It was 4:00 AM on March 31st, and it was raining outside when the state's scoundrels and puppets, with their armored vehicles of oppression, surrounded and raped the Occupied Popular Urban Laboratory, the L.U.P.O. gym in the heart of Catania. Fourteen years of occupations by various groups and eight days of permanent protest by hundreds who, over time, showed solidarity amid differences, affinities, mistakes, victories, love, repression, and struggles. This place was not just a physical space, but a process of healing. Yes, exactly, but not the institutional, medicalized, top-down, sold kind, made up of psychotropic drugs, compulsory medical treatment, or beauty treatments to fit the latest capitalist trend, but a radical, shared healing, rooted in relationships and values. In a society that has systematized exploitation, abandonment, and loneliness, self-managed spaces today represent a concrete counter-practice: places where life is not measured in terms of productivity or speed, but rather intensity, connection, and possibility. Here, care was not a privatized service, based on mafia-backed or clientelist contracts familiar to institutional Sicily, but a widespread relational act. It was not bought, delegated, voted on, bribed, or consumed: it was built together.
Mark Fisher spoke of the difficulty of imagining alternatives to capitalism, of that suffocating feeling where "there is no alternative" becomes a mental horizon even before it becomes an economic one. Spaces like L.U.P.O. challenge precisely this perceptual cage. Not because they offer a perfect model, but because they make another organization of life visible, tangible, and habitable. They are interruptions of capitalist realism, fissures where a sociality is experimented, not mediated by the market but by ideals of freedom and anti-authoritarianism. But their strength lies not in their exceptionality. It lies in their fragmented nature. As David Graeber suggested, anarchy is not a project to be realized in a distant future, but a constellation of already existing practices, disseminated throughout the present. Fragments of autonomy, moments in which people decide to organize themselves without hierarchies, without impositions, without waiting for authorization. Care, in this sense, becomes the connective tissue of these fragments: what allows them to exist, to endure, to transform. Caring, in these contexts, means many things at once: listening, supporting, sharing resources, creating safe spaces, addressing conflicts without resorting to authority. It also means failing, starting over, learning, and getting back up. It is an imperfect practice, but a living and human one. And it is precisely this vitality that makes it incompatible with the logic of profit and control. Today's capitalism, on the contrary, empties care of its meaning. It transforms it into a performance, into invisible or underpaid labor, into individual responsibility. It tells you you have to "feel good" while destroying the material and relational conditions for doing so. It isolates, rapes, insecurizes, deludes, and then medicalizes the discomfort it itself produces so you can see its futile cure.
Self-managed spaces reverse this dynamic. They don't treat symptoms by adapting people to a sick world, but rather attempt-even if only for brief moments-to build less sick microworlds. They are laboratories of possibility, but also refuges, survival networks, places where the burden of existence is redistributed. This is why they are so frightening to those who have given up and those who want to command the life of obligation; because they show that dependence on institutions and the market is not inevitable, that we can organize ourselves, support ourselves, and live differently. And every time this possibility takes shape, it becomes urgent to neutralize it, clear it out, erase it. But the healing that occurred at L.U.P.O. isn't contained within its walls. It can't be. It passed through people, settled in relationships, changed perceptions and desires. It's already elsewhere, already circulating, ready to reemerge. And this is the structural limit of repression and these ridiculous evictions of communal spaces that we continue to witness at an incessant pace. Yes, of course, the monsters of capitalism can demolish their own concrete with their machines, the homes of Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, or one, two, or a hundred occupied buildings here, but they can't dismantle a practice once it has become a shared experience in souls and bodies. Fine, they can close off a place with a thousand barriers, but they can't prevent what was learned there from being reproduced in other contexts, in other forms, perhaps less visible, but more widespread.
Let us remember that the real threat to the existing order is not the occupied space itself. It is the capacity that space had to create autonomy, to teach cooperation, to make care a collective responsibility, to generate life, love, and anarchy. Every self-managed space is a fragment of another society. Not a happy island, but a testing ground. Not a model to be replicated, but a practice to be reinvented. And their multiplication does not follow a linear logic: it happens by propagation, by contagion, by desire, by love. The L.U.P.O. was one of these fragments. Not the first, not the last! The L.U.P.O. was a beautiful crack in the system that allowed you to see beyond the darkness. Now there are 10, 100, 1000 cracks within each of those anarchic souls who have learned to see through and beyond the darkness of the advancing nothingness; And as long as there is even a crack in the asphalt of the present, as long as there are bodies willing to meet outside the logic of profit, as long as care continues to be practiced as a political and collective gesture, no eviction will truly close what has already been opened. In this sense, the demolition of occupied spaces is not a loss: it is an unexpected release of forces. It has broken a container, it has dispersed free energies that perhaps had remained concentrated, restrained, protected, sedated in the comfort of a place for too long.
Its demolition has actually released antibodies for this society. Antibodies that function not as a passive defense, but as a widespread intelligence. They are practices, languages, and attentions learned over time that now circulate without a center, without walls to delimit them. They graft themselves onto neighborhoods, into daily relationships, into conflicts, contaminating other spaces, other lives. They do not seek to integrate into the system: they pass through it, challenging it from within. What remains after the bulldozers is even more dangerous for this sick system. Like any living organism, the social body is never completely controllable, and these antibodies act precisely there, in its fault lines, preventing domination from becoming total, adaptation from becoming resignation. They are minimal yet radical gestures: a network of mutual support that emerges, a shared practice that spreads, a refusal that becomes collective. They don't make noise like the bulldozers of power, but they work over time, transforming what they touch like perennial water. And the more they are dispersed, the more difficult they become to neutralize, because they no longer inhabit a place made of bricks and mortar: they inhabit people. And when care becomes a body, a relationship, and a shared memory, it can no longer be evicted. It becomes a persistent presence, a force that reemerges, adapts, and resists. When care spreads as a practice, it asks permission from nothing: like a powerful explosion, it transforms everything it encounters. But anarchy doesn't have to make noise; it can be whispered in a hug, a smile, a gesture of loving solidarity, or a simple NO. Today, the WOLF has emerged from its concrete, it's in the streets, it's in the diffuse sound of that ping pong ball from its tables where children used to play, it's in the hands and hearts of its comrades, it's in its protest poems engraved on the city walls.
The WOLF is free. Solidarity with the transformation!
Gabriele Cammarata | Riccardo Ricceri
http://www.sicilialibertaria.it/wp-content/uploads/aprile2026_compressed.pdf
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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