The structure itself was an architectural marvel. Purposefully janky (I made sketches and everything), we created an initial shack that could be adapted and grown organically. The entire thing was predicated upon the materials we found, so Michael and I would gather up what we could in our dumpster, and wheeled it back so we could all have a mini strategic meeting before slapping boards together. It all happened very fast, with new volunteers adding their ideas and offering their assistance. Walls flew up and we were all able to sit around a makeshift table to discuss, organize, eat, what have you. It was a sturdy and cozy little fortress and, with little regard to commonly accepted aesthetics, I think it looked very nice.

The next week really flew by. Every day was a new foray into slapdash architecture. Repurposing everything from pallets to panels, screws and nails. At my earnest behest, my friends and I scavenged every pallet and panel we could, eventually forming a veritable stockpile of building materials. More and more people started to come by our building site, curious as to what was going on. I made a conscious decision to keep my head down and build, operating 'behind the scenes' as much as I could, letting Carolina and other participants do most of the talking. Occasionally I would step in to introduce myself or add some dimension to the conversation, but for the most part tried to stay in the background - in almost all cases, I have found, it's not a very good idea to have 'the weird one' doing the marketing. Anyway, we all knew our mission - to create the forum - so I didn't need to focus on the message. Now that we had 'residents' to guard our occupation, Michael and I spent a lot of the initial building time theorizing perfect pod-city structures while going back and forth to and from the Gates Building dumpster. We were quickly making headway, and enemies.

The second week is where things got dicey. There were the obvious haters, the student groups and individuals of the student body who thought we were just a bunch of "damn hippies" making a mess. Something Awful caught wind and called it the “stinkiest pile of poo poo” they had ever seen. All of that was predicable. When "Students for Free Trade" or whatever decided to film a segment in front of our busted-ass little shanty, occupied by fired-up rad-folk, young and old, we knew we had achieved our desired forum for the disenfranchised, and were very comfortable with that fact. There were, however, also a number of incidents that required more... delicate attention - namely multiple visits from the campus police, as well as administrative representatives, and the real police. There were many demonstrations happening in town that were causing a worthy amount of disruption to the daily routines to the residents of our small city, and we were quickly becoming a significant part of that. To be clear, due to a loophole I had discovered years earlier, we were housing demonstrators that were not part of the student body, and radicalized in their politics. Some were students at other universities, some were not. This meant, quite simply, that some of the organizers of these demonstrations were invited to seek refuge at our humble shanty, free of charge. Anarchists and krusties have a good ear for this kind of thing, and thus flooded our space. And we welcomed them - this was as close to my original project idea as I could come, if not an improvement. The administration, of course, disagreed.

For the most part, everyone was very well-behaved. We all knew where we were, and the priviledge it afforded us, even the "outsiders". Carolina and I acted as ambassadors, providing diplomacy and justification to campus police and other authorities while 'residents' continued to build and organize. Honestly, I think the first problems started when we started organizing events - while everything we did on site was lawful and well without our rights, we were attracting too much disorder. This included anything from marches to openly collaborative artworks, but it had also become noticeable how many tents were accumulating. Personally, I would have loved to cover the entirety of "The Cut" with tents, but we all soon realized doing so would be our demise. At that point we had started attracting informants, and I personally had to ask several outside participants, confidentially, if they were working for police. With the exception a few new friends, I had to start kicking out non-student residents from the space.

Weeks before President Obama decided to play host to the world's top 20 economic powers in our relatively small city, I had been scoping out various dumpsters on and around campus for ulterior reasons, mostly related to (art)school, or rather trying to escape it (evidence of which I'm sure you’ll find elsewhere on this website.) Having been in Pittsburgh for a few years at that point, I already happened to know where multiple caches of building supplies were, just sitting around in giant, steel bins waiting to be dumped. Or rather, 'liberated'. Pittsburgh is a town for architecture fanatics, so there is constantly construction happening somewhere. It's also pretty old, which, to be quite frank, means lots of dead people - old folks were passing all the time, and their belongings would end up in some roll-off container, ripe for the picking. That was around the time Google moved in, though - I'm certain it's not like that anymore, but that's beside the point. There was a lot of useful garbage.

Bill Gates had recently donated something like 18 million dollars to build a brand new, neo-brutalist, megalithic technobunker on campus. A giant construction dumpster (and I mean GIANT - if someone emptied it and slapped on a roof, they could very easily live comfortably in one of these things, or make an office perhaps) was placed at what would be the loading docks, just outside of the building where my basement studio resided. My final semester had begun and I had been casually picking up bits of trash and inspiration for my thesis along the way. The senioritis hadn't quite set in, and I was still well-motivated at that point to "create a scene" before I left school for 'the great unknown'. I was engaged in study and research involving globalization and climate change during uncertain economic times and was doing my best to synthesize; my head was deep in the books, as they say, but also in the bin.

One day, early in the semester, we had a big class meeting, where everyone shared their ideas for final projects. My initial idea was to scavenge a bunch of wood from roll-off dumpsters and build myself a little hut under the Schenley bridge (iykyk). I wanted to create and declare an autonomous space, for protest and refuge, invite others to stay and see what happened, see how it grew. I had my sketchbook open on my lap, listening to my peers' ideas, vigorously adding notes to pages already filled with sketches of landscapes filled with shanties and alternative home designs, when a classmate, Carolina, stood up and began talking about favela culture. My ears perked, I stopped writing and listened, then thought about the impending G20 event. Everything clicked. The meeting ended and I walked over to Carolina with my sketchbook open, excitedly showing her my cryptic sketches and tiny handwriting, expounding upon the dovetails between our projects, going on about the overtly fascist hang-out that was about to happen in our town. Depsite my enthusiasm, she seemed to agree and was interested in working together, so I packed up my shit, walked directly over to the student-led, mostly-anarchist-populated-climate-justice group meeting, and gave them my spiel. Everybody who was there was in. I ran home, sent a few emails, packed my hiking bag with books and a few changes of clothes, and prepared to "take the fence" with one last night of sleep in my own bed. The G20 was still a week out, which meant I had a week to get busy before the out-of-town riot cops arrived. My final project had just become an open-source collaboration.

