At Santa Marta, It's Always a Celebration: The Story of an Occupied House, between Art and Activism

The 1974 oil crisis, accompanied by economic stagflation and rapid corporate restructuring, led to the dismissal of thousands of industrial workers, especially in northern Italy. This context of severe precariousness pushed many young Italians to develop new social awareness and to embark on an alternative path to traditional factory logics, focusing on the dimension of desire, conceptualizing it in line with the theoretical reflections of Deleuze on “Oedipal” dynamics. This process resulted in the occupation of houses and abandoned buildings, not only as a response to the need for housing but also as spaces designated for artistic and cultural experimentation.

A significant example is the occupation of Via Santa Marta, in the heart of Milan, which became a central node in this dynamic. Occupied in the winter of 1975 at the initiative of some members of Avanguardia Operaia, it quickly became a hub for various musical and artistic cooperatives. Among these were the Cooperativa l'Orchestra, which organized music courses, and the Teatro del Drago, a theatrical collective that established fruitful collaborations with Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret. Additionally, workshops for the construction of theatrical and parade masks, as well as activities related to screen printing and muralism, were organized there.

The experiment at Via Santa Marta 25, although not unique in the Milanese landscape (notable mentions include the cultural center Macondo and the Fabbrica di Comunicazione), aimed to create, through collective artistic practice, a space for participatory sociality capable of countering the consequences of the economic crisis. This approach finds an interpretive key in the thought of Agnes Heller, who in her book The Theory of Needs in Marx (La teoria dei bisogni in Marx) defines the concept of “the necessity of free time” as an essential element for satisfying human needs in a context of alienation and structural precariousness.