"If you're taken out of here, it's your death as an artist": at Les Frigos in Paris, the concern of the occupants threatened with eviction

Claude's studio is a joyful jumble of colors and fabrics, paint pots and canvases leaning against the walls. A small kitchen, a mezzanine, and endless windows. Yet when the painter arrived here forty years ago, it was all less cozy: no water, no electricity, not even any protection between the inside and the outside – for a long time, he lived behind tarpaulins. Claude is 63 years old. Along with other young artists fresh out of Fine Arts school, he set up his brushes here when he was in his twenties, in the former disused refrigerated station of Paris-Ivry, in the middle of a neighborhood in the 13th arrondissement that was almost completely abandoned. They signed occupancy agreements with the SNCF, the then-owner of the premises: for a small rent, each could set up their studio and living space here, a precarious but unexpected opportunity for these young, penniless artists. "It was never a squat ," explains Claude, beige cap screwed on his head. "But always a proper occupation."

And then they took over the place, and the occupation <