In Málaga: The Case of the Casa Invisible, Post #2

Image from video by Castro and Ólafsson

In this post I dig down on the Casa Invisible itself, the beleaguered social center in Malaga's historic center. Long an oasis for creatives and thinking people, and a center for activist organizing and strategy, "el Invi" has been under siege by the conservative government for years. Artists and institutions have pitched in to help in the resistance. Now a new space, Casa Azul and the Suburbia bookstore and publishing center, has joined in as another node of creative resistance to the banal touristification of Malaga.

In my last blog post on the trip to Málaga, I described the decades-long manic touristic development in that city and region. The heat and noise of all that was explicated in the 2024 INURA meeting I attended.
The most hyperbolic example I didn’t even mention, a gigantic luxury hotel proposed for the harbor, el gran pepino (cucumber), as prominent as the Colossus of Rhodes. The plan is the cherry on top of a fine case of capitalist rational madness. (Although unacknowledged, the money is said to come from oil sheiks.)
I didn’t come to the conference for the comic tragedy of Spanish Babbitry. I came to learn about the Casa Invisible, an inspirational Spanish social center of creative thinking people where much of the conference was held.
On the last day of the INURA meeting, our principal host, Kike España, led a tour of the building.

Kike in the nightclub of the Casa Invisible

A Palace in Commons

This 1876 Neomudéjar (Moorish style) palace has had many lives; it was a nightclub, twice a school and much more besides. It’s spectacular, but shabby. Renovation costs are estimated at a million euros. Compared to my last visit 10 years ago, La Casa today seemed disused. Signs of former creative glory abounded – a leftover theater prop, a complex mechanical face-wall; murals, and remains of art exhibitions; a compact bar and disco space which no longer operates. The free store, which was not on the tour, is still meticulously kept. A woman tidying up smiled as I peeked in.
The Casa Invisible was occupied “with a key” in 2007, since some apartments were rented within the city-owned building. The first activities there took place during a week-long festival of cinema and “free culture”. The house was named after Los Invisibles a novel by the Italian author Nanni Balestrini.
In 2011-12 the collective had an agrement with the city, but they never arrived at the most important part – the cession of the building. Now they have a “cession en precario”, a de facto tolerance of their presence.

Wall painting by Os Gemeos

Conditions are difficult at La Casa (also called “el Invi”). They have no running water, and must truck in giant cubes. The city constantly interferes with the cooperatives working in the space. “The secret police are always around,” and they have piles of denuncias (complaints) against them.

Museums Stand By

In their struggle to remain in their broken-down palace La Casa has had support from the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid (MNCARS), and the Arteleku center in San Sebastián, and the Pompidou in Paris. They host gatherings of academics like INURA, and the 2022 " plicity", a congress on the "future of cultural policy in Europe" with drop-in stars like Hito Steyerl and ruangrupa.
Other support from the European institutional sector comes in the form of funded projects. Under the rubric of Arte Útil, the artist team of Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson were commissioned to produce “The Rehabilitation of La Casa Invisible—Chapter I”. As explained in an e-flux broadside, the artists intend to “rethink the architectural project through art, weaving new networks of collaboration and advocating to restart the dialogue with the City Council”. They began with a video work. (See image above.)
The rehabilitation project the artist duo support was to be executed in phases so that activity in La Casa does not have to cease. Despite initial approval by a city agency, politicos with Ciudadanos put the brakes on the project. Although that political party was vaporized in the last election, the cession of La Casa still does not advance.

An Arte Útil

The conception of an Arte Útil (roughly "useful art") which brands Castro and Ólafsson’s project was developed by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and colleagues, working at the Queens Museum, NYC, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and in Havana. A stroll through their online archive of hundreds of projects that conform to the rubric is a virtual history of social practice art in the 21st century.
The ideology behind their work is clear in the e-flux broadside. It is based in ideas of the "right to the city", a concept enunciated by Henri Lefebvre in 1968, elaborated by many other urban theorists, including David Harvey, and adopted as a banner by activists.

Suburbia and the Casa Azul

The INURA meeting was also organized out of the Casa Azul, a newer site in the Lagunillas barrio of Malaga. Lagunillas is undergoing a process of radical reconstruction, with old low houses (casas bajas) being evicted, closed up, and rebuilt. Gerald Raunig, the Austrian theorist and activist, snagged a building early on, and his gang has built up a bookstore called Suburbia, a print shop and a meeting space there.

Raunig has been at the center of online theory networking for decades, most prominently European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (EIPCP) and its ramified platforms. They’ve been “a kind of networking of European cultural and artistic institutions with the aim of collaboratively carrying out artistic projects and organizing discursive events that accompany them”, part of the “transnational struggle against neoliberal hegemony” which “clearly refers to the specific activism of the ‘anti-globalization’ movement”. (Buden, 2007)
La Casa Azul and Suburbia together comprise a kind of a theoretical redoubt, an egghead montagnard encampment, with Raunig its own Subcomandante, a complement and a fallback in case the Casa Invisible should fall.

