Guests & speakers

 Action Diritti (Rome)
Action Diritti (action rights) derive from the tradition of disobbedienti and post-autonomia, that played an important role in the globalization movement. They work mainly by helping immigrants (most of them illegal) in squatted houses.

 Kanak Attak (Berlin/Hamburg)
Kanak Attak (nigger attack) work with anti-racism on all levels. Their working methodology is an example of an alliance across the color line, a close collaboration between illegal and legal immigrants and white left-wing activists. They have made many humorous actions like handing out fake identity cards, making a wedding parade and jumping a union congress, while forcing the delegates to address the working conditions for illegal immigrants.

 Klara Brekke (London)
Klara has been dealing with urban issues as an activist and video documentarian. She is a former editor of the journal Occupied London, now working with strategies to intervene in the current financial crisis and its possible influence on European racism.

 Rosa Rosegarten (Berlin/Wien)
Rosa Rosegarten is an user led urban gardening project started in 2004 in Friedrichshain in Berlin. The group seeks to combine the urban garden with an anti-racist approach.

 Asyl Dialog Tanken (Copenhagen)
The Asylum Dialogue Tank (ADT) is an independent organization of asylum seekers, students, artists, lawyers, activists, architects, journalists and many more. They work together to create alternatives to the inhumane danish asylum policy. Their aim is to create a user-controlled house, The Trampoline House, that can accommodate these meetings and activities such as Danish classes, juridical help etc.

 Es Regnet Kaviar (Hamburg)
Es Regnet Kaviar is an anti-gentrification initiative fighting, among other issues, against private beach-clubs, a typical example of german gentrification where commons/waste-lands along the water are turned into private businesses. Their presentation will focus on how the diverse network of artists, activists and social workers came together last year. (see more: www.esregnetkaviar.wordpress.com)

 Jakob Jakobsen (Copenhagen)
Jakob is an artist and activist, working with issues of self-organization, public space issues and in the recent years, he has been involved in organizing seminars and protests on workers and migrants rights and autonomous spaces in Copenhagen. He will present some tales from the various waves of gentrification, housing activism, rebellion and gang crime that have hit Nørrebro since the 1970s - and some attempts on analysing how they mix through concrete examples.

 Anthony Iles (London)
Anthony is a cultural engineer and writer researching and making experiments in the disappearing public sphere. He is assistant editor of Mute magazine. He will present a short talk using speculative fiction to think through the present housing situation in London after the financial crisis. Connecting struggles against gentrification, inflation and privatization a phantom organization seeks to intervene in the crisis by updating existing tactics such as squatting, auto-reduction and proletarian shopping. Fiction will be used as a way to invent and test a number of possible scenarios and actions as radical responses to the crisis.

 Anders Lund Hansen (Copenhagen)
Anders is an assistant professor at the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Lund’s University. He will focus on the ‘glocal’ rhythms of capitalism and urban governance formed by competition between cities translated into uneven development – segregation, exclusion and ‘space wars’. A focus on space wars carries a critical perspective across to the study of urban transformation processes and uneven development, and is related to the processes of gentrification. It sheds critical light on urban renewal – especially in a Scandinavian context where gentrification is given little public or political attention and researchers on urban issues often gloss over the connection between urban renewal and gentrification.

 Alarm Sthlm (Stockholm)
Alarm Sthlm intends - through discussions, direct actions and the spreading of information - to confront the big city politics of the market-bureaucrats and in the long run to take part in the effort to abolish capitalism. They also intend to fight for a city, where everybody should be able to take part in the process to shape it, and where one should be able to live freely, without having to buy oneself that possibility. Read more

 Lasse Lau (Brussels)
Lasse is an artist and queer activist and theorist. He will be talking about the importance of queer spaces and the necessity to think through different models that can occupy, appropriate, and recover public spaces for social queer purposes. He will talk about three particularly connected projects that were motivated by the attack on gay cruising in HC. Ørstedsparken to uncover new strategies.

 Joen P. Vedel (Copenhagen)
Joen is an artist and activist, working with issues related to the public space. He will present his view on an occupation of a road that happened next to Christiania, last summer. He will be showing sunny images from the occupation and relate to a few other projects that came afterwards, heavily inspired by the action - projects that got permission from the municipality and huge budgets from big private real estate companies.

 Rikke Luther
Rikke is an artist and teacher at the Jutland Art Academy. She works as part of the group Learning Site, who focuses on examinations of economic and environmental factors, but also labor rights, property rights and the production and distribution of knowledge. She will be talking about the right to the water, a complex issue with many different actors: By og Havn (a company owned by the state and the municipality), the military, private owners, the sea authorities, the inhabitants and everyone else. Read more at the Learning Site

 Oliver Clemens (Berlin)
Oliver is an architect and co-founder of An Architektur, a political architectural journal that focuses on critical analysis of spatial relations and the visualization of their inherent socio-political conceptions. He will be talking about the growing privatizations of public housing in Germany.

 Ockupantscenen.se (Lund)
Ockupantscenen is a collaboration between squatters in Sweden and works as a platform for various groups. They will present the ideas behind a coming squatting festival on May 16 in Lund, in which they will squat several houses in the inner city. This is an action inspired by the Danish G13 action and its confrontative non-violence concept. They invite all squatters and activists to come to Lund.

 Tempelhof Für Alles (Berlin)
Tempelhof Für Alles is a forthcoming squatting action of an old airport in Kreuzberg, Berlin. This will be done before the area gets privatized and as a demand for the old airport to be used by everyone. They will present the concept and ideas behind, and tell how and why this action is important. Everyone is invited to the occupation on June 20.