"House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence" is an ongoing informational project about the global squatted social center movement. The project takes the form of a mobile archive exhibition which was first shown at ABC No Rio in Spring 2009. The website archives the progress of this initiative.
 BULLETINS: House Magic #4 is finished at last! In time for spring... You can find it here. SQEK was in New York, February 2012, 23rd to 27th. The program is here. More materials will be posted soon to the SQEK websites.
The Squatting Europe Collective (SQEK) plans a seminar in Copenhagen December 4-6, 2011. You can see the program and the draft of meeting minutes here. A draft of my talk, "Circulating Movement Information in the Spheres of Art," is here.
"House Magic" materials were included in the Creative Time Summit "Market" project in New York in September. You can see the display in the photo here.
They were part of a solidarity show at the Rote Flora social center in Hamburg in March, 2011. You can see information about that here.
The last U.S. show of the archive was in February 2010 at Basekamp in Philadelphia.
An excellent panel in NYC considered "Squats, Social Centers and Autonomous Spaces" at the Anarchist Book Fair in April -- Discussion was Youtubed in segments by the organizer, Sebastian Gutierrez at: "Squats, Social Centers and Autonomous Spaces - I" (in 5 segments) Moore presented "House Magic" at the SQEK (Squatting Europe Kollective) meeting in Berlin March 29-31, 2011. See the SQEK program here. See SQEK notes from London, July 2010 here. Berlin, March 2011 here. (All the edited notes from SQEK meetings are here, including Copenhagen December '11.) Moore read a text about the social center movement at the CAA conference in NYC in February, 2011. That is here. Scapegoat out of Toronto published an "Incomplete Timeline of OSCs" in 2010; an uncorrected PDF is here.
2009 -- The "Social Center" course at Public School (Architecture) in NYC concluded with two sessions in fall of 2009. A reflection on the experience was sent to the Common Room, organizers of the project. You can read it here. A text about "HM:BFC" was published in Lumpen out of Chicago. Read this text here.
Also there is a Flickr page for this project. You can see it here. 2006 -- This project has a prehistory in a paper for the "Artists in Contested Spaces" show at Pratt Institute, NYC; the conference reader/exhibition packet is here.
The House Magic Bureau of Foreign Correspondence nomad information project continues. We are blogging occasionally at http://occuprop.blogspot.com/. The first number of the zine catalogue of the House Magic project was published in Spring of 2009. Here is the compressed PDF. The second number was finished in May 2010 -- here it is: "House Magic" #2 House Magic #3 was done in July 2011. It is here.
The global social center movement wasthe focus of a process exhibition at the Lower East Side cultural center, ABC No Rio in the Spring of 2009. Images and information, videos, and discussion engaged the realities of the vital urban movement of disobedient political and cultural spaces in the global cities. A key node on global justice organizing, squatted social centers have sprung up in cities throughout Europe. (There is of course an inspiring movement also in Latin America, and many centers in other lands which remain to be reported.) The disobedient social centers represent a new wave of activism, closely linked to the global justice movement, and supported by grassroots activists, artists and radical intellectuals.This ongoing "House Magic" project invites public participation as we share the stories and lessons of the vivid life of these temporary autonomous zones. Among the centers and agencies past and present considered in the spring show at ABC No Rio show were Bowl Court, Ramparts, CoolTan, ASS and 56a in London; El Patio Maravillas, Seco, Laoratorio, Caracolea nd SinAtena in Madrid; La Casa Invisible (Malaga); Krax City Mine(d) in Barcelona; ESC (Rome), ROG (Ljubljana), and many others. This larger website reflects that first investigation. For a schedule of events and discourses that took place at ABC, click that link back there.... A rotating selection of videos about squatted social centers played in the gallery, as well as the following artists’ documentaries: Oliver Ressler -- “5 Factories - Worker Control in Venezuela,” 81 min., Span./Ger./Engl., 2004 {with Dario Azzellini}, “Disobbedienti,” 54 min., Ital./Ger./Engl., 2002 {with Dario Azzellini}; and “What Would It Mean To Win?” 40 min. / 2008 / PAL / Engl./Ger./French (with Zanny Begg), Marcelo Expósito, "Primero de Mayo (La Ciudad-fábrica) [First of May (The City Factory)]" (61 minutes, 2004) Span./Engl. After the show at ABC No Rio concluded, "House Magic" moved on to the Sculpture Center, in Queens, New York until August 3rd, 2009. It was a research unit within the University of Trash project by Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman. Here are some photos from the showing of "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence." Again, these are all old pics. |