Thread by @andrewflood

The news about Jigsaw closing is dominating my timeline tonight - in the next couple of days I’ll try & put together a thread from the early Seomra days onwards looking at the intersections of dance & radical politics that keep that heart beating for so long

When 'we' first rented the building I shot a walk through video as it was being cleaned & painted - you'll get a sense from this of the rounds of internal redesign over the years -one measure of the level of volunteer labour poured in 🧵2

Volunteer labour was what built Seomra - no one drew a wage, there was no state funding & none was ever sought. It was that aspect that defined the dance floor even if few of those dancing knew that, it funded many radical political projects including the space itself 🧵3

The concept itself came from experiences of Social Centers in Europe during the Summit Protest movement that dominated the turn of the millennium. Seomra Spraoi became the answer to 'how can we have something like this back home' alongside RTS & anti-war activism 🧵4

With some experiences of running previous spaces, here the GoD back in 1996 and Warzone in Belfast. Indeed some of would have been teenagers visiting the WRC in Crowe street in the mid 1980s. Each projects stands on the shoulders of many that went before, as the next will to 🧵5

I'm going to take a break here and link you to a piece I wrote in 2013 from the opposite angle, a defence of such social centre spaces in the process of left organising. TBC later 🧵6 anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=768

Another important precursor was the Magpie squat on Leeson st, photo is a successful anti-eviction mobilisation. It was the organising centre for the early Mayday 2004 EU summit organising but evicted ahead of the summit protest 🧵7

I have truth been told intimidated myself with the size & complexity of a story I thought last night I could tell in a few tweets. There are a lot of layers, so many people to accidentally leave out. This is Halloween 2010, the 1% Network had just returned from Shewsbury road🧵8

At this point every dance night ended with Ghost Town - sometimes played several times over - we'd no idea of the future of endless hotels as far as the eye could see that awaited on the other side of the recession 🧵9

Dozens, maybe hundreds of DJs, bands, poets, acts and things that remain hard to characterise played in the downstairs back room - at times the band would take up half the available space 🧵10

But in terms of the story I want to also tell who takes photos of a meal being served at the cafe that fed 100s on the cheap in the recession winters, a Revolutionary Anarcho-Feminist Group meeting or a Better Questions discussion. Turns out I do have a very few 🧵11

I'd imagine I must have been at 400 events (not counting our own meetings) over the years Jigsaw / Seomra was in existence. Some very thought ones I may get onto down thread, others that challenged in other ways. Almost none (anyway?) that felt like a waste of time 🧵12

Trivia, for a while the dance floor was located in the 'garage' at front of building rather than kitchen at the back - in the transformation from Seomra to Jigsaw the internal walls downstairs were removed, the toilets moved and walls rebuilt to make that last dance floor 🧵13

I mentioned the all volunteer unpaid nature of the space - that included the people who did 'bouncer' on the door week in week out, and tidied up afterwards. Telling people it was really time to go home at 6am when we wanted 'just one more tune' paid the rent🧵13

Under not all fun and games here are some whiteboards from a Shell to Sea strategy session on the connections with a potential water tax movement from 2010. Dublin Shell to Sea meet in Seomra through these years - indeed huge number went down to Rossport via Seomra 🧵14