Episode Transcript
[00:00:31] Speaker A: A collision with the past.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: The calender Panden is a former squat located in the east of Amsterdam.
It is a building as long as a year, and it takes me one year, precisely November 2020 to November 2021, to wrap up my thoughts about it. And about squatting.
In case you're wondering what the hell is squatting anyway, allow me to make a quick parentheses.
[00:01:06] Speaker C: Historically, squatting in the Netherlands started in the 1960s. The dynamic of squatting people in need taking over spaces unused or marked for renovation or demolition speaks about the housing shortage in the cities where it happens. But it also speaks about property speculation.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: In some cases, now and in the sixties, buildings are declared uninhabitable way before it's necessary. They are marked for demolition, and the people that live in them, usually lower income, are displaced to make way for new property development.
What squatters do in such cases is point out such speculative practices.
[00:01:47] Speaker C: The overall market at the moment is fucked, with prices rising in the last two decades in Amsterdam, from an average of €200,000 for an apartment to the same apartment being valued at half a million at the same time. Squatting is generally, at least for a brief moment while someone breaks in an illegal affair.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: In the past, the municipalities took a less proactive approach to evicting squatters. Some even passed on the building to the ones that broke in. In some cases, squatters had a hand in negotiations.
They might have been offered alternative buildings to live in, somewhere further from the city centre, for example, and then they could take them or not.
Gradually, though, since the end of the eighties, the story changed. Eviction notices got shorter and evictions more violent.
[00:02:44] Speaker C: The 2010 nationwide dutch squatting ban criminalized squatting and derailed the one striving anarchist direct action movement that demanded equal rights to housing.
Then, in 2021, the time that squatters are evicted decreased in Amsterdam to 72 hours from the moment the building was taken over. There is also a construction that was invented to work against squatting. This construction is the so called legal alternative and it's named antisquat.
Antisquat functions through temporary contracts with eviction times of one to three months. Three months is luxurious and with no guarantee of a new place once one gets evicted, the contracts give few rights to tenants. They are in buildings which are not renovated, sometimes with no running water or heating. They also are aimed at individuals, not at families, leading to situations in which if one has a child while in anti squat, they can get evicted.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: The companies that offer anti squat contracts are specialized service contractors like ad hoc vps, but also the housing companies Eimetere, Rogdale, Eichenhardt, etcetera.
The rent is low, but in fact there shouldn't be any rent at all, since what you're basically becoming if you take on an anti squad contract, is an unpaid guard for a space that will eventually be redeveloped. For someone that earns much more than you do.
[00:04:30] Speaker C: Who takes this sort of contract? Well, artists that need housing and exhibition space for cheap. They also need to not get in trouble with the law. As a result, a lot of them currently live antisquat in larger dutch cities.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: Back to the present.
The building, a large warehouse with an exposed brick exterior, overlooks a canal in a relatively quiet residential area behind a zoo, next to a basketball court, and close to the constant hum of a power substation.
It's peppered with windows both wide and narrow, and it goes from January on one side all the way to December on the other.
The months are each marked above the ground floor, individual entrances into people's homes from left to right.
Nothing really brings to mind its history as a squad.
While walking by it, one might naturally think of its history as a storage space, repurposed since it has an interior courtyard, impossible to access unless you live there, which seems to have been carved into half of the building.
The outer shell of the calendar panden, therefore still exists in the back of the building, but it's only left as a means to preserve its looks, having lost its function during the remodeling.
It's crystal clear, though, that it wasn't initially built with living in mind, but the traces of its history between 1998 and 2000 are all but lost unless one digs into looking for it online, since it existed at that sweet spot when online presence was on the rise, and therefore its archive is extensive.
Throughout the past year, Ive worked on figuring out just what attracted me to the place, and as I was thinking through this, Ive also witnessed the resurgence of squatting as a housing practice in Amsterdam.
I'll move through it month by month.
[00:06:40] Speaker D: November.
[00:06:44] Speaker E: 30 November the Kalander Panda on the Amsterdam.
