> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.artsoftheworkingclass.org/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# A life that we live with all the beings around us
- URL: https://www.artsoftheworkingclass.org/text/a-life-that-we-live-with-all-the-beings-around-us/
- Published: 2026-10-13T12:47:52.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-13T12:47:52.000Z
- Description: On “Tools for Assembly” by Iliada Charalambous at Lateral Roma.
- Author: Fabiola Fiocco
- Tags: Review, Art, #main-article

Iliada Charalambous’ *Tools for Assembly*, curated by Giulia Menegale, opened at Lateral in Rome on September 18th. The exhibition develops from *True Counterpower*, an ongoing research project she initiated with Serda Demir through a series of assemblies at the Van Abbemuseum, and subsequently expanded through workshops, collectively produced banners, and *Reading Counterpower*, a reading group engaging with texts produced within revolutionary movements and radical organisations. Since 2024, the group has been developing into a confederated network connecting groups in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and The Hague. At Lateral, archival materials, texts, annotated fabrics, a mural, and the *Reading Counterpower Protocol* comprise different moments of this process, giving tangible form to practices whose substance lies largely in the relations and situations through which they unfold, without fixing them into complete or self-contained forms. The objects on display retain traces of these processes, allowing what has been learned to become available beyond the particular encounters from which it emerged. The fabrics used during the reading groups make this process especially tangible. In the sessions, Charalambous often brings large cloths printed with the text to be discussed, which participants annotate collectively as they read. Quotations, notes, and reactions accumulate directly on the surface, gradually holding the content and the traces of changing relations among the people using it. Charalambous recalls that participants initially wrote very small, limiting themselves to discrete areas of the cloth; as the sessions continued, the writing grew and spread. The altered scale of the annotations registers an increasing familiarity with the shared surface itself, a growing willingness to intervene, overlap, and occupy more space, to leave something for others to encounter. Across *Reading Counterpower* sessions, learning takes place not only through the texts being read but through the repeated use of a material held in common.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-12-at-17.05.09.png)

Tools for Assembly, Reading Counterpower. Iliada Charalambous at Lateral Roma. Photo: Roberto Apa.

The timing of the exhibition’s opening was more than adventitious: on the same evening two days of mobilization around the occupied space of Spin Time began. Between 29 and 30 July, a fire in the occupied former INPDAP, the Italian public social security and welfare institute dedicated to civil servants and public administration employees, building known as Spin Time in Via Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome led to its evacuation and judicial seizure. Around four hundred people who had lived there were suddenly unable to return home. For days, many slept outside the building or in emergency accommodation while the municipality attempted to negotiate its purchase from Investire SGR, the company managing the property. When that first negotiation failed, residents were progressively moved into temporary accommodation, dispersing a community that for thirteen years had organized housing together with cultural activities, mutual aid, and social services. The demonstration called for September 19th did not concern only the possibility of re-entering a building. Bringing together housing movements, social and cultural spaces, trade unions, associations, students, migrants, and political organizations, it explicitly connected the future of Spin Time to the financialization of housing, as well as to a different idea of the city and society, and of who should have the power to shape the city and, with it, the terms of collective life.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/10/WhatsApp-Image-2026-10-12-at-13.03.31--2-.jpeg)

 Reading Counterpower at Spin Time, a session mediated by Iliada Charalambous, in collaboration with Giulia Menegale and 10 documents (Ginevra Ludovici, Flavio Michele). Credits: Giulia Menegale.

On the day of the opening, Lateral also hosted the first Roman session of *Reading Counterpower*, followed on Sunday, September 20th, by another at the Spin Time post. This first encounter made the energy around the project palpable. Taking a text by the Community of Squatted Prosfygika as a starting point, the discussion moved across a wide range of questions, from material concerns to more ideological disagreements, through moments of agreement and of confrontation, showing how, once a struggle is encountered in its concrete complexity, the material and the ideological cannot be cleanly pulled apart. What I found most compelling was engaging with a text grounded in the concrete struggle of the Community of Squatted Prosfygika, detailing its administrative structures and how they relate to and coordinate with one another, the organization of collective self-defense, and forms of political struggle, the organizational and decision-making processes that shape its everyday functioning, and the mechanisms of internal review—with all the difficulties and contradictions these entail. The discussion that followed around terms such as *struggle* and *commune* was particularly revealing of the distance between a language grounded in specific political histories and traditions and the more theoretical and relational vocabulary through which political questions tend to be addressed in contemporary art. There was something particularly valuable about remaining with the discomfort of a text that made its political affiliations explicit, and in allowing those positions to be discussed, questioned, and contested on their own terms.

