The squat. Photograph courtesy of Benoit Méry.
People stood out front as if waiting: smoking, talking. Of consecutive sets of doors, the first one bore a monogram in stenciled capitals: B-L-O-C. A grille resisted lifting, sticking. Just inside was a foyer, at the back of which stretched a crescent-shaped desk referred to by squatters as the Accueil, “reception.” Watch was kept. Behind that desk a crank could operate the grille.
“This is a building of the people,” the squatter Dominique, who had worked construction, told me, referring to its history as a public health agency and its suitability for heavy use. Hard floors swept clean. Banks of cabinets, their material a blond composite, lined the halls, which at rhythms of their own let onto rooms that had been government workers’ offices. These doors, green frosted glass, shut with a clang. They kept in the warmth of space heaters. Open, they let smoke and music circulate; they aired disputes. A squatter who was a woman—women were a minority at Le Bloc—drew my attention to gaps in the fabric or paper stuck up to cover certain doors. People liked to see feet coming in the hallway, company, warning. Each door wore a padlock.
Living quarters in this way took up the aboveground stories, thirty to thirty-five offices a floor. Into bathrooms, which variously came with pairs or rows of sinks, sitting or squat toilets, and mirrors, squatters had built showers. At least one room per floor served as a kitchen, but all did not have kitchen fixtures. The kitchen on the second floor, though it was much used, lacked a sink. A squatter who lived on the third floor told me they’d had, on that floor, to padlock the kitchen. Reputedly clean, it attracted the messier residents of other floors. After they finished making messes on their floors, they came and made a mess on the third floor. Though he characterized the padlock as a necessity, it embarrassed him, as the proper role for a squat, by which he seemed to mean its default action, the direction of motion within, was to open, he said, not close.
Hallways wrapped the building, graffiti serving as street signs. In a stairwell, French words for “Live Fast Die Young” marked off the third floor; a death’s-head labeled the basements. At least one of the artists spoke of signing pieces “Le Bloc” in the hope of getting work piling up to cohere into a movement, and while I don’t think this plan gained traction, the will was genuine; some artists developed a memorable brand: a skull and crossbones below which unfurled the legend, in English, LE BLOC SONS OF ANARCHY.
They had at least one motto: Tu dors t’es mort, “Sleep and you’re dead.” This was explained to me as a challenge, serving to encourage participants in a shared project of sleeplessness, and as a constraint on behavior, to dissuade them from falling asleep just anywhere.
On the ground floor was a gallery in two devoted rooms. Caravaggio had worked before with some of the artists in residence at Le Bloc, and the squat’s management was meant to take a cut of sales.
The first basement level, called the moins un, was used by the squatters for building-wide meetings as well as public-facing open houses. It surrounded a patch of greenery, the base of an atrium within which a disco ball had been suspended to cast, on sunny days, a fractured light. Picture windows contained this, a garden at the squat’s core.
The −2 was low ceilinged, utilitarian. Ducts snaked, silver prisms. DJs set up there, parties spilling over, and I heard some people even lived two stories deep.
The −3 had been a parking garage, as had the −4, where during the building’s occupation runoff of its every leak would end up, black pools.
According to the documents of their eviction suit, the squatters’ entry had been forced. But judges tasked with the case all failed to investigate the nature of this break-in. And the squatters maintained otherwise; as for other assertions about Le Bloc this one’s greatest value did not lie in correspondence to historical reality. “A trade secret,” one may have said.
Sometime in December of 2012 their neighbors, perceiving the occupation, alerted police. A bailiff stopped by, taking names; now it was 2013. Out of perhaps two hundred squatters (they gave higher estimates too), thirty-six at the most were, by the time of their court date that June, named as defendants. The bailiff, in the proprietor’s pay, was motivated to give a low head count, as one of the squatters explained to me; this one, in any case, did. A far underpopulated occupation was harder to defend, seeming less reasonable to the judge. As there might be damages to pay, squatters, for their part, considered it strategic to feature as defendants those of them who were insolvent.
