Doing a headstand at La Invisible
Last April, the second international meeting of urban creativity took place in the face of the transformation of the city during the
Krax 2.0 Conference
, organized by the
City Mined(d)
collective, which focused on autonomous cultural spaces. Months later, and through the collective’s mailing list, we received the first installment of a series of interviews conducted with the various spaces that presented their activities and their mode of operation during the conference.
The first to tell us their story have been the people from
La Casa Invisible
in Málaga by the one and only Jorge Dragón. La Casa Invisible is probably one of the most interesting autonomous citizen management projects in Spain, and a project to which we also have a small emotional connection, as we had the pleasure of collaborating there in the organization of
During the Conference, 3 months ago, we took extra time to interview the guests.
The idea was to ask some basic questions to see how people from such different cultural/political/social contexts would respond to the same questions. And that is in line with the objectives of the Conference.
The interviews revolve around the concepts/mechanisms of internal organization, communication, financing and the always thorny issue of the cloning of the discourse of these autonomous spaces by formal cultural/political institutions.
We are starting to transcribe those interviews and will be publishing them here.
We start with jd, a member of La Casa Invisible, from Málaga. We start with jd basically because it was the first file I selected…, but La Invisible was also the first presentation of the Conference. And on the other hand, La Casa Invisible is one of the (big) reasons why the theme of this year’s Conference was autonomous cultural spaces… olé!
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LA CASA INVISIBLE (MÁLAGA) [jd]
La Casa is a space, a living organism fed by the energy of hundreds of people who, in turn, are part of different collectives; in my case, for example, I have a background as a visual artist and the work developed in Rizoma, a research project on culture and territory. La Casa is made up of people like that, each one comes from their specific fields.
We work in a network and are connected with people from Andalusia and the rest of the State; it is a dynamic of its own in which, although we have a kind of electronic appendage -which allows us to be connected by emails, communicating online, by telephone, etc…-, we work in direct collaboration with the rest of the colleagues. People propose and collaborate: organizing an activity or as participants. I don’t see another possibility of doing the work without that network of support, relationships and collaborations: the key is in its structure, its different intensities, the relationships that are maintained within and between them, and those resonances, the common vibration that can occur between different bodies. Without that connection between people, between organizations, between places, between cities, between ways of thinking…, there would be no way to work. We are only something, so to speak, a body, because we are working connected in that way.
Before La Casa Invisible existed, we knew each other, we collaborated on different projects, but La Casa has given us a kind of presence… a kind of body. La Casa has given us the physical relationship, beyond the remote connection relationship. It is necessary to be connected, to be in contact with people from all over, but it is also necessary to see each other, to do things together… CSO is Centro Social Ocupado (Occupied Social Center), but in our case it is also CsO: Body without Organs. La Casa functions as a kind of node, which connects certain relationships, internal and with other nodes: these relationships are the important thing, not the node itself; if it were the other way around, La Casa would have become an institution, in the usual sense of the term.
-But that node is organized in some way, isn’t it?
The organization is minimal, diffuse and completely horizontal. As you know, La Casa was occupied by a collective of people and neighbors who acted under the name of Creadores Invisibles (Invisible Creators); that strategy defines very well the spirit of La Casa: there is no visible head in it; those of us who at a certain moment may have to be visible (today it is my turn to be here, but tomorrow another person will come…), we act vicariously, replacing whoever speaks for itself, La Casa; I understand that we can only truly speak of some of the things that the multiplicity of La Casa generates and always without pretending to represent it as a whole. Only La Casa speaks for itself; those of us who speak for it, offer approaches, perspectives, we try to be faithful… in reality we only speak of the particular agency of La Casa with each of us.
There are dozens of people involved in the management, in the creation of spaces, of activities; everything works by mutual support and collaboration. If a project is proposed, everyone collaborates to the extent of their possibilities. There are also people who prefer to fulfill the role of simple user; and there are those who alternate both roles.
Every Monday there is a general assembly where the issues are debated but there is no voting, it has no immediate decision-making capacity, the decisions are born from consensus… In the assembly a discussion is raised, and then, in the space between assemblies, those consensuses arise, and people transform their approaches. La Casa shapes us: we are here to obey La Casa. A wonderful place to be, but above all, a place to work.
-And where does the funding for the activities come from?
From personal contributions, the work is voluntary. And from specific activities, concerts, etc… The word subsidy does not enter the approach right now. We propose a strategy for maintaining La Casa, that it stays in Málaga, and we have presented a project to the City Council: that the City Council maintains the ownership of La Casa and we propose the uses.
Cultural, social, etc. projects are carried out, which have a certain budget attached, and funding is sought for those costs, which can be private and can also come from the public field. But it is different to consider things in terms of financing than in terms of subsidy. We have been carrying out continuous activities for a year without asking for or needing subsidies.
