To be quite frank, sometimes when I criticise the state of culture in Slovenia or Ljubljana, I feel like I am looking a gift horse in the mouth. That guilt especially bites me when I see my American fiancée, who has a theatre company in Seattle and has to pay hundreds of dollars for a suitable studio for rehearsals–and that's already with a discount for non-profits.

Then I remember that no rights have ever been gifted freely, but have been and will be (sometimes bloodily) fought for. And I remember that just because somewhere else has it worse does not mean we necessarily have it good here.

The fact is that the public sphere is shrinking. It sounds almost like a platitude–something we murmur between sips of overpriced coffee in one of Ljubljana's gentrified cafés; cafés that are hardly different from the thousands of other gentrified cafés around the world where people drink overpriced coffee and talk about the shrinking of the public sphere. So subtly has this shrinking crept up on us that we are like the proverbial boiled frog who first thought they were just taking a little dip in the jacuzzi.

No, no. The capitalists have set our cauldron on fire, and now here we are, stewing. Now, I should point out here that we are not all just sitting in it, far from it. Three years have passed since a huge number of people jumped out of the cauldron and into direct action around the eviction of ROG, a stronghold of independent culture that offered (creative, and often actual) home and solace to countless people. But despite the huge mobilisation, capitalism, which also has that literal police gunfire on its side thanks to the way too intimate relations the city has with investors, has won. ROG is gone, and in its place is now a polished, empty skeleton of something that should have been. A monument to the triumph of capitalism and the private sphere. A monument to violence.

ROG is unfortunately not the only one that has fallen. We have also said goodbye to two beloved rehearsal spaces on Parmova Street, which were not only relied upon by countless dance and theatre artists as a rehearsal space, but were also an important pedagogical meeting point, where new generations of movement artists were training, a crucial element for the health of any cultural scene. Artists who have been left studio-less are now dealing with the situation by renting various private spaces, while at Parmova, a new department store is to be built–because that's what we really need as a society, right?

At least we Ljubljana artists are being somewhat kept afloat by the regional JSKD, which, in response to municipal cuts in creative space, has recently opened Cage, a beautifully renovated studio in the basement of Cankarjeva Street 5. That brings the number of their affordable studios to three, a most welcome addition and in general a most laudable helping hand in the time of crisis.

But a single space more doesn't solve the systemic problem. And of course, the space crisis is much bigger than the art scene itself; just as we are forced to sip overpriced coffee in the capital, we are forced to pay overpriced rents–or we can simply say goodbye to life in Ljubljana.

It seems that capital is winning all the way. That is why it is crucial that we do not get used to the diminishing accessibility of public spaces, that we do not let ourselves be fully boiled, fully done, that we continue to organise and demand more. Even if it seems that we might be doing well compared to anywhere else, it does not mean that we could not (and should not!) do better here.