Casa Robino

dinner at the casa

Sky and I wrote this piece together for our Cville mass email list.

While in Amsterdam, we stay at Casa Robino, a kind of half-collective house half-crash pad. We found the house on Bewelcome.org, the newest manifestation of the hospitality network phenomena. Robin, who rents the flat and energetically holds the intention of the space, has been active in hitchhiking and hospitality networks for years. The house is a hub for cross-pollination because Robin is well connected, as are his friends (a friend of Paxus' had pointed us in his direction).

Long and interesting conversations often start around the dinner table, and then go on late into the night. On the second evening, the conversation lingered on the politics of hospitality networks. Both Robin and his friends Casper and Anu, also Casa Robino "hosts" (anyone who stays there is referred to as a host, as opposed to a guest), had been very involved with couchsurfing.com. They were upset that the company has gone much more corporate and explained that BeWelcome was predominatley started by disenchanted couchsurfers. Couchsurfing.com is now owned by one guy who had feigned an effort at collective engagement and then pushed people (like anu) out. It has increasingly focused on being a commercial operation and the people who use it are more mainstream, more focused on partying, more adverse to the elements of the network like hitchhiking.

A couple days into our stay at Casa Robino we decided to do some dumpsterdiving for the house. Dumpsterdiving in Amsterdam primarily involves going to one of the many daily street markets around closing time at 5 or 6pm, and picking through the conspicuous blue trash bins. In stark contrast to the US, vendors (in particular, the ones from Turkey or Morocco) will sometimes offer other food headed for the trash if they see you or if you ask nicely. At the market, we met up with with Lily and Mindy from the extended Casa Robino network. Lily is australian, traveling in euorope and working on a documentary about dumpster diving; Robin had put us in touch so that she could film us in action. We got a pretty good haul and then went back to Casa Robino to cook up a feast of liberated food. Paxus and Aisha (another dutch friend of Robins) joined us for dinner, and the evening's post-dinner conversations meandered back towards the politics of activism and hosting.

Aisha spoke passionatley about her frustrations with the rough edges of the anarchist squatting movement; she hopes to create an ashram and is not interested in the violent edge and constant uncertainty of squatting. Robin talked about his involvement with the spanish anarchist/squatters movement. He had lived and worked in Barcelona for 8 years, and left feeling very disillusioned. He recounting the story of an anarchist in a squat in Barcelona who threw himself to his death off a 5 story building. At the time, he asked, how could this happen in a community like this? This query led him to conclude that relationships are key to world transformation, including our relationship with ourselves. If we can't deal with the fucked up stuff in ourselves, how can we deal with it in the world? Casa Robino is an effort in this direction. The house is based on transforming the world through granting people unconditional trust; it operates on the principles of open space technology. People come in, get a set of keys, have access to the resources of the house, and they have transformative experiences. This possibility was palpable that evening. It was so amazing to feel total ownership over this kitchen and host a dinner party at a house we had just arrived at a few nights prior; deep satisfaction for one who yearns to root.