, 39, 41, 79 © David Šrot; pp.8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 © International Institute of Social History Amsterdam; p.25 © 99percentinvisible.org; pp.26, 27, 28, 30, 38 © binnenpr.home.xs4all.nl; p.29 © radical-guide.com; p.33 © risingshadow. net; p.36 © Rogier Smal; p.37 © Frans De Waard Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague 2020
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