In 2014, the small Kurdish-majority town of Kobanê near the Syria-Turkey border became the focus of global attention. Surrounded by ISIS and expected to fall, Kobanê resisted, survived, and inspired one of the most radical democratic experiments of our time. During the siege, I was translating Hemingway’s The Old Man at the Bridge and imagined the story set along the ancient Euphrates River, near some of the world’s oldest settlements. Hemingway’s Old Man fled the Spanish Civil War, leaving behind his animals, his home, and his life. Nearly eighty years later, in Kobanê, the Old Man was Kurdish. He left his goats, cats, pigeons, olive trees, and a home built over generations. The bridge in Spain became a river crossing in northern Syria; history had changed its language, but the fear and the loss remained the same.

Last October, the Advisory Service for Squatters celebrated its 50th anniversary, though squatting has been around much longer. In October 2024, we published the 15th edition of the famous Squatters Handbook, which had to be more detailed and complex than earlier editions.

‘We call on all cultural workers to put down their tools and cease to make, distribute, sell, exhibit, or discuss their work from January 1st 1990, to January 1st 1993'. So begins the Art Strike Handbook, published in 1989, with the hopes of initiating an international cessation of artistic labour. Organisations were formed, banners and badges were made, and pickets were organised. The goal wasn't just to shut down the art world, but threaten the very notion of art itself.

How did you get started selling the magazine?

It was a recommendation. Since I became homeless, at first I was just being moved from one place to another, hostel to hostel, but mainly sleeping on the street. It wasn't until the 2024 Crisis at Christmas that I got really stuck into selling the magazines. I wasn't taking it too seriously at first, but, yeah, I started from then.

As we write, the world is on fire. Trump threatens Greenland and Venezuela, Iranians are being killed for protesting against their regime and the Gaza genocide continues. Climate breakdown is quickly entering a critical period. There is a desperate need to shift towards peace and reconstruction, and ideas for how to do so without relying on the state, government, or political parties are becoming increasingly popular. But those ideas are not equally accessible for all. As deaf people who use British Sign Language (BSL) as our first language, we face barriers that prevent us from participating in these discourses of resistance.

On the evening of 15 December 2025, just before 9:40 PM, a large group of people dressed as Santa Claus and his elves went into a supermarket in Montreal. They moved calmly through the supermarket aisles, filling their sacks with food. Within minutes they left taking thousands of dollars' worth of groceries, none of which was paid for. Santa and his masked elves then went to the Christmas tree in the central square. Underneath the twinkling lights, they laid out the stolen food and attached signs that read ‘Christmas is expensive, free food’. The remaining groceries were distributed to community fridges across Montreal.

Class is a touchy subject. It’s a lens we use to judge others and ourselves. Over the last 50 years, categories of class have become increasingly blurred by neoliberalism, despite Victorian-era poverty making a comeback. We are forever sold the dream of social mobility, but these days, most of the ‘socially mobile’ are hurtling downwards. Austerity has played a part in this. Families and friendship networks have been financially and energetically trying to care for those around us after years of health and social services being defunded, a burden that left many of us unable to accumulate our own personal safety nets. Many of us have had to move to big cities for work, and the precarity of the housing crisis has been another boot on our necks. At the same time, we watch through black mirrors those with more money than we have ‘living their best life’ on social media, taunting us with pleasures we will never be able to afford.

Surrounded on either side by the police headquarters of Athens and the supreme court – two pillars of state power – the eight housing blocks that make up the squatted community of Prosfygika stand proud and unflinching – and always threatened. The neighbourhood is marked by a long history, both as a haven for refugees in Athens since the 1930s (Prosfygika means 'refugee homes' in Greek) and as a stronghold of partisan resistance in the December 1944 uprising, which left the blocks scarred by bullet holes. Today, the neighbourhood plays a key role in the fight against the ongoing state-backed gentrification of Athens.