They are owned by the municipality of Amsterdam municipal land.
The complex consists of twelve warehouses. They are the names of the Monsanto.
[00:07:07] Speaker D: December to January.
[00:07:11] Speaker E: In the string of winter.
In the harsh winter of 96 and 97, there is only one wood burning stove and many broken windows. The property is populated by a large pigeon colony. There is a thick layer of pigeon shit and cadavers everywhere, no water, electricity and no gas.
The pigeon shit is removed. Rooms are divided, electricity lines are installed, etcetera.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: February there are two separate ways to.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Enter the calender panden. One is on the entrepot dock and the other one turns a ban on Gesut Zverf.
I watch on one of my outings a group of five friends walking by that stop in front of the month of June and looking up towards a folded for sale sign from Kaus render, Skakis real estate developers. The five friends drop a pin, check the address they're at and look for the listing online.
As if on cue, they let out a collective sigh.
I mimic the reaction when I stumble across the same listing. Kusutzwerf 23.
It reads like you'd like it to read if you were to drop a cool million and €50,000 on property.
[00:08:31] Speaker F: A unique loft apartment of 155 m², spatially divided and with a depth of 30 meters, situated in the beautiful plantage Burt on a car free road with a view of the water of the entrepot doc and Artis Sou.
The apartment is located on the first floor in a beautiful historic warehouse originally built in 1840.
In 2001 the building was renovated by the renowned architects Klaus and Kahn with a lot of craftsmanship and an eye for detail into the exclusive apartment complex, the gallenderbonden. It is not without reason that the historic building has been given the status of a national monument. Perhaps the most special is the view of a wooded hill of Artis, where the Algazel square is the Heide.
All the conveniences of the city are within easy reach.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Depending on your status, depending on the time that passed, you might perceive the distance from the city centre as either convenient or an offence.
Convenient for a millionaire. An offence if you're a squatter.
In the 1980s, the area of the Kalenderpanden was offered as an alternative to squatters, which the municipality wanted to evict from the historical center.
Think 17th century mansions, but also the Jordan.
In 2000, the squatters of the Kalenderpanden were asked to move to Zaiburha island. That's double the distance from the historical center of Amsterdam, from the middle of the action to 3 km away to then 6 km away.
Since then, squatters have been gradually removed only weeks into their occupation, without any offers or a chance to to appeal the removal.
[00:10:21] Speaker D: March.
[00:10:31] Speaker E: 1997 suddenly a public prosecution service wants to proceed with the eviction due to local peace. Breaking the squad part, we connect to a non squadron that is induced by the tenants. The squatters file a lawsuit against this and win. After a visit by Judge R. Robbio de Castro to the building, the municipal ground company refuses permission to connect water fetching water every day from a gas station or neighboring squad. Flushing water for toilets is pumped from the canal.
Early March 2000 the ground floor and part of first four squad. Apart from some corners, all six warehouses have now been squatted and the day cafe has a south facing terrace.
[00:11:23] Speaker D: March 2021 the squat anti squat dynamic.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: By now ubiquitous, can be seen in the case of the anarcha feminist group Amsterdam and those that took their place. The building they squatted at, Spaustrat 59 in Amsterdam on March 8, 2021, was evicted violently by the police. A few weeks in, the building was smack dab in the middle of the city centre, but also significantly on a street which had undergone massive gentrification and squat evictions in the past couple of years. Therefore a symbol in itself, this building was then given over to the VPS property speculators and offered as an anti squat contract to two artists that organized exhibitions as a nomadic gallery.
The nomadic space displayed young, freshly graduated artists. It was funded by the Amsterdam Fund for the Kunst. It had a semi professional social media presence, and in one elegant move it managed to erase the history of the squatting action which preceded it.
I found the very impersonal reply from the artist exhibiting in the nomadic gallery an interesting take on how to deal with one's ethical standing as an artist.
In short, sound, humble talk in general terms, deflect.