The subsidy is born because there are public budgets that are accessed through a competition system. We position ourselves more actively. We propose a budget, we see the costs, and from there we look for funding, and all kinds of mechanisms can enter there. I understand that all cultural production must be financed, and all work that is done in culture and in social work must be financed. In what way? That is what we are discussing. Everyone has the right… we must aspire to everyone getting paid for their work. [at the meetings in May, a month after this interview, the possibility of this formula was accepted, although no subsidy has been requested until now].
-And why culture as a channel to reach society, as a magnet, as a vehicle?
Well, the set of expressions of society is what forms culture; its customs and practices, the creation of language, of ways of saying, the creation of representations. We never speak of culture as something isolated from its context, reduced to a merely aesthetic question. We naturally attend to the social context where it is born; it is not a strategic decision: culture and society are linked words, they have no meaning without each other.
-On what geographical scales do you work at La Casa Invisible?
We work on all scales. These Krax Conferences are an example of international connection, where the work of Málaga is being connected with the work of Mexico City or Mumbai or Barcelona. We do not understand the international as something separate. There are people who have the same perspectives on work in society and culture, and in that sense we are part of that great river. Our plural are many plurals. We share experiences because we learn from each other.
Yesterday one of the compañeras from Patio Maravillas told me that La Casa Invisible has helped them for their strategic development; but La Casa Invisible would not have been possible without the experience of the Casa de Iniciativas, a pioneering occupation experience in Málaga. In the leap from the Casa de Iniciativas to La Casa Invisible there has been an extension of the role that is played in Malaga society. The number of groups and people involved has been expanded, and therefore the perspectives. Everything we do is part of a learning process of special importance: we understand that La Casa Invisible is a learning space, and this learning is also transmitted to other experiences that are being born.
Before we were talking about networking and how we are connected, to the point that the international also acts on a local scale. For example, tomorrow, the debate about the neighborhoods: obviously a neighborhood in Mexico with two million inhabitants has different characteristics with a neighborhood in Mumbai, Barcelona or our neighborhood in Málaga that has almost no population, that stopped being a neighborhood and that is reborn as such thanks to La Casa. But it is very useful for us to compare experiences and ways of doing things, to place different realities on the same plane and compare how each case acts.
-Has it happened to you that the political/institutional discourse has cloned your discourse?
It hasn’t happened to us yet, but that danger will always be there. It is something that can happen, and that we have to know how to value. We have to be vigilant in those things. Creativity, creation, culture, is, above all, creation of language. We are creating language through visual signs, through words, through ways of doing things. We transmit that to our group, to our friends, but also to people outside or with whom we have nothing to do, also to those institutions. It is true that part of that language will end up being assumed by those institutions, but, slow by nature, when that happens, we have already advanced and they find us relocated in another position; workers of language, we do not stop, the process is of continuous creation. It is about transforming the relationship between power and citizenship, so that it is more horizontal, that power is more distributed, that it obeys the needs of citizens…
-And then, what is the relationship with local and regional institutions?
La Casa, the building, is owned by the City Council, which is trying to open the debate about La Casa and the future of the project to the Junta de Andalucía, the University and the Diputación. The City Council says that our project is very interesting, but it wants the space for a project of theirs, without interest… (laughs).
The City Council is not an ally, we do not participate in its city approach: a Barcelona-style showcase city, something that is already clearly in crisis here and that now, decades later, they want to implement in Málaga.
So for the moment we are negotiating our right to be in this building, a building owned by the City Council that we remember is the institution of the citizens ayuntados (joined together). As the City Council does not offer us spaces of that type in which we can develop our initiatives, we have occupied a space to make them possible. The pure expression of a need that our city had. This is our legitimacy.
-And in the long term?
The future does not exist. I don’t think about it… Now we are in a delicate situation, we will continue with activities related to May 68 and May 48 (when Israel was instituted in historical Palestine). But then we will temporarily close the rest of the activities. Too many activities, many energies, few means… Then we will open a small period of reflection to consider these planning issues: personally I am in favor of doing fewer activities, of more depth and in the medium term. So, yes, we are working on the future. Heh, we are making the future every day.
But of course, it is an open space, inhabited by hundreds of people, people of all colors, immediatist people, people who pass by… How do I live that? Well, it’s curious. We live together. It is very strong, because everything is resolved by consensus. La Casa has created a good vibe and a point among the people that makes the conflicts are solved…
La Casa is the one that always speaks, there the people are invisible. There are no names, professions, status, curriculums… it is La Casa. That is the spirit. It is never achieved 100%, but that is the story.
Barcelona, April 2008.
Thanks to Nuria Reguero.
