A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #12-26 - Beware of the L.U.P.O. Catania: the state evicts, the experience multiplies (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

It was 4 a.m. on March 31st, and it was raining outside, when the 
state's puppets, with their armored vehicles painted with oppression, 
surrounded and violated the Laboratorio Urbano Popolare Occupato, the 
L.U.P.O. gym in the heart of Catania. More than 11 years of occupations 
by diverse groups and eight days of permanent protest by hundreds of 
people who, over time, demonstrated solidarity amid differences, 
affinities, mistakes, victories, love, repression, and struggles.
The L.U.P.O. wasn't just an occupied physical space; it could also 
constitute a healing process. Yes, exactly, but not the institutional, 
medicalized, top-down, sold-off kind, made up of psychotropic drugs, 
compulsory medical treatment, or beauty treatments to fit the latest 
capitalist trend; we're talking about a radical, shared healing, rooted 
in relationships and values. In a society that has systematized 
performative exploitation, abandonment, and solitude, self-managed 
spaces today represent a concrete counterpractice: places where life is 
measured not in terms of productivity or speed, but in terms of 
intensity, connection, and possibility.

Mark Fisher spoke of the difficulty of imagining alternatives to 
capitalism, of that suffocating feeling where "there is no alternative" 
becomes a mental horizon even before it becomes an economic one, the 
nihilism that leads you to lock yourself inside a refuge from which you 
look out with hatred and fear. Spaces like L.U.P.O. challenge precisely 
this perceptual cage. Not because they offer a perfect model, but 
because they make another organization of life visible, tangible, and 
habitable. They are interruptions of capitalist realism, fissures in 
which one experiences a sociality not mediated by the market, but rather 
by ideals of freedom and anti-authoritarianism. But their strength lies 
not in their exceptionality. It lies in their fragmented nature.

As David Graeber suggested, anarchy is not a project to be realized in 
the distant future, but a constellation of already existing practices, 
disseminated throughout the present. Fragments of autonomy, moments in 
which people decide to organize themselves without hierarchies, without 
impositions, without waiting for authorization. Care, in this sense, 
becomes the connective tissue of these fragments: what allows them to 
exist, to endure, to transform.

Caring, in these contexts, means many things at once: listening, 
supporting, sharing resources, creating safe spaces, addressing 
conflicts without resorting to authority. It also means failing, 
starting over, learning, and getting back up. It is an imperfect 
practice, but a living and human one. And it is precisely this vitality 
that makes it incompatible with the logic of profit and control. Today's 
capitalism, on the contrary, empties care of its meaning, transforming 
it into a performance, into invisible or underpaid labor, into 
individual responsibility. It tells you that you must "feel good" while 
destroying the material and relational conditions for doing so. It 
isolates, violates, creates precariousness, deceives, and then 
medicalizes the discomfort it itself produces so it can then sell you 
its useless cure.

Self-managed spaces reverse this dynamic. They don't treat symptoms by 
adapting people to a sick world, but rather attempteven if only for 
brief momentsto build less sick microworlds. They are laboratories of 
possibility, but also refuges, survival networks, places where the 
burden of existence is redistributed. This is why they are so 
frightening to those who have given up and those who want to control the 
life of obligation; because they show that dependence on institutions 
and the market is not inevitable, that we can organize ourselves, 
support ourselves, and live otherwise. And every time this possibility 
takes shape, then it becomes urgent for those in power to neutralize it, 
clear it out, erase it.

But the cure that was created at L.U.P.O. is not contained within its 
walls. It cannot be. It has passed through people, has sedimented in 
relationships, has changed perceptions and desires. It's already 
elsewhere, already circulating, ready to reemerge. And this is where the 
structural limit of repression lies, and of these ridiculous evictions 
of occupied spaces that we continue to witness at an incessant pace.

Yes, of course, the monsters of capitalism can demolish their own 
concrete with their machines, the homes of Palestinians in Gaza or the 
West Bank, or even one, two, or a hundred occupied buildings here, but 
they cannot dismantle a practice once it has become a shared experience 
in souls and bodies. They can close off a place with a thousand 
barriers, but they cannot prevent what has been learned there from being 
reproduced in other contexts, in other forms, perhaps less visible, but 
more widespread.

