This year we will be celebrating our 3rd anniversary on Sunday the 1st of December, and we are planning a full day of events, from vegan brunch to talks, workshops and music!

Economic insecurity, over-individualisation, constant anxieties, fear. Everywhere you look, capitalist democracy is in trouble, very few people believe that politicians are really going to solve their problems, and still conditions worsen and worsen. In this context, the necessity of doing things differently arise, the necessity of creating a collective space where we can practice solidarity with each other, a space where we can try, autonomously, to gain back control over our lives and over what surrounds us.

This space is what a Social Center should be: a basis for Counter-power and solidarity in the city.

In our context, however, squats and social centers often happen to not be very connected with the neighborhood, and thus all the people living there, but are more spaces for the radical scene only, if not just spaces for concerts and parties of a certain subculture that tends to be commodified more and more.

We therefore feel the urge to start a discussion on this and to confront ourselves with examples of social centers more connected with a certain kind of popular struggle, situated in different contexts. For these reasons, we invited the Ex-OPG Je So' Pazzo from Naples and the Kiezkommune from Berlin to come and talk about their experiences and reflect on these topics with us.

During this panel, beside seeing the examples of how striving for counter-power and practicing solidarity can look like, we are going to address various thematics.

What are the reasons that brought to a certain "subculturalisation" of social centers? In which ways do practices of solidarity and mutual aid differ from assistentialism? What are the conditions that can bring to gaining more or less autonomy from the state?

This and more we are going to discuss in this panel so join us!

We are also going to present a booklet with various texts from various collectives and contexts (including Ex Opg and Kiezkommune) on social centres, counter-power and struggle. You can find it online here: https://archive.org/details/socialcentres