In May of 2012, cultural workers in Milan occupied an abandoned 31-storey skyscraper in the northern part of the city. Named MACAO, the new space was intended to give workers in Milan’s creative industries a space in which to pursue their labour without being subject to the finnancial austerity and precarious working and existential conditions gripping the city’s cultural sector. Cultural Workers Organize interviewed one of the workers in the organizing group, Emanuele Braga, shortly after the occupation to find out more about this audacious collective gesture.