In his account of how common spaces are produced and kept open to newcomers, the architect and activist Stavros Stavrides discusses comparability and translatability as crucial strategies for expanding commoning, through which differences among subjects and practices—as well as experiences and forms of knowledge—can enter into relation without being organized according to fixed taxonomies or reduced to common denominators. (1) For Stavrides, this openness depends on the terms of comparison and translation remaining themselves open to negotiation and revision by those involved, so that what enters into common can be reshaped through the relation rather than absorbed into a pre-existing framework. The work of *Reading Counterpower* actualizes these processes and concerns into the group’s self-organization as well as its relation to the texts it reads. Rather than presenting knowledge as something to be transmitted intact, Charalambous asks us to interrogate what can be learned from one struggle and applied elsewhere, what remains specific to the conditions in which it emerged, and what changes in the process. Reading is understood less as an individual encounter with a text than as an organizing practice, one in which ideas are tested collectively and gradually become entangled with the conditions, disagreements, and experiences of the people discussing them. The knowledge produced through these meetings remains difficult to separate from the procedures through which it developed, and it is precisely this entanglement that the exhibition attempts to hold rather than resolve. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/10/WhatsApp-Image-2026-10-12-at-13.03.32.jpeg)

Spint Time. Photo: Giulia Menegale.

The accompanying publication, co-curated and produced with 10 documents, makes this movement across situations more explicit by bringing together texts selected on the basis of conversations with activist groups in the city, allowing them to take on a further function in relation to the conditions and place of their reading. Finally, the movement between the local character of particular struggles and a transnational horizon is developed further by the mural that dominates the back wall, which gathers and recombines symbols drawn from the political movements encountered through the texts read during the sessions—from the struggle for Palestinian liberation and the Sudanese revolution to the Black Panther Party and the Kurdish Freedom Movement—translating the principles, references, and struggles underpinning the project into a new visual form. Each of these symbols remains legible through the specific iconographic traditions from which it derives, yet the mural subjects them to a process of aesthetic and thereby political recomposition through which their encounter generates an iconography that belongs fully to none of them in isolation. In that recomposition, solidarity acquires a form that is neither inherited from a common genealogy nor secured by a prior political identity, but instead is produced through the relationships among struggles, the representation of a possible new internationalist political subject.

Keeping the question of continuity in mind, while broadening the scope once again to encompass the context in which Charalambous’s work is being encountered, the crisis surrounding Spin Time helps us address another element inherent in the practices and values underpinning *Reading Counterpower*. An assembly acquires duration through the possibility of returning to a place, assuming responsibility for it, and building routines and forms of interdependence that accumulate through sustained coexistence. Once those conditions are destabilized, collective continuity becomes inseparable from the power to determine where and how that collective life can continue. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/10/_DSC0699.jpg)

Installation view: Tools for Assembly. Iliada Charalambous at Lateral Roma. Photo: Roberto Apa.

The fire of 29 July and the subsequent judicial seizure prevented Spin Time’s residents from returning to the building without dissolving the organization that had developed there. For several weeks, Via Santa Croce in Gerusalemme became an improvised extension of the sealed building. Tents spread across the street around tables where meals were shared; residents, volunteers, and people organized food and medical assistance while musicians played, films were screened, and children continued to spend time together, alongside assemblies and the daily work of finding accommodation for almost four hundred displaced people. Stavrides’s account of threshold space gives this experience a more precise spatial and political form. For Stavrides, thresholds separate and connect at the same time, for their porosity allows commoning to extend beyond an enclosed group and to remain open to newcomers, while common space itself is produced through practices that shape both the relations among its users and the spatial conditions of their encounter. (2) Translating hosting practices, knowledge, and mutual obligations formed through thirteen years of occupation into another setting, the street outside Spin Time temporarily acquired this threshold function, allowing Spin Time to persist as a collective formation while making the struggle over the conditions of that continuity publicly visible. 

In contemporary cities, land and buildings increasingly function as assets whose valuation incorporates expectations of future income and appreciation alongside their present use. In his influential text on “the right to the city”, David Harvey locates the structural basis of this process in the relation between capitalist accumulation and urbanization. (3) Surplus capital is repeatedly fixed in housing, infrastructure, and real estate through investments whose long duration requires credit and the anticipation of future returns, the financialization of which intensifies this dynamic by changing the form in which property enters circuits of accumulation. Urban development, therefore, continually remakes the spatial conditions from which further valorization becomes possible. Spin Time’s description of Rome as increasingly falling into the hands of landlords, real estate funds, hotels, short-term rentals, and luxury residences points exactly in this direction. As noted, the building is held by the Fondo Immobili Pubblici, created in 2004 as Italy’s first real-estate investment fund based on a sale-and-lease-back operation involving public property, and managed by Investire SGR for institutional and private capital. Investire has emphasized that, in the case of Spin Time, it administers third-party assets belonging predominantly to pension institutions and insurance companies and is legally required to manage those assets accordingly. (4)

The same property meanwhile has been materially and socially remade through years of inhabitation, services, cultural activity, mutual support, and political organization. The collective production of use, however, does not in itself confer ownership, an enforceable claim on the asset, nor a formal position within the institutional structure through which decisions over its disposal are made. The fund, by contrast, organizes legally recognized claims over the property and places its management within fiduciary obligations towards its participants. The distinction is, therefore, also a question of urban power, because the ability to decide the future of an individual property contributes, cumulatively, to determining how space is allocated across the city, which receives material support and which can be displaced when competing forms of valorization acquire greater institutional force. The political force of Harvey’s demand for “greater democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus” lies here. (5) When investment, property, and finance help determine how urban value is produced and realized, control over their deployment also helps determine which existing uses can persist, which are displaced, and which forms of collective life can acquire material duration.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/10/_DSC0725.jpg)

Reading Counterpower Protocol, Tools for Assembly. Iliada Charalambous at Lateral Roma. Photo: Roberto Apa.

