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Anti-Capitalist Retreat

Part 1 Project 2012
Ayden De Luca
 University of Greenwich | UK
The Anti-Capitalist utopia is inhabited all year round and expands in the summer to combine activist rally, training and camping facilities. Situated in the mountains of Llanberis, Wales, it re-occupies a disused slate mining quarry. A group of activists inhabit the ruined miners dwellings and reconstruct community and identity with shared resources and ideologies.

It is a constructed space for exploring and expressing anti-capitalist ideologies via legitimate and progressive means, and developing strategies to counteract modes of suppression by law enforcement and government.
Conceived with direct help from ‘Occupy London’ protesters, the project developed from the emerging institutions within the Occupy London campsite at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The mining context and setting has a history of oppression – miners’ strikes, unfit living conditions, and unfair evictions. It also offers an abundance of abandoned mining material and infrastructures – the blondin cableways – to reuse, rebuild and reoccupy. From the foot of the mountain, activists are hoisted up the rock face by itinerant beacons which circumnavigate the mountain front using dynamo storage systems and the augmented blondin cableway network to provide the settlements with a range of goods, produce and services.

The ruins accommodate a sequence of varied, liberal spaces interconnecting larger institutional and domestic spaces. These are formed by a geometry of explosions, tensions, evictions, and disrupted domestic furnishings. Suspended above the settlement is a protective tensile membrane which utilises the blondin cableways to retract and respond to varying environmental conditions as well as social ones, including the annual anti-capitalist festival.

The retreat was constructed around various practical, environmental, political, and symbolic constituents, mainly the Occupy campsite at St. Paul’s. Studies of the camp helped to model the retreat into an anti-capitalist hub that sustains the act of protest through institutional and domestic facilities, such as the lecture space carved into the mountain face, based on the ‘Tent City’ university, which welcomes the leading activists, authors and visionaries of the movement.

Partially documented, partially speculated, this project responds to the growing numbers of people and organisations who fight for the right to protest against capitalist ideals.

It is an architecture of micro-tactical resistance
Ayden De Luca
Tutor(s)
Ms James Curtis
Ms Reenie (Karin) Elliott
2012
The Anti-Capitalist Retreat is a constructed space for exploring and expressing anti-capitalist ideologies via legitimate and progressive means.
Micro-tactical resistance and a call for radical institutional change in our contemporary society is a notion expressed and explored even at grassroots level through the practice of protest.
As an anti-capitalist hub, the retreat sustains the act of protest through institutional and domestic facilities.
The retreat re-occupies a disused slate mining quarry in the mountains, in Llanberis, Wales.
The retreat reconstructs community and identity with shared resources and ideologies.
A group of activists inhabit the ruined miners dwellings.
The ruins accommodate a sequence of varied, liberal spaces interconnecting larger institutional and domestic spaces.
Suspended above the settlement is a protective tensile membrane which utilises the blondin cableways to retract and respond to varying environmental conditions as well as social ones.
From the foot of the mountain, activists are hoisted up the rock face by itinerant beacons which circumnavigate the mountain front using the augmented blondin cableway network.
The annual Anti-Capitalist Festival is a display and celebration of work from activists who promote anti-capitalism through film, books, and other mediums.
The lecture space, carved into the mountain face, based on the ‘Tent City’ university, which welcomes the leading activists, authors and visionaries of the movement.
The libary is a spatial focus-point which utilises the ruines in its presentation of hundreds of donated books. With every book that's borrowed, more of the ruined slate walls behind are revealed.
The world's resources must go towards caring for people and the planet.The abundance of abandoned mining material and infrastructures on site are reused, rebuild and reoccupied.
Spaces are formed by a geometry of explosions, tensions, evictions, and disrupted domestic furnishings. The form is constructed by practical, environmental, political, and symbolic constituents.
A revolution is neither made nor stopped. Only one of several of its children can give it a direction by dint of victories. These are some of the protesters who've helped to conceive this project.
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