In 2011, art workers started in Italy the “Occupied Theaters” movement. Inheritors of struggles against precarity, they were also influenced by the coeval Occupy season. The constituency is distinctive for they are artists making their own activism. My proposal focuses on Macao, the “New Center for Arts, Culture and Research” active in Milan since May 2012. Based on a 3-years-long ethnography the paper wants to investigate the consequences of mobilization on Macao core members’ personal and professional trajectories until now and trace some possible lines of development. Macao constitutes a privileged site of observation because most of its members had little or no previous direct experience of political activism. Furthermore, activists’ involvement is substantial in terms of dedicated resources and in terms of depth, since Macao’s political action consists of practices and discourses on the care of relations seeking new forms of work and life in the cultural industry.