Seen from this perspective, one of the strongest aspects of *Tools for Assembly* lies in the way it attends to what remains from collective processes as well as how it attends to the material reproduction of its community. The reading group, the annotated fabrics, the publication, and the Protocol all attempt to retain something from processes that cannot be transferred in their entirety. What they preserve is not the experience itself, but elements that may become operative again: a method of reading, a form of notation, a procedure for organizing discussion, a political text whose terms can be reopened elsewhere. Their usefulness depends precisely on the fact that they require another situation, another group, and another set of conditions in order to acquire meaning again. Read together, Spin Time and *Reading Counterpower* return the right to the city to the level of practice, where occupying, maintaining, and transforming a space also means producing the social relations through which collective life can endure. Self-organization is exercised through the bodies that gather, the labor that keeps an infrastructure available, and the forms of coordination through which people learn to think and act together, making the city itself a terrain of collective use and transformation. The internationalist dimension of the project grows from this material grounding, through alliances that keep methods, political knowledge and forms of organization in circulation while safeguarding their relation to the struggles from which they emerged while making them available for new collective uses elsewhere.

A copy of the *Reading Counterpower Protocol* is also included in the exhibition space, a document developed through the project that articulates the principles and procedures through which *Reading Counterpower* can be convened and adapted in different contexts. The guidelines contained in the Protocol are particularly interesting insofar as they convey the degree of intentionality and commitment involved in self-organisation, together with the work of negotiation and collective responsibility it entails, without effacing its situated and generative character. The acquisition of the Protocol by the Van Abbemuseum introduces a further complication, though not necessarily a contradiction, as a tool developed through collective research and concerned with counterpower becomes part of a museum collection, together with the archive that records the conditions of its emergence and the texts read. Once acquired, the Protocol gains a form of material continuity that the collective situations in which it is practiced cannot necessarily guarantee. Yet that continuity is secured by giving it a new institutional status as something owned, classified, and conserved, potentially fixing a procedure whose form had previously remained dependent on use, revision, and the relations through which it was enacted. Musealisation nevertheless can provide forms of protection for knowledge produced from below, especially when that knowledge remains embedded in practices, relations, and partially systematized archives that are easily dispersed or erased. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/10/WhatsApp-Image-2026-10-12-at-13.03.33.jpeg)

Spint Time. Photo: Giulia Menegale.

Under conditions of growing censorship and the deliberate removal of political histories, vocabularies, and records from public circulation, preserving these materials also means preserving the possibility of reconstructing the practices and forms of organization through which that knowledge was produced.

Contemporary art has become increasingly capable of receiving, translating and circulating the languages of counterpower. Texts, methods, vocabularies, and forms of organization move through exhibitions, publications, collections and public programs with considerable mobility. At the same time, the spaces in which counterpower can actually be practiced remain exposed to pressures that are far less discursive and far less addressed within the system: for example, rent, property, eviction, legal uncertainty, and the erosion of the infrastructures required for collective life. The exhibition’s location at Lateral makes this asymmetry materially legible. As a self-organized project space in Appio Latino whose program extends beyond exhibition-making into exchange, production, and research, Lateral forms part of the urban ecology on which such collective practices depend while remaining exposed to the same pressures of precarity, rent, and uncertain continuity that affect the spaces through which collective life is organized. Against this background, *Tools for Assembly* reminds us that counterpower does not persist through language alone, but through places where relations can gather density, acquire duration, and become capable of acting on the conditions around them. Carving out such spaces in the city, and keeping them available to collective use despite the pressures that seek to displace them, is part of how another idea of life, society, and collectivity is materially lived and organized.

\* The title is derived from a passage in Iliada Charalambous’ poem *To comrades near by and far away* (2025), included in the publication *Tools for Assembly: A Reader*, edited by Ginevra Ludovici, Flavio Michele, and Giulia Menegale.  

//  
  
**Footnotes**  
(1) Stavros Stavrides, *Common Space: The City as Commons* (Zed Books, 2016), 42-44.  
(2) Stavrides, *Common Space*, 2–5, 54–55.  
(3) David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” *New Left Review* 53 (September–October 2008): 23–40, esp. 24–30.  
(4) Investire SGR, “Fondo Immobili Pubblici,” Investire SGR, accessed 30 September 2026\. Investire describes FIP as the first Italian real-estate investment fund promoted by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the first sale-and-lease-back operation involving public property. See also Investire SGR, statement of August 7, 2026, reported in “Spin Time, Investire SGR: ‘Non ci sono le condizioni di legalità e sicurezza,’” *DIRE*, August 7, 2026, where the company states that the assets involved are managed on behalf predominantly of pension institutions and insurance companies, and that the SGR is required to act in the exclusive interest of the fund’s participants.  
(5) Harvey, “The Right to the City,” 37.