Free Culture Needs Free Spaces

Every four or five years some rightwing politicians try to destroy the place that I call the center of culture in Switzerland: the cultural center Reitschule. In Switzerland a lot of laws are decided by a popular referendum. A lovely institution. But also a chance for anti-cultural and anti-intellectual forces to create laws that nobody really needs. For instance the prohibition of minarets in a country with hardly any mosques. One party is specialized in creating xenophobic hypes: SVP (Swiss Popular Party). Now this party forces people to vote about one of Swiss capital Bern’s most important cultural space. They want to auction off the place that has brought so much joy to the global cultural scene.

23 years ago Reitschule was re-squated. Already in the early 1980′s the former horse riding school next to Bern’s central train station was claimed by the youth of town. After a short time of free cultural expression the place was taken over by the city and afterwards guarded like Fort Knox with heavily armed police men. 1987 was a year with a lot of cultural clashes in Switzerland’s capital. It was not a purely local thing actually. There was a movement all over Europe that claimed new cultural spaces and cheap housing in an atmosphere of profit oriented housing policy and a growing urban gentrification: Hafenstrasse Hamburg, Berlin-Kreuzberg, Kraak-Capital Amsterdam to name just a few. All of a sudden hundreds of kids took back what they urgently needed: a place of freedom. Reitschule was squatted – for good. Legendary German punk band Die Goldenen Zitronen who played in a nearby club re-scheduled their show and played at Reithalle, the huge hall of the former horse riding school. Local music heroes, such as Stephan Eicher, Polo Hofer and Züri West, took the stage. The place has been autonomous since then!

I first set foot in the place about one year later. I was a young teenager looking for kicks and I found them there. Of course it was the perfect place for the adolescent boy: Drinking cheap beer, smoking healthy and unhealthy herbs, listening to loud music and going wild all night, while my parents thought I was spending the night at a friend’s parents’ house – a respectable professor of the local university. The professor’s son of course going crazy as well. Soon we would start working behind the bar – getting paid in free beer and free culture. It was wonderful.

In 1990 the film “Step Accross the Border” about guitar and violin wizard Fred Frith came out. Me and my music loving buddies were flabbergasted and found that this was exactly what we were looking for. Soon after all those acts of the global improvisation scene, that were portrayed in the film, did gigs at Dachstock Reitschule, the former hay storing place of the horse riding school: Iva Bittová, Tim Hodgkinson, Tom Cora with numerous of his projects, and of course Fred Frith himself. Sandro, one of the promoters of Dachstock, was working for recrec, an alternative record label and distribution agency. He had all the contacts and brought the most beautiful music culture to the small city of Bern.

Global cultural freedom has been celebrated at this place, which offers a theatre for plays, a movie theatre, several small and big music stages and more. At the same time it has also been a place for local experiments. I remember we – a bunch of tech and art geeks – did a multimedia performance every year in the early 1990′s: Media Suck. We experimented with new aesthetics and computer technology. It was so avantgardistic most visitors left after a few minutes, but some stayed all night and had the trip of their life. That was ten years before new media and digital art festivals all over the world started to pop up! Of course computers crashed most of the time back then. Beer stayed analog. Fortunately.

Of course freedom not only meant happiness and sunshine. Some people overexaggerated their need for personal freedom and used violence against others. Mad folk singer, banjo virtuoso and noise scientist Eugene Chadbourne once called the place “Righthell”. And I had my own share when I got beaten up pretty badly after I – rather drunk at the time – insulted some punks. But I came back to the place and I joined the concert promoting collective. After the blood and tears the joy followed. I even met one of my first girlfriends at the place – actually I just started a family with a lovely woman I also fell in love with at that wonderful place. And I met the global music scene. I have to mention some bands and musicians that impressed me and made me very proud of being part of the Reitschule world: God, The Boredoms, Zeni Geva, Oxbow, DJ Krush, Cop Shoot Cop, Missing Foundation, Melt Banana, U.S. Maple, Marc Ribot, The Ruins, Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., 2nd Gen, Kid 606, The Ex, Zu, Charles Gayle, Les Gitans du Rajasthan, Illusion of Safety, Crash Worship, DJ Andy Smith, El Vez and many many more.

Even though I am not directly involved in the place any more I keep returning. Of course for norient this is a very important place, too. First of all Reitschule is a place where new music on the edge finds a place long before it becomes mainstream. Asian Dub Foundation, Transglobal Underground, Loop Guru were groups that played at Reitschule before the so-called “Asian Underground” became trendy. Eastern European bands played at Reitschule soon after the Berlin wall came down. It’s only logical that today the most important local club night for sounds of the Balkans is at Dachstock Reitschule: Wild Wild East. Norient did its first music and film festival at this place: In 2003 Thomas Burkhalter and I presented our film “Buy More Incense” about British Asian musicians at Dachstock. TJ Rehmi can be seen on the screen playing the sitar guitar during the credits. After we removed the screen real TJ Rehmi appeared on stage. Followed by DJ Ritu, Bobby Friction (who later became a resident DJ in Bern) and Kingsuk Biswas. In 2010 we returned to Reitschule organizing the first norient music documentary film festival. The Reitschule Kino (movie theatre) was sold out every night. All kinds of people came – a former Swiss congress man as well as young high school students. We will do a second edition next year. This September we will do our show “Sonic Traces: From the Arab World” with PRAED at the Grosse Halle of Reitschule. We will stay. No matter what.

Free culture needs free spaces. If rightwing politicians would like to turn every city in this world into a place without edges, a synthetic Disneyland, we have to start fighting. When gentrification starts, when the whole world turns into H&M, Coca Cola and Starbucks, when investors and purely profit oriented politicians destroy what has been built by the people, it’s time to stand up. Reitschule has done that succesfully and will probably win the fifth referendum. I urge everybody to fight for more places like the Reitschule in Bern all over the world. Let’s create a global Reitschule. Cheers…!

P.S.: The fun thing is: every time rightwing politicians want to close Reitschule, the creative community of Bern gets together and produces great stuff to show the solidarity with the place. Now there has been a CD production and several video clips. The song “Erich, warum bisch Du nid Ehrlich?”* of radio comedian Müslüm (a Swiss version of Borat/Ali G.) even has entered the Swiss charts. More info here.

*”Erich, why are you not honest?” – Erich J. Hess is the rightwing politician who is responsible for the referendum about Reitschule.