I found a space organizer's simple repost of the statement and both of their reshares as stories on social media as further proof of their level of care.
A short dissection.
[00:13:02] Speaker C: Recently there have been questions raised about the purpose of my window installation at Spoustrat 59, to which.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: I ask what were the questions? Where did they come from?
[00:13:14] Speaker C: The building at Spoustrat 59, which has been formerly squatted.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: Who was it squatted by? Have you reached out to the people involved? Do you know who they are?
[00:13:25] Speaker C: I wholeheartedly support the causes that the previous residents pursue.
I will, however, use this opportunity to reflect on who is accountable for the shortage of affordable housing and the eviction of marginalized groups.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: How do you support the causes of the previous residence?
I think this pretty much gets an answer in the next few lines. The struggle brings all of the parties listed together, the artist, the exhibition space, the building owner, the future residents.
[00:13:55] Speaker C: This is part of a broader conversation of art gentrification that is more needed than ever.
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Yep, only who's gonna have it? If the artists and exhibition space, the ones that are actively involved in it, do not step to the table to discuss it with the other parties involved, and to even realize their own involvement in it.
If in the 1960s and 1980s, and even in the early aughts, artists were the squatters in the 2020s, artists end up being, more often than not, the complicit tools of property speculators.
But they don't have to.
As David Greber mentioned, the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and we could just as easily make differently.
I'm wondering what would have happened if, instead of drafting this long statement, the heads of the nomadic space would have simply handed over the keys to the anarcha feminist group instead.
[00:14:57] Speaker D: Present day again my mind turns back.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: To the description of the apartment from the Kallender pandan, and I get fixated on the algazels. So I look up the species.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: The algazel, which also goes by scimitar auryx, is a species of oryx that was once widespread across North Africa.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: Conservation status extinct in the wild, gradually being reintroduced since the year 2001.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: Day I started photographing the building from all available outside angles, and as I lifted my lens towards the roof on Gesut Zwerf, a gentleman approached me, must have been in his fifties, and started to tell me that he used to go there ten years ago when it was a squat, that he still vividly remembers the parties, the music, the smoke, the noise, the people.
We fell briefly in conversation, and he expressed his sadness that the place was evicted, while I ended up dumbfounded that the history of the squats still lived in. Someone was still walking by me after the building itself showed no obvious trace of those four years of its existence.
The guy's memory was so vivid, in fact, that what had happened 20 years ago felt like it was only 10.
[00:16:27] Speaker D: April.
[00:16:37] Speaker E: The municipality refuses to register residents in the population register.
[00:16:43] Speaker D: Meanwhile, in April 2021.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: In a rather.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Futile attempt to access the insides of the Kalenderpanden, I write an open letter to its current residents and print it in a couple hundred copies.
I make my way to the building. I slide each invitation for contact into the mailboxes of the residents at both Entrepotok and Husutzwehr.
It's a hopeless pursuit, but it makes me feel a little bit more grounded. For the first time since diving into the place's history, it's also the first time that I peruse the names of the current residents, and one in particular catches my attention.
A name which is also held by a local billionaire. No initials, no first name listed. A name entangled with arts funding, which reminds me again of the many trials and tribulations that artists go through in order to establish a practice, those that don't mind where the money is coming from, and those that do.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: I trace back the familiarity of the name to a recently published article, and I skim through it.
[00:17:58] Speaker F: Another well known philanthropist in the dutch art world is billionaire Rob defares.
His affinity for contemporary art is apparent in his great donations and personal involvement in various institutions.
Defares is co founder and managing director of technology driven proprietary trading firm international market makers combination, or IMC, which is specialized in high frequency trading.
The Faris carries out philanthropic activities through various organizations, including the Hartwig Medical foundation and the Hartwich foundation, which is also a patron of the Staedelich Museum Fund.
In 2020, the Hartwich Art foundation was added, to which the Phares donated €10 million.
The money that the Hartwich Art foundation invests in young artists thus indirectly comes from high frequency trading, or flash trading.
