Remake the Globe

These days, in Rome, the Globe Theater has been occupied by a collectivity that brings together collectives, groups and individuals working in the art and culture and entertainment world.

What is happening?

The pandemic, we know, but maybe something else too. Something deep and radical, something trained, restless, organized.

Workers of art, entertainment and culture have been without income for a year and starting from this condition of extreme fragility they have begun to meet, to discuss together, to mobilize, to lead the struggle for a worthy life.

Like many other workers, we live in a condition of structural precariousness, with no consistent welfare measures.

Violence, exploitation, public funds distributed according to exclusionary criteria, quantitative mechanisms based on profit and hyperproductivity: a system that denies culture its essential constructive function of and its role of caring for the community.

We were already precarious. 

What about politics? After more than a year of pandemic and lack of answers from the institutions, we are forced to navigate in an increasingly toxic way between occasional jobs, undeclared work, insufficient and often not accessible subsidies, to self-exploit, to reinvent ourselves by finding others ways to survive. 

Today we say: It’s enough!

A wave is crossing Europe and today also touches Rome, where it meets a network that for months has intertwined collectives, groups and individuals working in art, culture and entertainment. This stratified and heterogeneous city assembly, today occupies a public space to strongly affirm the need to rethink a sector, which was in crisis well before the health emergency.

This is the time to put energies, desires, reflections back into circulation. This is the time to intertwine the struggles, to get out of invisibility, to speak out.

Today we decided to re-appropriate this public space, to make it crossable as much as possible, to reclaim its meaning, transforming it into an agora. We have an urgent need to continue this sharing process, so that the wave widens and becomes as wide as possible.

We do not need to reopen the theaters and cultural spaces, if the conditions to do so, in safety for everyone, do not exist. The indiscriminate so called restart penalizes the most fragile experiences and fuels competition, aggravating an already collapsing system. Choosing between health and work is not a questionable option.

We need to structurally rethink the conditions of our lives and our work, giving the possibility to all the subjectivities that exist in the city, to imagine models that are sustainable, based on collaborative bottom up practices, also replicable elsewhere. What we have been experiencing on our skin in recent months is only the inevitable collapse of a system that is unsustainable for all of us, which  today concerns those who are more fragile and will soon end up desertifying the entire landscape.

We claim the right to a continuous basic income, to a paid and permanent training, because time of research and study is work. The need new social rights and new protections, we need tools against discrimination and inequalities between subjects; a need to an access to art and culture for everyone is clearly emerging. We defend the informality of the spaces of artistic and cultural production currently excluded from the financing circuits, and we reiterate the need for a revision of the public financing criteria.

From this public place, which lives in a strange combination between public and private, today we take word. Today we enter to go out and we invite you to do it with us, to build a collective discourse in which everyone can recognize themselves and immediately begin to imagine together new paradigms, new statutes, new social rights for precarious, autonomous, intermittent work.

We invite single workers, artists, technicians, operators, companies, artistic and cultural institutions, theaters, festivals, research centers, formal and informal spaces to support our struggle.

The time is now.

Art, Entertainment and Culture Workers’ Network 

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