With other first arrivals Caravaggio invited artists, everybody. The building’s occupants referred to its square meterage, a brag: “seven thousand,” “eight thousand,” they said, a figure that, reported in documentation of the later renovation, was, very precisely, 8,186. They developed a sense of themselves as historically important; when squatters called Le Bloc the biggest squat in Paris, one tended to believe them. When, somberly, a young artist called it the biggest in Europe, I understood her to be referring to the eviction, the year before, of the massive Tacheles in Berlin. (I was interested to read in promotional materials for a concert at Le Bloc the contradictory claim that Forte Prenestino, a squat in Rome and one band’s home turf, was in fact the biggest in Europe.) About Le Bloc’s early days, about its parties, I would hear even years later claims that struck me as outrageous; there was one about a sponsorship by Red Bull, the corporation, said to have installed dispensers for its product free of cost on every floor. Red Bull did not respond to my requests for comment; I was ready to forget this claim entirely but then found mention of Le Bloc in an article about Parisian nightlife on RedBullMusicAcademy.com, apparently a hub for sponsored content. The title of the French article dated September 2016, three years after Le Bloc’s eviction, translates to “A Permanent State of Party.”
Not every artist working at Le Bloc would sleep there. Many simply kept up studios in a range of disciplines. 3D printers filled one; jugglers practiced in a basement room. A craze built for a photography style referred to, in English, as light painting that, over the course of a long exposure, left the subject swaddled in strands of color swirling as if at that person’s command. So they set about immortalizing each other. A sculptor made installations out of Le Bloc’s trash. Preeminent were the graffiti artists, understood by squatters to be well known in graffiti artist circles. Empty cans stacked artfully into a grid were sprayed with paint, contributing another oeuvre. Despite the rate of repainting, certain murals were left alone by unspoken agreement. Despite the heterogeneity of expressive practices and a certain factionalism within the building, it was rare to see tags sprayed to deface a finished mural.
Beneficial, for any squat, was having neighbors on its side. Neighbors of all kinds were understood to side with artists. The squatters of Le Bloc, as early as January, distributed flyers, letters describing their practices. The −1 partitioned into alcoves in which these residents could exhibit even as it allowed for a view of the group: paintings, knots of musicians, “wellness” activities. An activity for children was set up, fans crowding heaped balloons that made them jump.
Some squatters from Le Bloc would have it registered, enabling the entity, and themselves really, to accept donations. Crucially, in collecting unsold food from supermarkets, this organization’s members would be able to ask the employees for leftovers directly rather than dumpster dive. A woman from the second floor went early in the morning, wheeling a shopping cart to be unloaded in a hallway near Reception. Free for the taking: yogurt, which stays good long after the date; packaged meat and sandwiches; vegetables with skin in such condition it would give way at a touch. Heads of lettuce crowded a cabinet opposite the second-floor kitchen, peeking out.
Thus the association Le Bloc was incorporated after several months of occupancy in a “declaration to the prefecture of police,” which squatters filed with that prefecture on May 28, 2013. Le Bloc, according to this appealingly breathless founding document,
responds to the flagrant lack in terms of [sic] artistic fabrication; cultural, social, and technical exchange; Le Bloc must respond at top speed to the recurring and endlessly unsatisfied needs of local artists and technicians in terms of spaces open to implementation, to creation, to information technology, and to practices in every discipline of artistic, technical, cultural, and social research.
The prefecture of police, as was standard, promulgated this notice, duly publishing it in a registry that June 8.
Wednesdays in the second-floor kitchen, volunteers and at least one salaried worker making up a “Squat Mission” of the NGO Médecins du Monde (“Doctors of the World,” spun out of the better-known Doctors without Borders) held office hours during which they gave advice and helped the squatters with their chores of paperwork. A common problem was that of domiciliation administrative, the address where, still today, a homeless person can receive the documents so important to the French welfare state. Addresses were available; you did have to know about them. A foreign woman with a toothache was advised to have it checked out by any means at her disposal.
Despite resorting to the state in such cases, or because the squatters knew the processes of recourse intimately, they were triumphant in describing social services that they provided to subjects the state couldn’t help, beating it at its own game. Housing was just the most obvious. They spoke pointedly about the irony they identified in a health agency’s shuttering of a building so manifestly able to serve as emergency shelter. That the agency had left behind archives of private data, health records, seemed to these squatters final proof of a fundamental indifference of which they’d always suspected their political leaders.
