http:www.petitiononline.com/cox18/petition.html.
In defense of autonomous culture: hands off the Primo Moroni Archive! Milan, Year Zero. In January 22nd Italian police evicted the social space of COX 18, a countercultural and political centre born in the 1970s, and attempted to sequester the Primo Moroni Archive -- a collection of documents of the italian and European autonomous movement from the late 1960s on. The magistrate's intervention declaring the police action illegitimate has put the situation on hold and avoided the move of the Archive into the dark canteens of the Milan police headquarters; but the materials are still under custody and risks being definitively sequestered. No-one has access to the documents placed under custody behind the walls of the social centre: leaflets, books, manifestos and magazines of the European-wide autonomous movement, gathered day after day in the last thirty years by the activists of the Archive and the Calusca City Lights bookshop. The police action tries to erase a cultural experience which has been traversed since the late 1970s by punk, cyber, hacker and electronic culture, and to silence one of the nervous centers of European autonomous culture.
After thirty years, COX 18 had started the procedure to have their property right over the space recognized. This attack, supported by Milan mayor Moratti, deliberately shuts down the possibility of a definitive legal solution for the precarity of COX 18's situation. Faced with this event, a further symptom of the rolling back of civil liberties across Europe, we wish to affirm today more than ever the social legitimacy of independent institutions such as the Primo Moroni Archive and COX 18 and the ethical and political need to defend their existence. What is on course today is an attack against a common cultural heritage and a place where a radically democratic culture and society is produced every day, through debates and concerts, cultural initiatives and social projects.
Now, when once again the memory of movements has been sequestered, the words of Nanni Balestrini's "Gli Invisibili", one of the most vivid accounts of the 1970s movements, come to mind: 'and so they began the back and forth of moving from the cabinet to the car’s boots i was desperate i knew i'd never see my files again it would rot in the canteen of some police station or courthouse would disappear like some years later the comrades' files would destroyed by themselves all the newspapers all the magazines all the leaflets all the documents all the manifestos all the press of the movement destroyed disappeared all stuffed into cardboard boxes bin bags and burnt or thrown away tons of print stuff the written history of the movement its memory thrown into refuse heaps into the flames for fear of repression a justified fear because one leaflet was enough for a warrant for a few years in jail then'
This eviction and sequestration attempt to deny to the whole of society a common, open space of reflection on our memory and the future that we are building. This is why we invite you to sign this petition, so that those who have built and maintained the Primo Moroni Archive throughout these thirty years may open it again to the city of Milan, and all of us, as soon as possible.