Let us remember that the real threat to the existing order is not the 
occupied space itself. It is the capacity that space had to create 
autonomy, to teach cooperation, to make care a collective 
responsibility, to generate life, equality, love, and anarchy. Every 
self-managed space is a fragment of another society. Not a happy island, 
but a testing ground. Not a model to be replicated, but a practice to be 
reinvented. And their multiplication does not follow a linear logic: it 
happens by propagation, by contagion, by desire, by love. The L.U.P.O. 
was one of these fragments. Not the first, not the last! The L.U.P.O. 
was a crack in the system that allowed you to see beyond the darkness. 
Now there are 10, 100, 1000 cracks within each of those souls, anarchist 
or otherwise, who have learned to see through and beyond the darkness of 
the advancing nothingness.

And as long as there is even a crack in the asphalt of the present, as 
long as there are bodies willing to meet outside the logic of profit, as 
long as care continues to be practiced as a political and collective 
gesture, no eviction will truly close what has already been opened.

In this sense, the demolition of occupied spaces is not necessarily a 
loss: it can also constitute an unexpected release of energy. No, it's 
not romanticism, it's strategy. Containers are broken, free energies are 
released that perhaps had remained concentrated in the shelter for too 
long, held back, protected, sedated in the comfort of a place.

Its demolition has actually released antibodies for this society. 
Antibodies that function not as a passive defense, but as a widespread 
intelligence. They are practices, languages, and attentions learned over 
time that now circulate without a center, without walls to delimit them. 
They graft themselves onto neighborhoods, into daily relationships, into 
conflicts, contaminating other spaces, other lives. They don't seek to 
integrate into the system: they penetrate it, undermining it from 
within. What remains after the bulldozers are more dangerous for this 
sick system than what was there before.

Like any living organism, the social body is never completely 
controllable, and these antibodies act precisely there, in its fault 
lines, preventing domination from becoming total, preventing adaptation 
from turning into resignation. They are minimal yet radical gestures: a 
network of mutual support that emerges, a shared practice that spreads, 
a refusal that becomes collective, a practice of listening without 
judgment. They don't make noise like the bulldozers of power, but they 
work over time, transforming what they touch, like perennial water. And 
the more they are dispersed, the more difficult they become to 
neutralize, because they no longer inhabit a place made of bricks and 
mortar: they inhabit people.

And when care becomes a body, a relationship, and a shared memory, it 
can no longer be evicted. It becomes a persistent presence, a force that 
reemerges, adapts, and resists. When care spreads as a practice, it asks 
permission from nothing: it transforms, like a powerful explosion, 
everything it encounters.

My idea of anarchy (not necessarily an example) isn't made of noise, 
bombs, screams, or violence; my idea of anarchy whispers in our ears. 
It's an idea that multiplies in the complicity of kind and reciprocal 
glances, of hugs and mutual aid, of practices of equality, but also of 
desertion, sabotage, and resistance. My anarchy is pure skepticism that 
allows me to look at even the things I'm most certain of with the eyes 
of one who knows there are millions of other possibilities. In this 
transitional society that normalizes violence, humanizes monsters, and 
isolates us within our fears, what is more conflictual than kindness, 
love, the joy of complicity in battle? I'm an anarchist. I'm not 
interested in killing anyone, not even kings or queens; they're all 
already dead inside me. And I'm not interested in wasting time shouting 
insults at the guards. I haven't seen the guards in a while. So, I 
wonder what's the point of shouting into the void, hoping for a 
response? It wouldn't be conflict, but collusion and entanglement.

Today, the L.U.P.O. has emerged from the concrete, but now it's in the 
streets, it's in the scattered sound of that ping-pong ball on its 
tables where children used to play (never enough), it's in the hands and 
hearts of its comrades, it's in its protest poems engraved on the city 
walls.

Concrete is always concrete. The L.U.P.O. is free to transform itself.

Gabriele Cammarata

https://umanitanova.org/attenti-alla-l-u-p-o-catania-lo-stato-sgombera-lesperienza-si-moltiplica/
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