La Casa Invisible

La Casa Invisible
Anomalous institutions against the pillaging of the common

Nicolás Sgüiglia, resident, La Casa Invisible: La Casa Invisible incorporates the entire evolution of contemporary social movements, which abound with energy, in a very important dimension of horizontal and participative dynamics, with the ability to accommodate different people coming together and reconstructing this love for the common. For us this means seeing politics not as an administration of power or a means to attain power, but a way of constructing the feelings of affection that make up a shared life.

Santiago Fernández Patón, resident, La Casa Invisible: La Casa Invisible draws on the legacy of the post-Franco era in Spain – the movements of ’77 related to insubordination, the environmental, women’s and squatters’ movements – and redefines them, adapting them to our times, to new paradigms of wealth accumulation today and new forms of autonomy. It’s trying to break identity paradigms that can weigh people down in terms of their integration in cities and the way they communicate. By rebuilding this legacy, we work with the political autonomy resulting from this recombination. In Malaga this is somewhat innovative, because of what we’ve achieved and our contributions to the politics of autonomy. We realised that by changing some old paradigms, it was possible to lay the bases for a movement that is flexible and can mutate and adapt to new situations. We’ve created the groundwork for the collective memory of victorious practices. The first steps were illegal, the result of a citizen conquest in the face of the apathy of institutions. We created a negotiating table and prevented a violent eviction. The only two things that are not up for negotiation are the building’s location and self-management.

Gala Garrido, resident, La Casa Invisible: La Casa Invisible as a project became a reality because the decisions were taken horizontally. It’s a citizen project, based on giving impetus to social values and a culture that operate on the fringes of institutions, based mainly on transforming the models imposed by the market and the state.

Nicolás Sgüiglia: The goal is to show how people can cooperate and pool their abilities, affection and knowledge. We talk about potential because, like Spinoza said, we never know what a body can do or what a group can achieve when its members cooperate. Our experience has been sustained by the potential of cooperation, by generosity, by the residents’ willingness to come together. Our victory in the first step of stabilising the project was due to an immense community that showed that it had the power to pool its knowledge and creativity, to become empowered. For instance, we showed the Malaga city government that with very few resources, but resources that are really incredible, we could create a cultural and social space that is a driving force in the city today.

Eduardo Serrano, resident, La Casa Invisible: We see politics in terms of power games, not in a negative sense, but in the sense of relationships between members of the polis. La Casa Invisible contributes the extremely important dimension of subjectivity regarding our place in history, and participates in what we call care-ship, a form of citizenship where our desire to care for each other rises above what could be a self-absorbed subjectivity. When we deal with relationships between human beings, it’s clearly a political issue. We are recovering something that science and politics – or bio-politics – today tends to separate: on the one hand, space, which is constructed, inert and inanimate; and on the other hand, the people – the social aspect.