The radical arts collective Macao's brief occupation of the Palazzo Citterio in Milan came to a swift end early this week after local police raided the area. The police intervention occurred only days after Macao's members first set up in the Palazzo, having been evicted from Milan's Galfa Tower, the site of a now vacant Banca Popolare di Milano.
Macao first occupied the tower on May 5, according to the Italian news site La Stampa, and the demonstration quickly grabbed national attention. "All of us strongly believe that the participative process we are living," members wrote in a press release, "finally represents the birth of a new perspective, that will allow us to create and re-think the concept of culture itself."
Over the years, left-leaning Italians have grown accustomed to expressing discontent through civil disobedience. Students of history vividly remember the "autnno caldo" (or "Hot Autumn") of 1969, when workers occupied the Fiat factory in Turin to protest conditions there. Since then, young people have frequently taken to occupying university buildings to express their grievances. Now, with social disquiet in Italy taking an increasingly tense turn in the wake of the international recession and the European sovereign debt crisis, artist groups like Macao are demonstrating a desire to be part of the conversation. (Occupations, of course, are not the only way Italians are displaying their discontent with the state of culture in their country: radical Italian museum director Antonio Manfredi made headlines with his controversial decision to burn works of art to protest cultural funding cuts across the country, while museum directors have protested their low salaries.)
On their Facebook page and in public statements, Macao's members lament chronic reductions in government funding for cultural industries, describing themselves as "precarious workers in the fields of artistic production," dedicated to "liberating" space in which artists can work and improving working conditions for Italians in creative fields. Last month, a like-minded artist group occupied the Garibaldi Theater in Palermo, Sicily, a space that has been out of use for more than a year. (In the process, they won the vocal support of the actress Franca Rame and her husband, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright and nobelist Dario Fo.) "We want the city council to take note of how they are governing theater spaces like these," an occupier told the news site il Fatto Cronaca.
Similar demonstrations have since taken place at cultural institutions in Rome, Naples, and Venice. The demonstrators have united under the umbrella group Art Workers, a loose union of art collectives across Italy. "We denounce the political interference in arts management and the shameful public governance of culture," reads a statement on the group's Web site. "Issues like income and welfare need to be part of the critical debate within the visual arts field."