Ollie building his models with LEGO
As soon as we meet, Ollie, 23, proudly shows me his brand new DC motor for a bike generator. He’s excited about making his own energy and eager to start the LegoView experiment. I met Ollie the first time the Occupy movement had taken the streets in London, on October 15th. He was enthusiastic then and so he is today. Since his job contract ended, he is now free to occupy full time and contribute and support the movement. I show him the LEGO bricks and he immediately starts building even before I ask him to do so. “I am building a house” he says. And he starts assembling the bricks. “It’s about homelessness” he tells me while making his model, “there are like 600,000 empty houses in the UK that are liveable, which are not falling down or abandoned and there’s so many people who are homeless…. They’ve been trying to make squatting illegal for years now… and that’s how you have people sleeping in the rain every night and houses which are completely empty… it’s just stupid…” He comments while playing with the bricks.
Ollie's first model
When he finishes, I start asking him about some pieces which seems peculiar. I am attracted by the windmill. and when I ask Ollie about it, first he smiles puzzled and then gets serious: “We need to seriously, seriously start thinking lot more about using renewable energies… We should think more about how we get energy, how we use energy”. And then I turn his attention to the ladder next to the windmill. “…it’s slightly out of reach” he shows me, turning the model towards me “it goes all the way to the top, and it’s meant to show that the methods to get energy, like wind, solar, geothermal are naturally in the environment but inaccessible to normal people… They had a solar power tariff… about 2 weeks ago the government was subsidising solar power by saying ‘If you power your house with solar, you can sell the energy back’, so you could sell the energy you’ve made but haven’t used. For years the government was encouraging this, saying we have to be the greenest government ever, we need to stop using fossil fuels. But because the scheme was so successful, now they’ve stopped it saying ‘No, no, no, too many people are doing this … we are losing too much money!’, so they’ve cut the scheme tariffs in half, which means that they have ripped the heart out of the solar panel industry, because they are gonna lose their jobs and money…”. He then start talking about the government’s going back in their promises: “Before the last general election the conservatives were saying they were going to be the greenest government and things like use renewable energy resources and we have scheduled in 2018 a new nuclear power station. “
After the warm up model, it’s time to ask him the real question I have invited him for: what is the
Ollie's Occupy movement Model
Occupy movement? What is all this about? I ask him not to answer, but to build a model of it. “It can take sometime…” he says while staring at the bricks. He divides the grey bricks, build a house-like shapes and struggle with the human figure having problems in holding a long brick. As soon as the human and the brick are balanced, he proudly says he is done. The model is divided in 3 areas: “What I wanted to do was make a representation of the financial collapse and for me the occupy movement is about the opportunity to rebuild something completely new, bright and colourful… it’s not every time in your life that you get such opportunity … This it’s kind of representative of our physically constructing something new” – he explains while showing me the human figure he has been struggling with before – “and it’s of course not about building new buildings but it’s kind of learning from the lessons that caused that” he says looking at the bunch of grey bricks. The grey and black bricks are behind the human shape: “This is rumble and reminiscence of how an unregulated financial system that has just imploded on itself and caused ten of millions people to lose their homes, their jobs and their life savings … it’s complete, absolute chaos. And I believe what the Occupy movement is trying to do it’s to propose a way for the good parts of that system to be taken out and the bad parts to be just rubbished and then try to build something which is more suited to human beings, more driven by human needs.”
He has lots to say, he simply looks at the bricks and goes on: “The business model that we have at the moment is just to accumulate wealth and to get bigger and bigger every year. And it’s not really sustainable and when you let it go for so many years stuff like that happens, things just simply collapse and hurt so many people… So for me the occupy movement is about getting people together, get everyone from every single background together and sort out how to make things a little bit fairer but also not to take away from the rights of people …” Building the future Building the future “And this is the new house…” he shows me with eyes full of hope, “That’s why I have made the old one all grey and black and miserable looking an I’ve made the new house, the new place, bright and colourful to represent that we can make it as colourful and as amazing as we want… because an economic collapse is gonna be horrible, it’s gonna be ridiculously harsh and when it potentially will happen, it’ll give us some clean layer to rebuild and learn from our mistakes and to make whatever we want out of it…”.
