Noemi Ehrat

The Kochareal in Zurich was one of the city’s biggest and longest-living squats before it was evicted in February 2023. The community ran a cinema, a bike workshop and organised concerts, which made the place into a vibrant centre for the city’s cultural scene. Over a hundred people lived on the 300’000 quare metre large area, including children. I captured the last moments in the squat before its eviction and spent time talking to the squatters about their plans for the future. As squatting is illegal, all portraits had to be anonymised. I used headlines from Swiss newspaper articles that dealt with the topic, as most of the reporting had negative connotations and influenced the population‘s perception of the squatters as violent, unemployed people. For these reasons, the portraits are not depicted here.

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