LAST NIGHT AT TUZRAKTAR

It was cold, much colder than we had expected it to be when we arrived at Tuzraktar to see if the rumours were true that it was going to be burned down by the mafia. An abandoned commercial building inhabited by various artists and performers, it’d been our regular Sunday night hang-out ever since we heard about the leftfield films (Derek Jarman, David Cronenberg) they were showing. You didn't just get the films (watched from old armchairs and sofas), but peanuts and Coke too. All for free.

The metal mesh gates are flanked by two giant boilers, each bearing a paraffin torch. These are typical of the post-industrial medieval atmosphere which pervades the central open space. Eerie, hastily executed images in white decorate the concrete walls: grinning monkeys, clowns, a woman on her hands and knees, a series of stencilled goats. Random household objects dangle from the unglazed windows. At the far left, there’s a small tree growing out from the outside of the third floor.

Tonight parts of the walls are red-lit, and there are paper and cloth festival lanterns hanging in a row between the buildings. They are lurid: faces, flowers, storybook animals and abstract shapes. Behind the bar are some fluorescent cartoon aliens and mushrooms on an overhead canvas. And in the centre, three barrels of fire with people clustered round feeding them broken bits of furniture. Every so often, the embers take on a life of their own, splutter and tumble out, making us all jump back in alarm and delight. There's the acrid, always autumnal, smell of woodsmoke. A girl is roasting lard and onions on skewers over the fire to make bread and dripping. All of this is bathed by cut-out snowflake and flower images cast in magenta and orange by a revolving disco light.

Down in the cellar, a local band is rehearsing some kind of French cabaret songs: the four singers, swinging their arms in sync, carry it off well even though they outnumber the audience. Upstairs, if you can brave the night air through the gaping window-spaces, you can see a collection of unusual paintings. The images are modern: vibrantly experimental, yet not abstract in any sense. The artists’ sincerity is clear in every work.

I hope this place reopens in the Spring. This kind of unmediated freedom of expression can only exist in the gap between post-industrial abandonment and near-inevitable enguzzlement by property developers. Let’s hope we beat them to it again.