Ollie’s words remind me 危机 the chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’ which combines the words ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. Ollie sees both the danger of the imminent collapse of the systems and the opportunities stemming from it. He shows me the colourful bricks next to the human figure: they are the building blocks of the new world. There’s a black brick there: “Things which on the surface may seem completely negative” – Ollie explains – “things against humanity, in a new world might be used in better ways. You can probably reuse a lot of stuff from it… it’s about recycling: use stuff in a different way to better humans”. The black brick “is the part of the financial system which were good and we are gonna save part of the old way of doing things… It’s not capitalism as such but the aspects of the previous financial capitalistic system …” He becomes serious: “People believe that when you are criticising capitalism you have some kind of communist beliefs, like everyone should have the same glass of milk and the same slice of bread at the end of the day … nothing like that. I firmly believe that people if they work hard they should be able to get more than other people …. “ Then he talks about the other bricks: “they represent all the stuff which is positive, and they’ve been pulled from the leftover from the economic and financial system we have at the moment and that caused the crash in 2008… I believe we need to take from there, take from the leftovers and leave the rest behind … we need to leave unregulated investments behind, the arms trade, drugs and people trafficking behind”.
I keep looking at Ollie’s model and ask him about the transparent brick on the top of the new house.
I want to learn about the world Occupy is building: “The bricks on the top are kind of solar panels… we have the capacity to be able to completely use all of our energy from renewable sources like geothermal, solar, wind and hydroelectric… we have the capacity to run everything in the world on renewable energy and obviously with a sustainable energy system like that, it’d be great ‘cos energy would be a way less expensive to people and we wouldn’t have those huge money operations which cause ridiculous amounts of death of people working in mines or have giant oil spills like we had few years ago in the gulf of Mexico.” While he talks with passion about the environment, my attention is caught by a pink flower. “It’s about a really cool project I have been told by someone who went to occupy Oakland” he says, “it’s called guerilla gardening…” He talks about it with enthusiasm: “It’s basically to have a good use of space. I just can’t see how can we justify flying or shipping [fruits and vegetables] from another country when we’ve got so much empty space here… Between Devon and Plymouth you drive just farm after farm literally abandoned and all the fields are empty and there’s nothing growing and it’s all really good land to grow stuff… but because it’s cheaper to fly it or ship it from another country, they can’t compete anymore.. so they close their farms…”.
Ollie is proud to be part of the movement, he is happy to work hard, to get his hands dirty and to be part of something which is trying to achieve something good: “I think the Occupy movement does have aspects of environmentalism. Even though it’s primarily an economic movement, it’s also a political movement, it’s also an environmental movement and a humanitarian movement and anti-racist movement … it’s a huge range of stuff and it’s really hard to define it. And as soon as one person walks in and joins the movement the scope changes because they come with their own opinions and they come with all the things they want to change… ”
I keep looking the new world Ollie build about with LEGO – this colourful, environmentally-friendly
The current system's collapse. And its base.
new place. But then I notice that the house has no base underneath. “Why does it have no base?” I ask. Ollie gets excited, like he were waiting for such a question. “There’s no base, not because it’s unstable, but because it’s fluid… When you have a base like that”, he says pointing me out the black base in the bunch of grey bricks representing the financial crisis, “it’s always gonna be there, it’s always gonna be the same place, it’s always gonna be the same size, it’s always gonna be the same shape. When you have something that’s fluid it’s different and it’s fluid because new people come up and you get new opinions all the time… A lot of rules of society are extremely old… I mean i know those are amended like financial regulations are amended but a lots of systems we use are quite archaic. So I think that if you have a completely set base, which sets standards for how things are meant to look and how things are meant to be, you can never fit in the way things are in the present moment. When you are stuck doing things in a certain way, you can’t react to new situation. So I think not having a base it’s important because it doesn’t limit the way you can grow. “
I challenge him once more: “But don’t you think that the lack of a base would make the new world unstable on the long term?” He looks at the model and pointing at the black base among the grey bricks, chuckling says: “That’s sounds stable to you? It had a base!” He smiles cheeky and goes on: “I believe that fluidity of not having a base it’s more important than the stability, because we’ve seen, tried and tested situations that had a very strong base, had a lot of regulations, had a lot of clear rules … you can set the base but it doesn’t mean people is gonna behave to it. So if you allow the freedom of fluidity, you allow people to create and do what they want. I am not an expert in the financial sector and that can be a loose statement, but I think the definition of stability is a faulty one because people sees stability as being rigid, as being set and knowing what you have to do and what’s gonna happen and I think reacting at present day is more important than sticking to rules that we used to set. Things change day to day but when you can’t react to them, you’re stuck”.
When Ollie finishes, I look at this 23 years old guy sitting in front of me, with his bike generator motor and the will to be there, build the new world from scratch and get his hands dirty. While he leaves I only can think about Carlos Castaneda’s words, who wrote: “Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid.”. And that what Ollie is. And that what Occupiers are: light, fluid warriors.’
[Many thanks to Ollie for his help in editing this LegoView 🙂 ]
LegoViews 