They had begun making their lives there around the time of a date in December 2012 coinciding with the 5,125-year cycle of an ancient calendar, widely reported as a “Mayan apocalypse.” The forecast was, for these squatters, the stuff of shared jokes. Le Bloc had begun at the world’s end, they would say. The squat picked up where the world had left off.
More often they spoke of “competences,” what each of them could do. During the first of weekly meetings squatters introduced themselves, I later heard, by tallying their skills, suggesting to the group that anyone interested in picking up a skill—screen printing, say—should come see them. I heard a squatter worrying, conversely, that the community was unable to properly to care for individuals who might, this squatter felt, require psychiatric attention. They lacked training, were “not social workers.”
Among themselves, they encouraged communal meals: they all liked to eat and drink well, and it was, in the same squatter’s opinion, shutting oneself in that led to violence, madness, all that which began in overreaction.
Voices swelled in halls, the glass doors grating. Fluorescents buzzed and flickered.
Caravaggio, who spoke in the accent of the suburbs (a way of speaking he adjusted for the benefit of my understanding, automatically correcting himself when, interviewed, he used slang), at last told me his work at Le Bloc wasn’t all “social” or charity. “If I hadn’t opened this,” he said, “I’d be in the street. And so would my buddy over there, and my other buddy”—the litany became joyful—“and this young man wouldn’t have any place to work …”
He was fat, a round face split by his laugh. My tape is messy with the voices of some friends of his and fellow squatters as he gamely let them draw out his responses. We sat at a table in a hallway, these others helping advance a discussion of incarceration to which Caravaggio, getting laughs, contributed harrowing tales, for my benefit pausing to gloss differences between the French prison system and the American. Of bystanders, he demanded hashish or tobacco. When I asked about children at Le Bloc, he shouted obligingly down the hall: “Mehdi, is your little girl around?” Apparently she wasn’t, but a man emerged, presumably Mehdi, and, letting out a wet laugh, started talking to both of us about something else: a history he shared with Caravaggio in “trashy” squats (à l’arrache) that meant the two men, finding themselves among “artists” at Le Bloc, were upwardly mobile, for them another occasion for hilarity. In the halls Caravaggio fielded and made requests, responding in Spanish to a woman who complained in Spanish that she had no money. Men interrupted our interview frequently to ask about a job on which, apparently, he was lead. Mosquitoes were breeding on the −4, where the pools of Le Bloc’s effluent had opened up and stagnated. Someone had set down plywood, bridges. A wall was fleshy with the eggs. The men would haul sacks of cement to this, the deepest sub-basement, where it was dark as well as swampy, and fill in the plashes.
“I can come back later if you’re busy,” I said.
“No, no, don’t worry,” Caravaggio said. “You’ll come with, and we’ll keep going. We’ll just be doing some construction work, and you’ll ask us all about what it’s for.”
It was understood in other Parisian squats that within superlatively populous Le Bloc, certain men enjoyed authority. Caravaggio did, for having opened the squat; so did others, for reasons less immediately clear. Useful to an understanding of Le Bloc is that many of the other squatters found these men intimidating. All called them tontons. The reference was to Les Tontons flingueurs, an old flick whose title is rendered in English as Crooks in Clover or Monsieur Gangster.
At Le Stendhal, gossiping, I brought up the matter with a squatter who told me delicately that while Stendhal squatters believed in direct democracy, Le Bloc had a more “representative” model. Visibly tontons commanded authority in settling fights. At one of the building-wide meetings that took place weekly they stood together to announce a rent hike, fifty euros a month to sixty.
The squatter Le Général said in the tontons’ defense that going to open up buildings did eat up resources. Scouting vacancies, they paid for gas. They had to buy brooms, a video projector, those sacks of cement, Caravaggio told me humbly. Another tonton said that a police informant warned him, once, about how tontons would get in real trouble if ever they made money off a party. The cop would’ve hated for that to happen. “He was a subtle cop,” the tonton added, not like other cops.