Flash trading is also associated with flash crashes such as the one in 2010.
Flash traders keep their shares for a very short time and do not aim to actually invest in the performance of certain companies and sectors, but rather to gain margins on as many small, random trades as possible, with big profits as the sole goal.
Flash trading thus extracts economic value from society and privatizes invested capital from public funds, the argument goes.
The more rigorous critics argue that the extractive practices of such data technology go so far as to reflect processes of primitive accumulation or predatory capitalism that take place when capitalism colonizes new domains.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: Its probably some other deforest though. Whos to tell?
Maybe I start fussing around the house and rearranging my paperwork.
Among the many work references a copy of the Amsterdam Housing Survey 2021 a way to project the future expectations about.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: Living in the city of Amsterdam via.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: The goodwill of its residents.
And for me, twelve pages of gleefully thinking about my bright housing future, of not quite understanding how my experience will shape city policy in the years to come.
[00:20:35] Speaker C: I'm warned before you start, there are no right or wrong answers. If you are unsure about the answer to a question, please provide the answer that best suits your needs.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: And I allow myself to fall down the rabbit hole of my housing history by now counting nine years of being an Amsterdammer.
[00:20:55] Speaker C: Since what year do you live in your present house?
[00:20:58] Speaker A: 2018.
[00:21:01] Speaker C: Where did you live before you moved into your current house?
[00:21:04] Speaker A: In the same city? Another neighborhood.
I was pushed out.
[00:21:11] Speaker C: What was your previous housing situation?
[00:21:15] Speaker A: Self contained rented accommodation from a housing corporation.
It was an anti squat construction.
I became a living, breathing squatting movement deterrent, just as in need of housing as those that used to squat, maybe more.
[00:21:40] Speaker C: The following questions concern your previous.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: If.
[00:21:45] Speaker C: You rented, what amount did you pay for renting this property to your landlord? Total amount, including service costs.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: I cannot remember.
[00:21:55] Speaker C: What kind of property did you have?
[00:21:58] Speaker A: Ground floor? Flat.
[00:22:01] Speaker C: What was the reason for moving to your present accommodation?
[00:22:07] Speaker A: The rolling tide of gentrification.
[00:22:11] Speaker C: Are you renting your current accommodation or are you its owner?
[00:22:15] Speaker A: I am paying rent.
[00:22:17] Speaker C: From whom are you renting your living space? Accommodation.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: A housing corporation.
[00:22:24] Speaker C: What type of tenancy agreement arrangement do you have?
[00:22:29] Speaker A: Tenancy agreement of unlimited duration for the entire dwelling. A normal contract, but funny story there.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: In order for me to get a.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: Full time unlimited contract, one of those things that you end up signing year per year, and then you extend from year to year with a 2% increase in cost adjusted to inflation, the housing corporation from which I'm renting and which was in charge of my anti squat predicament, had to forget about me as a tenant and continue their renovation to the point where they one day knocked on my kitchen window and asked to demolish my balcony while I was still living on the property.
Later that day, I called them as the bulldozer ate away at other parts of the inner courtyard, and they apologized for the confusion and sent the courier to my place with an eviction notice, active immediately, but also, given their bureaucratic slip up, their need to indeed demolish my balcony within two weeks time, this gave me enough leverage to negotiate a better contract for a new home.
Imagine being just a number in a system being forgotten, falling through the cracks and in that fall, gaining the upper hand. In fact, without that fall, you'd end up being nothing.
It went on and on. And by looking at the questions and the way they're defined, by progressing through it page by page, I got a glimpse into the future of the city and who it's meant to be open to, who it's meant to be hosting.
The old, the young, the nuclear families, but only those in stable employment. The ones that need parking, the ones that think about investing into renovating and greeting up their property, the ones that worry about crime rates and proximity to amenities and might say hello to their neighbors. But that's never implied.
I couldn't recognize myself in any of these categories, but I still wish I could afford to live there.
