25/4/09 PUBLIC MEETING ABOUT THE FEMININE PRISONS

Organization: Women Group of Thessaloniki - Terminal 119 - Companions


Micropolis presentation text

Micropolis
Social Space for Freedom


A building has opened at the corner of Venizelou and Vas. Irakliou 18. It has opened to the city. A building, a miniature of the city that we want, a social space for the freedom that we want. Here gathered people who had met earlier and others who joined afterwards. To cooperate a space that satisfies our needs and the needs of those that have no face or voice. To speak in first person, singular and plural at the same time.


To create moments of the future

Not the future vaguely nor the future they prepare for us. Moments of the future, where people will not function by means of profit and competitiveness, but in terms of social solidarity and offer. Moments and situations where people satisfy their needs by expressing their creativity, and undertake responsibilities, self-pledged to their social surroundings- situations that want to efface the coercions of hunger, violence or exclusion, once and for all. This is what we consider that is served by the structures of self-management, which are autonomous and anti-hierarchical: the factual opposition to intolerance, parliamentarianism, nationalism, racism, sexism, war, religion, dominion, human exploitation.


To give space to freedom

The social space Micropolis includes (or will include) the operation of a self-organized café/bar/concert hall, a place for children to be co-managed by children, parents and pedagogues, a computer room to provide free access to the internet and support the conduction of lessons, an assembly room, a library/reading-room, a film screening group, a food cooperative.
All these activities exist due to the interest of people who already participate in them and they are anti-commercial, in the sense that every cash transaction aims exclusively at the maintenance and development of the space and its activities, and anti-hierarchical, since all people participate and co-decide equally, without leaders, allocations and representations. The general assembly of this space functions in the same way∙ it is open (both to individuals and to new ideas and activity initiatives) and administrative (deciding about the inner function and the demonstrations of the space). This assembly isn’t and doesn’t want to be a political group.

To realize direct democracy

The social space Micropolis is related directly with the December uprising. The prime for the creation of this space was given inside the squatted Faculty of Theatre of Thessaloniki. December wasn’t what the TV showed. It was first of all everything we saw with our own eyes and everything we experienced: from the rage and violent clashes to the popular assemblies, the co-management and coexistence in public places and in places of the movement. It was altogether the condensation and the transcendence of decades of struggles and it forms the heritage to always remind us that dignity and life have no need of any avantguardists in order to fight back against present death. Inside the squatted Faculty of Theatre we recognised that we should learn to discuss with respect to disagreements and we realised that, with all our differences, we can cooperate and determine our own lives without having the need of any leader. Thus, it became clear to all of us that our future can’t include elections, scandals and this bankrupt democracy, but direct democracy, solidarity and freedom. The realization of these values and their diffusion outside their ordinary circles, traces the route of this social space.

To socialize antiauthority

All of us that have taken the initiative and the responsibility to create this space imagine a world that would be different from the present one. We know, however, that we weren't born in it. And we also have the bitter knowledge that we live in hard times: dominion tries to fight back after December, to intensify imputation, control and repression, to cultivate racism and depreciation of people that have arrived here hunted, to cut down anything humane. And all these situated under the circumstances of a generalized capitalist crisis, which they want to convert into an opportunity for better profit, and stronger segregation, a chance for expanding the desert of meanings.
We understand that we should change the world by changing ourselves. And we don’t have the magic recipe - just the will. And as we are observing the bankruptcy of the isolated/private person around us, sunk in competition, her profits and her loneliness, we choose to live and create collectively, as persons for whom the collective or society is an extension of themselves.

And here we are expecting (in Shelley’s words) everyone that has already hit the road

To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

Contact

Micropolis - Social Space for Freedom

Venizelou & V. Irakliou 18,

54624 Thessaloniki


Telephone: 2310261290


micropolis.email@gmail.com


View larger map