Caravaggio, orchestrating introductions—“In France, we give bisous, kisses, even to the boys”—brought me to this tonton’s room, on the fifth. In the association’s founding documents, some squatter had bestowed on “Big Vincent”—the very tallest of Le Bloc’s Vincents—a title. Caravaggio, for my benefit, used it, addressing Vincent as Monsieur le Président.
“You’re looking for how this place is organized?” Vincent said to me. “You’re looking for a unicorn. The problem is that the people here are marginal. They’re here because they reject rules. That’s fundamental. So it’s impossible to make up rules specially for these same people.”
“We make rules,” Caravaggio said, “but a minimum.”
They relaxed, eventually joking between themselves, men, about certain women at Le Bloc. I had a hard question, about the resolution of disputes. “On the subject of management,” I said, “someone mentioned a kind of internal court.”
“Oh yes,” Vincent said quickly, “that’s us, we get together at night, we go to the −4, and Le Général …”
I cut in, alarmed. “The −4?”
“But of course. You want to wale on somebody, better do it down below. It’s more discreet. It’s every Thursday night, this get-together.”
“He’s joking,” Caravaggio said, uncomfortable.
But I would have it confirmed by another tonton, by two tontons, that such a body did exist, created in response to complaints the squat’s government was insufficiently transparent.
***
The building’s size was a point of pride that many of them held in common, but it was not the only one. Caravaggio, early in our interview, rattled off the squat’s constituent ethnicities, in his brag an echo of that value shared with corporations. Squatters made appreciative reference to Le Bloc’s multiformity. Their origins were various and included Algeria, Chile, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and French Guiana—which I will call by its name in French, Guyane, so as to avoid that possessive—Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Romania, Senegal, Spain, Togo, Uruguay, the U.S.S.R., and, even before my arrival, the U.S.
I kept hearing women at Le Bloc were treated well, a claim that gave itself the lie in its very syntax (in the cordoning-off of women and the looming question of the subject, a potential aggressor to whom cover had been granted). Still, though the tontons were not, in my woman’s experience, bien-pensant regarding gender, one French artist transitioning while living at Le Bloc felt well there. A few of the others, given the chance to correct a bailiff on the matter of the artists’s pronouns, did so with apparent eagerness.
Here and there lived an otherwise homeless Frenchman taken in by tontons some years previously on the condition that he quit drinking and do the dishes. A petite, emaciated man with a beard ending at his chest and tons of bracelets, he was called Jesus.
One tonton, a thickset, dreadlocked Frenchman, unnerved me by only very late in my reporting addressing me in English that was perfect, even posh. Of some other tontons, he said: “The problem is that these people have trouble communicating, so they’re just going to get upset and smash people up, and I don’t think it’s the proper way of doing things.” He had gone to boarding school in Kent, he explained.
A Frenchwoman in her twenties from the suburbs had grown up working with the Red Cross—her mother ran a local chapter, she explained—and raised money steadily, at Le Bloc also, to fill a shipping container she would send to “Africa.” These parties didn’t happen at Le Bloc, but she threw fundraisers.
A more senior Frenchwoman, a painter, explained while clutching a portfolio of her work that a grandfather of hers had helped lead the French Resistance during the Second World War. Out of the direst necessity his children were split up and hidden. The squatter’s mother, given away to a provincial family, was brought up to make a living by competing in motorcycle rodeos. In consequence the other siblings, placed in higher-class homes, came to reject her. The squatter, who was living on the second floor of Le Bloc, told me in conclusion that not long before she’d met a cousin of hers, a rich man, because he was trying to buy one of her paintings.
Not sure I believe any of this, I noted.
Myths of Paris came to roost at Le Bloc as they did at other squats, as if squats were the city’s unconscious. Three boys nineteen years old arrived from Italy to launch careers as painters. Le Général provided secondhand canvases, white paint with which to blank them. Previously the teenagers had stolen their canvases from 59 Rivoli, the municipality-owned “after-squat” on the rue de Rivoli, they told me. At Le Bloc, they slept in one of the ground-floor galleries; it looked as if a family of swans had molted. While their French was just okay, the English spoken by these Italians was very good: after they told me they wanted to live in Montmartre, haunt of the cubist Pablo Picasso, I asked—I thought reasonably—if they wanted to recreate la bohème. “Not recreate,” a boy said. “We are la bohème.”
