02 Set

OCCUPATION of the MARINONI THEATRE

Venice Lido, September 2, 2011
68° Venice Film Festival

PRESS RELEASE
OCCUPATION of the MARINONI THEATRE

We are Workers in the arts and entertainment.
On June 14th we occupied the Teatro Valle in Rome, as a symbol for the dramatic situation of Art in Italy, to save it from an uncertain future and risk of privatization. We do not have affiliations that represent us and through direct and horizontal forms of self-organization we take back our rights. We deal with what is ours, reclaiming our time and our spaces.

Today we occupy the Theatre Marinoni, an Art Nouveau jewel of the Venetian lagoon, because it’s yet another cultural space abandoned and in the center of a real estate speculation. From this space returned to the citizenship we look over at the most important italian festival of international cinema a few hundred meters from here and invite actors, directors, producers, writers, technicians and all the workers in the audiovisual sector to discuss the criticality of the system and expose themselves by opening a dialogue.

We believe it is time to take responsibility in first person to break the duopoly of RAI Cinema – Medusa, which dominates the mechanisms of production and distribution, to build a productive autonomy, an expressive and artistic thought without monopoly, to contrast the trend towards outsourcing in the country by supporting the national professionalism, for a fair distribution of public funding, for transparency in the choice of the committees deciding the allocation of funds to avoid political interference, the right to claim the guaranteed income during unemployment, to foster the rebirth of multiple narratives of the present.

We believe that cinema can be virtuous even from a point of view of production: we oppose to the austery policies with a different way of thinking and making films, another conception of wealth that might focus on quality rather than the strict logic of profit.

There is no longer time to do separate battles for each category: we must be able to overcome the divisions between individual disputes, affiliations, the special interests. Because we want the film to be again – really – a collective work and not ruled by individualism.

The state of emergency in which the cultural sector in our country is at the moment is the result of specific political choices: violent cuts in recent years have hit theaters, museums, cinemas, cultural institutions, research and education, gradually devastating the public system. The same logic of profit that is transforming the Lido into a cement factory, threatening the existence of many places of great historical and artistic identity, like the Cinecittà studios that are to become residencies and wellness centers.

The projet of a new Palace of Cinema, which was to revive the Venice Film Festival, has turned into a shady deal. In three years of excavations there have been spent more than 37 millions, to have as only result a huge crater. The scavations are stopped but not the speculative projects that were created to pay for the work. This is an exemplary case of how cultural destination is strategically used to justify emergency-plans and special commissions. Similarly Venice is by its nature an exemplorary case: a unique artistic, cultural and intellectual system that is based on exploitation and on the strong concentration of cultural precariousness.

Teatro Valle has in the over two months of occupation turned into a direct form of self-government and a political laboratory for imagining new models of management that is based on participation and cooperation. We do this by giving back value to common action and providing a new definition of the idea that each of us have of commonwealth. Every place, like the Valle and Marinoni, as beautiful – if empty, is a dead place. Only by the presence of living bodies, by knowledge, relationships, experience and passion it can take on a political and civil value.

The commonwealth belongs to everybody and emerge when a community in which it was taken away from, struggles to reassert it.
We try to do it at Valle and Marinoni – every single day.