[00:24:43] Speaker E: June August uni Auguste eten representative steak proof Dieudez Dorburo onslaught in the Fraksi, Amsterdam, Anders and the grune a representative survey conducted by the ONS office, the gruden faction, shows that a majority of do you agree with the municipality's intention to vacate in order to build luxury apartments?
28% no 49% don't know or no opinion 23% August 22 the eviction notice is this building can be evacuated from October 2, 2000 still has started. Urharto Hovd, the broker of the apartment, the cheapest apartment is now 80 00 90,000 guilders.
[00:25:47] Speaker A: September a wall on the calendar pandan squat in the autumn of 2000, mere weeks before the planned eviction, boasted a quote by the spanish anarchist Buonaventura Duruti. It went a little something like we.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: Are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history, but we carry a new world in our hearts.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: I feed the quote into Google, curious about its further ramifications, and find out that the quote is actually incomplete.
The bit missing is its intro.
It is we the workers who build these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere, we the workers. We can build others to take their place and better ones who were the workers of 2000.
In a way, I find the emission fitting in between 1936, when the quote originated, and 2000 the fight over space in Amsterdam continued. But the fight in question gradually shifted between the workers as actual builders, the traditional working class, towards the service workers, the young creatives and some variation of a bourgeoisie.
Morals changed, professions shifted, and maybe so did the spirit of solidarity.
The boundaries turned ever more fluid, and the new people taking up the squatting fight didn't quite see themselves as the working class anymore, just as the working class didn't see themselves as squatters.
In this loose space between the two, it's the ones that could afford 155 square meter lofts near the center that profited.
[00:27:37] Speaker D: October.
[00:27:40] Speaker E: 7 no replacement space available for the squatters 31st 2000 eviction the.
[00:27:53] Speaker A: Calender Pandan eviction video is easy enough to find online.
[00:27:59] Speaker B: One morning in October, I wake up before sunrise, groggy, make my way to the building itself and position myself on Gesut Zverf.
I slide open my iPad, search for the video, the early morning wind howling as I try to stabilize my camera and catch within the frame both the calendar pandem and the eviction video that's playing, all eight minutes of it compressing 5 hours of struggle.
The algazels watch me from a distance.
Playing the video in the space where it took place feels like an exorcism.
[00:28:46] Speaker E: One amazing people start barricading the access roads to the Kaluna town the bridges on the Hoffman's alike and at the poldok will be raised and barricaded. Spanish horsemen and 50 large steam structures will be placed on quadc near the the asphalt is broken up, rejected. A trench is also dug with an excavator. The police come to take a look but do not intervene. Five over five in Ohvens the matvard. Five five am. The riot police with a water cannon starts to intervene at the barricades on the Hochto Kadaiki on the side of this fatty. This is responded to by throwing stones.
The riot police heavily with tear guys and badly with the water cannon at the first barricade near Safatistrat.
06:00 a.m. The riot police comes to a halt under a range of stones at the still growing and burning barricade on the Hochto cadet quarter to 07:00 a.m. The water cannon is empty and is withdrawn for refuse. The gas is also burned. The traffic scanner shows that the riot police is getting anxious.
Eight seven am.
All possible escape routes are closed by detention units.
A 07:15 at the building flares are fired.
07:25 a.m. At a large burning barricade the riot police gets to work with an excavator. A second excavator is on its way.
The Bravo zero zero. The general command is the same MAF. There are reports of three injured riot police.
07:24 a.m.
Two platoons are ordered to charge from the Kreithstrand at Osenberg towards the building over the barricade.
A total of 160 tear grass grenades were fired and 60 grenades were thrown. Between a 05:15 and 07:30 in the.
[00:30:57] Speaker F: Morning.
[00:31:00] Speaker E: A number of right police threatened to approach the building via the swing bridge rearrests at the antopodo.
08:00 a.m. To 08:30 a.m.. A considerable group gets away.
09:15 a.m. The right police enters the building.
[00:31:47] Speaker A: A piece in the newspaper Trau from the time briefly documents the eviction.
When the sun is up, it is already over.
