CITY PLAZA.
In the gloomy sky of Europe, Resistance is the shining light
On 18 March 2016, following the brief summer of refugees and the diverse wave of solidarity on the Mediterranean islands and in the European mainland, the EU-Turkey agreement of shame is signed, in the purpose of «managing refugee flows» and further securitizing the ‘forbidden’ European borders. The Balkan route is sealed and thousands of refugees are trapped in Greece, cramped inside population clearing houses, away from the public eye and doomed to the spatial and temporal inexistence of daily life in the camps.
During this shift of the seasons, on 22 April, activists and refugees from Athens squatted the City Plaza Hotel that lay abandoned for seven years, in order to build up in the “here and now” time a pattern of dignified housing inside the urban space, to break up with the “reality of detention” by creating new realities of social relations and multicultural forms of coexistence and to animate a living example of self-organization expressing in every language loudly and clearly: we live together, we struggle together, we will win together!
Since then, a lot, but also nothing, has changed in the dystopian Europe of our times.
One year before the spring of shame, on 18 March 2015, the remarkable multitude of the European anti-austerity movement mobilized in front of the European Central Bank, against the other side of today’s Europe authoritarian face: the ongoing financial crisis and the regime of social and economical devastation as a method to overcome. This moment wasn’t just a moment but a landmark in the live course of European struggles rejecting the biopolitical doctrine of TINA and prefiguring a different common fate. City Plaza is a step in this trajectory of changing the chain of events, a word in the book of suspended demands contesting the generalization of the European TINA politics.
As Assembly of City Plaza, as a space of resistance to the Europe of the indefinite limbos and of the land of precarity, we are calling on a European mobilization on 18 March 2017, on the anniversary of the signing of the EU-Turkey deal, but also on the anniversary of our past stamp in our common future.
Because even if City Plaza is a home for hundreds of refugees and an international home of struggles for the freedom of the movements and the social integration of refugees, however, City Plaza alone cannot bring back the lost summers: the Mediterranean sea continues to be a watery grave for thousands of refugees, the internal and external borders of Europe operate as Apartheid zones of human rights while Europe is drowning in the madness of austerity and is being transformed into an expansive social hotspot, into an open space of fascist practices and moods in which human life will gradually loses its meaning.
Because the struggle against every form of oppression, it is a struggle that is both global and constant.
Because every struggle for peace, freedom, and dignity, wherever it may be, it is a struggle of the whole of humanity.
Because in the gloomy sky of Europe, resistance is the shining light.
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