Last week the National Opera House (Ethniki Lyriki Skini) was occupied by dancers renaming the historic Athens building "Insurgent People's . Opera". Since the Opera has been functioning as a free space for revolutionary workshops and forums in solidarity to K. Kouneva and the arrested insurgents of December, as well as against the police state and the culture of the Spectacle.
graffiti from the Insurgent People's Opera
The occupation of the National Opera House in one of Athens most busy high street (Akadimias Bulevard) last week by dancers has created yet another center of resistance and counterinformation in the greek capital, receiving the active support of the entire range of insurgents including the Cleaner's Union (PEKOP) who continues to receive death threats from the OIKOMET bosses behind the murderous attack against K. Kouneva on December last year. The Opera now renamed "Insurgent People's Opera" functions on a 24h bases as a space for workshops, film projections, performances and forums regarding art and the body in relation to the resistance against the police state and the society of the Spectacle.
What follows is the first Communique of the occupied Opera:
December’s rebellion, while drawing strength from all previous social struggles, laid the ground for a generalized resistance against everything that offends us and enslaves our lives. It triggered a fight for life that is being disparaged on a daily basis. As an answer to those who understand rebellion as a short lived firecracker, and discard and undermine it by simply saying “life goes on”, we say that the struggle not only continues but has already set our lives on a new basis. Nothing is finished; our rage perseveres. Our agony has not subsided; we are still here. Rebellion in the streets, in schools and universities, in labour unions, municipal buildings and parks. Rebellion also in art.
Against art as a spectacle that is consumed by passive viewers.
Against aesthetics that exclude the ‘Different’.
Against a culture that destroys parks and public space in the name of profit.
We unite our voices with all those in struggle.
In solidarity with Konstantina Kouneva and those arrested during the rebellion.
With our struggle and our own culture, we respond to state oppression, social exclusion and to the attempts of the mass media to terrorize and misinform.
With this initiative that originated in the ‘Arts’ (considering everybody’s life as art), we re-claim a space for the art of living of each and everyone to unfold and for exploring the reformation of culture. We aspire to an unmediated art; open and accessible to all.
We liberate the Greek National Opera because by definition it belongs to all of us.
We feel the need to take things from the beginning and to reinvent the role of art.
Through self-organized processes, we propose free creative actions by everyone and for all those who consider culture as a product of collective creativity.
To recover and reclaim the culture that has been stolen from us.
OPEN GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE LIBERATED OPERA
EVERYDAY AT 9.00 PM
STREETS ARE OUR SCENE
REVOLT IS OUR ART
Free opera-tors
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