[00:31:57] Speaker B: Police officers with gas masks guard the entrances to what was a sanctuary for alternatives. The Amsterdam calender panden next to the artist's zoo.
[00:32:08] Speaker A: The streets are littered with smoking and burning debris, broken pavement tiles, scaffolding pipes.
[00:32:14] Speaker B: And nuts and bolts which were thrown.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: From the building to the police. In the early morning, 15 officers were.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: Injured, four left with bruises.
[00:32:24] Speaker A: Police arrested 18 squatters.
November perhaps the trick worked, or at the very least, it couldn't have hurt my little bit of exorcism in a piece entitled we have the matches on the resurgence of the housing struggle in the Netherlands on itsgoingdown.org comma, I read.
[00:32:49] Speaker B: The.
[00:32:51] Speaker D: In the past month, two large housing protests have happened. First on September 12 in Amsterdam, with roughly 15,000 people attending, and then on October 17 in Rotterdam, which was attended by almost 10,000 people.
It is notable that these protests, initiated by a broad coalition of leftist and grassroots groups, were very outspokenly supportive of squatting.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: The peace goes on. It turns a ban. It brings me back to the algazels.
[00:33:22] Speaker D: As the march approached its end point, a small group split off the demonstration with the intent to squat a house. They were instantly met with massive amounts of police who used some of the most relentless violence we have witnessed in a long time. More than 60 people got arrested and severely beaten up.
On October 16, an annual protest in Amsterdam was held in defense of autonomous cultural spaces. During this protest, a massive building in the very center of Amsterdam was squatted and dubbed Hotel Mochum.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: Another piece, this time from Vice, about Hotel Mocham itself, reminds me of the gentleman that remembered the calendar Panden and folded 20 years of past time into ten.
[00:34:07] Speaker D: Several groups have come together to take Mokoum back, both seasoned squatters and young people for whom this was the first squat. Lisa, we have been preparing for at least two months, but the idea has been around for much longer. For the younger people in our movement, it has been a dream for years to be able to squat something in the city.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: Some of the new squatters were most likely not even born when the Kalander Panden was squatted. They can't remember it, but they have the energy to make it anew.
Pushed to the brink of housing instability, they and other categories of people like them joined the housing protests and became unlikely forces holding hands across the divide.
[00:34:50] Speaker D: Despite not universally having a background in radical politics, all of the organizers of these protests have refused to accept the divisive narrative of the state.
They have stood in clear and open solidarity with the victims of police violence and stated explicit support for squatting as a legitimized method of protesting the housing crisis.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: By mid November 2021, Hotel Mochem gets another companion, building a new squat, this time on ring Dike 8th in Amsterdam east.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: The culprits?
[00:35:21] Speaker A: The Anarch FM group, and they do it on the precise one month anniversary of Hotel Mokum. As if to bind their link, we've gone through all of the year's months, but the year ends with questions rather than a resolution.
For how long and in which direction will these actions go?
[00:36:20] Speaker B: On November 27 at around midday, using a disproportionate amount of violence, the Amsterdam police and the mobile unit evicted the squatters at Hotel Mocham.
Six weeks, six floors left empty.
[00:36:59] Speaker G: Color phone commissioned by Radna Rumping of radio yay nay nay nay Amsterdam and inspired by Rachel Selim and Elky Boredom, creators of the input party. Additional Anamaria Gushu Yarn Nettingsmeyer, Tim Odimolin, yellabars recording and sound design Yarn Nettingsmeyer music the Fear Troze Matrose, DJ Lulu Kai slanderskakes, Mackelardai Hippoteke Frisekerenger and Euronext Amsterdam, formerly the Amsterdam Stock Exchange with material from Anthropoddoc squad mega Funda nl Cope Amsterdam. YouTube user Freia Paipteve Retort 24 the philanthropy trap by Timo de Mollen a recent housing survey of the underzug Informazi and Statistics Department of the City of Amsterdam and news outlets itsgoingdown.org vice.com nl and trauma.
