We are an anarchist publication based out of so-called vancouver. We are a collective of 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 nonhuman 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. 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.
We were inspired by finding past writings about the city across periods of time, from more recent publications like Wreck, to old riot grrrl zines like Cockroach and HAG. Finding these was a gift. The writings and news reports and spokenword resonances left by other anarchists and radicals are like treasures to excavate. Without their writing, we would 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.” 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 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 megaprojects, or because we were somehow able to create the spaces we can sustainably live and thrive in.
Disclaimer: 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 organizing 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. TLDR: We don’t believe in anything we say and nor do we do any of it.
Territorial Acknowledgement: Our editing work is conducted across ancestral and stolen land that has been continually stewarded since time immemorial by multiple nations including the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (TsleilWaututh), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), Semiahmoo, sc̓əwaθən məsteyəxʷ (Tsawwassen), qiqéyt (Qayqayt), Kwantlen and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples. We denounce the legitimacy of the brutal, genocidal canadian state.