Depression Surfaces

The INURA meet was exhausting for me. After our last dinner in the lovely patio at La Casa, I felt a sense of sadness… and a definite tinge of hangover from the night before. The Casa Azul seems cool, and offers an encouraging way forward for alternative culture in Malaga. But a sense of doom was hanging over the Casa Invisible that evening.
Kike España was downbeat. All ways forward are blocked by the city which has cut off the water, forbids income-generating activity, and sends in undercover police in a constant campaign of destabilization. The place is being suffocated.
The focus of the Malaga activists that night was on the upcoming Spain-wide march for housing on 29 June. The assembly of the Casa Invisible, Kike said, is some 90 participants. “Years ago all of us were living in the center of Malaga. Now none of us are.” Their neighborhood became gentrified out from under them, apartments turned into tourist lodging.

The sign "Entorno Thyssen" brands the district around the Casa Invisible as a dependent territory of the mediocre museum

Throughout the INURA, the focus was on the bigger picture, madcap gentrification in Malaga, and the city’s unaffordability for its residents. As it turned out, the 29J mobilization put thousands into the streets all over the country.

Reactionary Fiestas

Our dinner the evening before, in a seaside restaurant with lavish table service, happened alongside another event at the same place celebrating the mayor who has refused the cession to La Casa. That was weird, passing all the suits and ties on the way to our tables.
“Go say hi to him,” I suggested to Kike. He gave me a wan look. The dinner moved forward in a tone of blunted sarcasm.
On the final evening we attended a screening of short films, old and new about the city. As we lined up to enter the theater, a rally for the extreme right Vox party was taking place nearby, in front of the Roman theater. It was a real Weimar scene, with lefties lining up for a film and excited reactionary politicians fulminating to a large crowd.

Theater-goers in line. Beyond them is the green awning of the Vox rightwing party, and their rally in full swing.

This is the rhythm of politics: Soon after, the extreme right took many seats in the EU parliament. The sense of depression on the left turned to fear. Then a united front pushed back the neo-fascist party in France, and cheer returned.

What Has Been, What Could Be

You can see La Casa Invisible in its early glory is shown in the five minute video "LIPDUB con Verdiales en la Casa Invisible" made in 2011. A complex “poor” production, it's joyful and very Andalusian. It’s one of the best social center videos I've ever seen. I played it in presentations many times, as it so clearly expresses the practical utopia social centers like La Casa aspire to create.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAMVnq6vCpI
The Casa is an active culture wtihin the city – rough, at times secreting toxins, in contrast to the smooth spaces of administrated culture. It’s the kind of place where things happen, not where objects are kept to be admired. The institutional support “el Invi” has received from major museums and local academies is a clear recognition of the vital importance of live culture.
As it has ever been, it’s unclear that the weight of a collective of academics and artists, no matter their support, can counterblance the big capital which Malaga politicians serve.
Picasso is dead. The “invisible creators” crying out for a space ito thrive amidst the touristic tombscape are very much alive.

LINKS

Paula Corroto, “Otra cultura es posible en Málaga: historia de una casa (invisible) al borde del desalojo”, 18 December 2021
https://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2021-12-18/casa-invisible-desalojo-malaga_3341786/

Gerald Raunig, “Casa Invisible is here to stay! Against the eviction of the Invisible, against Mall-aga, against the compliant city”; July 2018
https://transversal.at/blog/Invisible-is-here-to-stay

"Multiplicity", a congress on the "future of cultural policy in Europe" at the Casa Invisible
[the multiplicity site at lainvisible.com is flagged by Google as malware. It isn't. Don't know why the monopoly thinks that. You can access it via Duck Duck Go, and likely other browsers. It has the more complete register of the conference.
https://transversal.at/blog/multiplicity-es

Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson and La Casa Invisible
The Rehabilitation of La Casa Invisible—Chapter I; December 16, 2023–January 26, 2024
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/583257/libia-castro-lafur-lafsson-and-la-casa-invisiblethe-rehabilitation-of-la-casa-invisible-chapter-i/

"About" Arte Útil
Arte Útil roughly translates into English as 'useful art' but it goes further suggesting art as a tool or device. Arte Útil draws on artistic thinking to imagine, create and implement tactics that change how we act in society.
https://www.arte-util.org/about/colophon/
Hundreds of projects, a virtual history of social practice art, are archived with links at
https://www.arte-util.org/projects/

Transversal website
https://transversal.at/

Boris Buden, “¿Qué es el eipcp? Un intento de interpretación”, 2007
https://transversal.at/transversal/0407/buden/es