“You see the building over there?” Hij wijst naar het nieuwe Filmmuseum. “I like that building. It looks like a giant Pokémon. There aren’t enough buildings in the world that look like giant Pokémon. The building we occupy looks more like a nazi headquarters.” Dorst: “How did it feel to break into this building?” “At first most of the people were timid. Some of them checked out only a couple of rooms, but I was all over this fucking building. All day and all night, running around and gathering shit. In the basement the floor panels are all shaky, wobbling and at some places it collapsed already. You can see through and there is all this toxic stuff underneath the floors, so scary! And there’s also a disco room. I think that’s where they were entertaining their potential employees and stuff. Pretty wild!”
Aanhangers van de Occupy beweging bezetten het Shell-gebouw in Amsterdam Noord. Ze willen er een sociaal-cultureel centrum voor een betere wereld ontwikkelen. Van een opvang voor daklozen tot een kleurrijk plantenbakkenproject in alle kleuren van de regenboog. Iedereen is welkom, hoewel Dorst nog niet naar binnen mocht. Voor de ingang spraken we een Amerikaan met een kerstmuts, die zichzelf met zijn slaapzak tot voordeurbewaker had gebombardeerd. “ I’m actually never cold sleeping out here. I have this circle of bricks around me, which I try to keep round.”
Dorst: “Are you with a certain group of people, working together?” “No, we weren’t a group until we came here. Basically it’s people from all over the fucking place. A lot of people were causing problems at the protest and it was really hard to figure out what was going on. There are no leaders or moderators, so it’s hard to have an overview. Then we went here and it’s the same story again. Anyway, this is supposed to be a peaceful protest. It’s actually harder than you’d think, because if I was hiding somewhere inside the building I could stay so totally peaceful. Actually sitting in front of the building there’s always something happening.” Dorst: “Like what?” “There are some weird gangsters living in the front hall of the Shell tower over there. There’s one dude doing a security round and another dude that doesn’t even live there I think. Yesterday they came up running like crazy people with their wild dog. They wanted to steal our copper. A few days ago a policeman walked up just to make sure we weren’t burning the national flag... because he thought that our king size monopoly board might be the national flag. And pretty often people show up telling us this is their building and that we have to get out. Actually the real owner is cool with us now.”
Dorst: “That’s nice.” “I don’t take it that seriously. I’m not like: ‘oh my god, if this doesn’t work out it’s so horrible!’ Most of the people here have another place to stay, but they act like this place is more important to them. Sometimes it’s a little too tense, so what I’ve tried to do is: smoke a bunch of weed.
Dit item werd eerder gepubliceerd op een van de vorige Dorst weblogs.