"A TAZ", quotes Lisa Hudson - the Natural Anarchist, reading from 'Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution' by Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswold Mitchell, "is a liberated area where one can be for something, not just against, and where new ways of being human together can be explored and experimented with. Locating itself in the cracks and fault lines in the global grid of control and alientation, a TAZ is an eruption of free culture where life is experienced at maximum intensity".
Today we spent two hours - and about 7 km according to a new app I have on my phone - wandering around the inbetween bits of Llandudno, looking for TAZs. We started at Cafe Provedero, a crowd-funded-coffee-heaven in the north part of town and then wandered aimlessly about the centre (looking up longingly at the empty spaces above shops) before heading off in search of periphery.
We were loooking for 'spaces' (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) within Llandudno, with potential to flower as autonomous zones. We found some, imagined some, talked to people about their ideas for them, got some fabric samples and a free bolster from the closing down bed shop, saw swans flying overhead and wondered about just how many cups of tea are served in Llandudno a day.
Over our own up of tea, and then while sitting in an already establised TAZ off Builder Street, we cooked up a plan to make one, a TAZ intervention, in one of the spaces that has come up again and again in conversations round the town. An intervention that, as Hakim Bey says, is "a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it".
And I am really excited about the possibilities of that...
