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25 .09. 2004
Good bye Lenin
betty says hello to italian squatting activism

Sexyshock chooses to move herself out of the squat named TPO (“Squatted Polivalent Theatre”) in which she was born, towards the core of the town, ‘cause she feels like changing her approach to political and physical spaces, relations and projects and focussing her attention on different ways and tools for realizing her politics.

We, Sexyshock, are going to look for living spaces in town, and not any more in the squat.

The squat’s experience as we have known it is a particular one in which individuals and groups are localized and kept together in a unique political line and practice. This seems to be a model that is not sustainable any more in terms of ethics and politically not efficient for our way of imagining and practising politics.
What we are talking about is an exhaustion of this kind of model, because it represents a very identitarian way of conceiving and experiencing politics. It’s characterized by very exclusionary and untalkative practices, unable to inter/act within itself and with the world outside. Above all it seems to us that for these reasons it is absolutely unable to catch the continuous social trasformations and contaminations and to ingenerate tools of participation and interchange.

In that sense “Squat”, declined in italian as a male and singular word, is not meaningful for us.

Instead, we are interested in re-thinking that what is full of conflict is above everything the space (also that of emotions and feelings) that the body is able to put at stake and to challenge in everyday life. It is meaningful for us to understand to what degree the “desire”, single and collective, is able to open way of “pleasure” for ourselves and for the @thers.

We are interested in experiencing new kind of political relations and meaning-production, because we are sure that it’s possible to intervene in our world, operating a deep change or, why not, a revolution, without creating a vertical political structure. A multiplication without clonation, a differenciation without dispersion, a partecipation without representation.

Sexyshock was born in 2001 as a space of contamination, a transversal project among different political institutions and subjects animating our city. A non-identitarian space experienced by a multitude of Betty* coming from a vaste “umbrella” of different political background, sometimes in open contrast with each other. Sexyshock thus was and still is for us a challenge in “playing” and “deconstructing” sexual and identity issues. A laboratory to experiment new forms of communication and relationships.

We can’t stand those kind of “political” and “physical” walls, rigid and strictly preordinated political agendas, and practices imposed by identitarian politics, like the one of representation is. That is the reason why we can’t stay in a Squat as TPO, dominated by manly and normalizing practices.

In that sense TPO’s lacks and mistakes are representative of the normal epilogue of the italian history of “Centri Sociali”. These political realities have been very interesting and meaningfull at the beginning, but they have shown in the last ten years all the vices of a strictly male, homogeneous and identitarian old style activism. We mean that this kind of identitarianism have sprung from the supposed necessity to have a home, to be a family in which diversities and conflicts, like gendered ones, are usually silenced. A homogeneous cell characterized by a unique Mind and a sole analytical paradigm. A “particular intellect” supposed to be “general” and instead confined in a physical space corresponding to the four walls in which it has lived and lives.

For Sexyshock is not the physical space that contains the project but on the contrary it is the project that shapes the space.

Starting everytime from ourselves and our everyday life, our analysis and practices try to be non-merely instrumental and ideological, or even worse, normalizing ones, and they aim at involving different levels of participation.
Nowaday Sexyshock wants to create a new space in the core of town that would be as inclusive and comfortable as possible. There it’d be possible to find sextoys to colour and to personalize your sexual pleasure and to get in relation with people & projects. To share the same desire of experiencing new codes and creating fluid and “instable” networks. As networks we mean “open processes” in contrast with mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion. Processes in which diversities, different immaginaries and conflicts will be valorized.
We have a lot of aims, a lot of horizons, no absolut point of view, no “global” analysis, no truth. We are conscious of the prism of our partialities and differences and we have a big wish to go on! We need this turning point in our political activism. And we also know we’re not alone.