We are an anarchist publication based out of so-called vancouver. We are settler cats who live in the city because that’s where pals and projects are at. Meanwhile, we plug our ears through the constant car traffic and construction noise and breathe in asphalt fumes and car exhaust. We watch all of our favourite spaces disappear through gentrification and see fewer non-human animal friends every year. The city is life-support. The city is death.
We are domesticated animals turning scruffy and crusty as we rummage for trash and search for friends in a crumbling city. We are scrapyard sorters trying to survive and build things for ourselves. Along the way, we stumble upon proof of lives lived, proof that others resisted and desired in a similar manner as we do. We follow their traces– evidence of times and places where friends found each other and their intensities and passions intersected in waves. There is no “movement” and never was– only energies and desires flowing through bodies that came together.
We’re tired of screaming into the void. Maybe someone out there wants to hear us. Maybe they need to hear us to know they aren’t screaming by themselves. We want to put a dot on a map or a pinpoint of light in a constellation in our locale’s patchwork anarchist discourse. We want to have a record that we were here, and we all hated this too!
Our work is conducted on the ancestral, unceded, and stolen lands of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Squamish, Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, Katzie, Semiahmoo, Tsawwassen, Qayqayt, Kwantlen and Kwikwetlem peoples. We denounce the legitimacy of the brutal, genocidal canadian state. canada is fake.
A direct inspiration for this project, a vancouver-based anarchist publication called Wreck, likened their project to a message in a bottle: a one-way communication that has travelled through time. This was a gift for those of us searching for others who were profoundly unhappy with the prevailing state of affairs, the long-burning ruin and waste that frames and overwhelms our lives. The writings and news reports and spoken-word resonances of past actions left by other anarchists are like treasures to excavate. We have no guide to contextualize what we see or to show us the paved-over and blank spaces where wild things used to be. We hope to leave behind helpful scraps for anyone in the “future.” This project is for anyone who is in the right place and time to receive it and know they’re not alone.
Our intention with this publication is to document a history that exists in the whispers between friends, in anonymous communiques and midnight actions, and in bits of knowledge passed on through word-of-mouth or online archives. A history that is excluded from textbooks and corporate-media accounts of time and place. We have had to dig to find this knowledge, and want to lessen the amount of searching that future anarchists have to do. We hope that by adding to the historical anarchist continuity, we can strengthen the shared, intergenerational knowledge of our communities. Any picture of the past we put together will be flat and fragmented, void of the texture and energy of the Real Thing when it happened in a Now.
One day there will be no more city– whether through complete ecosystem collapse caused by colonial pipeline and hydro mega-projects, or because we were somehow able to create the spaces we can sustainably live and thrive in.
Disclaimer: We exist as a publication and an aspiring historical record of anarchist activity within this doomed city. We are here to celebrate accomplishments, critique failures, and mourn losses. We as a group exist to publish and lift up other people’s actions, not to directly engage. There are other awesome groups that are organising actions on this territory, but we are not those folks. The writing we publish is not necessarily our own accounts, nor do all contributors views reflect our own.