« Play it again, punk ! » : The squat La Miroiterie and the diffusion of the punk scene in Paris (1999-2014) Communication dans un congrès

Between 1999 and 2014, “La Miroiterie”, a squat in Paris located at 88 Menilmontant Street (Paris XX) played a major role in the world of alternative artistic creation and diffusion. Resisting the demands of the city, firmly against any agreement with the city cultural policies, this totally self-administered place defended its right for existence at all costs remaining a free space of multi-artistic creation. Within the “Punk Now” seminar, we plan to center our studies on the analysis of the artistic life in the squat and more particularly on the organization of concerts, largely dominated by the national and international programming of punk bands which corresponded to several thousands of concerts. From a first-hand archive corpus and ethnographic studies, we would like to question the capacity that this artistic type of life set in this particular place was to find some meaning in the perspective of “resistance”, resistance to several pressures, either socio-political, municipal, administrative or even cultural, and was to propose an opening up to the world that would be embodied in the development of a rich and strong alternative scene that was likely to reunite people within a single audience. The recent and sudden dismantling of the squat, following an accident linked to the deterioration of the place, is a good reason for questioning the circumstances in which this organization was able to live while implicitly fixing the concrete limits to its own freedom (carelessness, no cleaning of the place, hygiene, financing, relationship with forbidden substances). In this way, we would consider that creation and resistance potentially underlie an agreement and a compromise with reality and its usual laws. If these kinds of “agreements” stem from a self-sustained project of freedom and DIY they also, obviously and fatally, set its own boundaries.