Squatters and the willing suspension of disbelief: Tales from the Occupied Theatre
Résumé
This chapter tells the stories of the Occupied Theatre (name has been changed), the occupation of a former cinema by activists, which serves as a counterplace that represents ‘a kind of contestation of space that is both mythical and real’ (Foucault, 1984: 4) and allows ‘perception in the present of the unknown possible’ (Busquet, 2012: 6). Once inside the doors of the Occupied Theatre, the concepts of space and time become blurred; the costumes of the inhabitants, the projection of films, the staging of plays, and the historical courses transport the inhabitants from one night to another space, another temporality. This chapter focuses on phenomenological approaches by mobilizing the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief (Coleridge, 1817) to demonstrate the capacity of the occupants to produce their own reality and the capacity of the researcher, embedded in an ethnographic methodology, to accept the need to put aside his beliefs for the duration of the story in order to experience the characters’ emotions and to grasp aspects of their ‘real’ world.