The first day was...interesting, to say the least. My friend Michael and I went directly to the Gates Building dumpster and one of the first things we found inside of it was... well, a dumpster. Talk about 'wasteful'. Compared to the apartment-sized roll-off, it was a relatively small janitorial bin, but a working dumpster, nonetheless (artist's note: this is the same dumpster that would become the infamous "DUMPONAUT"). We filled it with wood scraps and walked it over to the fence. No one was there. According to campus "tradition", that meant "fair game". We unloaded everything and began building right away - some of the students from the climate justice group had already started to show up and tools began appearing on site without request. I remember asking someone to locate a hammer - I don't think I ever asked for a drill, but if I recall, there were several. With other people now gaurding our site, it meant the fence was officially "ours". Our occupation had begun - tents started popping up all around the fence, and by night one, we already had a veritable tent-city. I don't remember having a tent - I think I just stayed up all night, building and meeting new people, eventually falling asleep in the makeshift hut I had originally envisioned.

Despite (perhaps, indeed, because) of the ruckus they caused, I admit the events themselves are somewhat a source of pride; the night before I started camping out, I had consulted my notes and put together a wishlist of performers and orgs I wanted to be there. Then I called and email-blasted everybody - this was a time before 'ghosting' was acceptable, so I got a lot of responses very quickly, many positive. Within a few days, representatives from multiple different groups (and lots of anarchists) showed up, not only looking for a place to stay, but also demonstrate. I had already worked out a few days of demos with the climate justice group, and being the president of the environmental group at my uni gave me a wide network of other related groups and individuals to call on. I was able to reach out to Reverend Billy, as well as the Beehive Collective, and both stated they were happy to attend our little village. The computer with the whole list of orgs is long fried, but we had a real circus going at one point. I remember one of my professors came up to me in the second week, while studying the Beehive Collective's impressive layout of banners and prints, and said (with reserve held only for tones of respect) "Good project, Redwood." I was beside myself, not because I was receiving praise from some applauded, tenured artist, but because I already knew it was a good project. Looking around, our little village was bustling, thriving; I felt a true sense of accomplishment and cohesion regarding the project we had created.

The project ended one Friday night when another student group, can't remember who, decided to challenge our occupation. I had been away from the shanty, gone to deliver some jugs of water for people I heard were being tear-gassed down Craig Street. I got held up by cops who had been funneling people into a pinch point and teargassing/ capsacin-spraying unsuspecting UPitt students (not demonstrators) as they came out of bars. I was not teargassed, but I ended up trapped in throngs of people, crying and coughing, trying to get away from the clouds of irritant aerosols. I didn't get back until much later, when Carolina was trying to reason with the new group that had approached in our absence. In retrospect, I grew too confident in our ability to gaurd the fence while I was away - our communication was good, but the fact that we, a bunch of activists and artists and students, were able to stay for so long was nothing short of miraculous. Honestly, it was only a matter of time until our staying-power approached a stress point and someone had been watching to take the opportunity to rightfully take the fence in our moment of weakness. When I got back to the shack, I decided that we concede - I had been home exactly twice in two weeks to get books and shower, and, despite still going to class and doing my homework (as well as working on the shanty project for school) I was starting to fall behind on my duties, and was exhausted to boot. It had been a long two weeks. The G20 was ending and it was time to dissolve the shanty.

In all, this was a magnificent project on which to work, indeed one of my favorites. During a week of embarrassing mismanagement of government resource and systematic marginilzation, it was one of those rare times when everything came together, where the spirit of camaraderie and magic of collaboration was felt by everyone involved. Everyone was extremely generous with their time and skills, and all contributions were voluntary. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with people's surprise and curiousity prompting them to add their own ideas or join us in construction. We got to hold demos every day, invited some legendary orgs and activitists, and reinforced Unity in a time of gross economic disparity. As one of those fateful few American citizens to have the LRAD used on them for the first time in history, I felt lucky and grateful that we had a place to return to and discuss it. My original goal, to create a forum and discussion space for the disenfranchised, had been realized more vividly than I ever could have done by myself. I spent a birthday in our happenstance shelter, and it was one of the better ones I can recall. I think everyone there could agree being surrounded by good, constructive energy like that was good for the soul - we shared ideas, music, and energy to build something unique and impactful. In stark contrast to the meetings the overlords were having downtown, everyone who came by our shanty had a different story, and a different take on what the shelter was supposed to be, but everyone expressed feeling welcome and comfortable. Also, I don't recall a single dollar being spent on any of it, save for banner and sign making supplies, and gas for Chris' truck (thanks Chris!) - all our food was dumpstered (yes, we had a pantry) and we even got Food Not Bombs to hang out and nourish folks on campus for multiple days. Who would've thought all it it took was some friendly attitudes and creativity directed at the powers that be.

check out the video and gallery below for more documentation!

special thanks and much love to:

Carolina, Michael, Matthew, Matt, Deren, Alan, Ben, Gwen, Hannah, Chris, Sal, Kim, Evan, Faith, Sugarplum, Aaron, and all others who helped make our shanty village a home for two weeks!!