A Mauritian man living on the fifth floor was a kind of lapsed philosopher, having been through too much schooling to content himself with any job; a woman about my age, white, French, explained she lived at Le Bloc having failed a course of study in the philosophy of art. A white Romanian woman my age applying to the Beaux-Arts was also a talented acrobat.
It was on the second floor where two men I’d met at Le Carrosse, since closed, had come to live, one middle-aged, one older. They had also lived at Mirabeau, the squat Le Général had opened in an eastern suburb. The older man, who due to a bad leg couldn’t work, was Algerian and had come to France years before for fear of events he explained with one word, terrorism, nearly the same in my language.
On the third floor lived a Moroccan musician, a performer in the Gnawa tradition. He had few possessions apart from his instruments, the most important of which was the gimbri, a tall, three-stringed lute of camel skin on which the man lavished attention. By hand he sewed a strand of cowrie shells onto its strap, sequined and red.
Also on the third lived “the Russians,” as they were called in aggregate, though one had been born in the part of the U.S.S.R. that became Belarus; I had known them, musicians, at Le Carrosse.
For a few days a man from Germany slept in a basement, apparently uninvited; he regaled me at the very first question with tales so violent I wished I’d asked nothing, about fights, acts of sabotage associated by him with some kind of punk scene. A musician and artist from Guadeloupe who was Black referred to the German as a “white Rasta,” because of his dreadlocks.
Many squatters referred to the inhabitants of the fourth floor, which was majority black, as “the Rastas” even if not all of them identified that way. (One who did gave me his business card; he sold food. Others sold posters, Judaica. A band from Jamaica visiting Paris stayed at Le Bloc, also Rastafarians; reggae groups performed on the −1.) Vicious rumors would spread about a Guianese man living on this floor who’d take it upon himself in meetings to question the tontons’ management, calling it racist. He was said to have padlocked a shower—he may have been the one to build the shower—and sold, subsequently, copies of the key. Also alleged was that on that floor rooms were rented out to new arrivals in France, Senegalese men maybe, many to a room in any case who couldn’t access other housing when they wanted, the story went, for immigration documents.
Because of the seriousness of these allegations, I looked for the men, and yet I didn’t like finding myself in that position, of hunting. (Separately I met at least two Senegalese men living at Le Bloc, one called Suleman and another, Action, his DJ name; both had, I thought, immigrated long before.) Very late, as the date of the squat’s eviction—December 6, 2013—was approaching, the fourth floor emptied out. Standing in its eerily calm hallway with my research question I called a Bloc squatter I’d met at Le Carrosse, a Japanese musician whose passport, even that, had expired, and learned he, at least, had left Le Bloc for this reason.
The beauty of Le Bloc was not that it took in everyone but that it took in anyone; one of its failures was that it could not take in everyone. In October of that year, a ship sank off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy; a large number of passengers died. The press identified them as undocumented migrants from African countries and, after that fashion, too late to do them any favors, set them down in history. Casualty counts—“more than 100 … including three children,” an “estimated 300,” “at least 130,” with “200 … unaccounted for”—did not discourage, by any burst of clarity, the public complacency. A few dozen or hundred got away from the wreck. I stopped by the squat Le Stendhal, where an artist from Taiwan, someone else who’d overstayed in France, marveled at the difference, stark enough, between her own predicament and that of the passengers. “I feel very guilty, because I know a lot of illegal immigrants who risked their lives to come here,” she said in English. She spoke little French and confided in me by reason of our shared language—one strangeness we shared. “I just took a flight, and I stayed because of my curiosity.”
This essay is adapted from Precarious Lease, to be published by Rescue Press this October and by Fitzcarraldo in January of 2025.
The author of a previous book, On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations, Jacqueline Feldman lives in Massachusetts.
from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/6InLOqz
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