EKO at night, during a recent demo against eviction
I haven’t done the rounds of Madrid social centers for a while now. I popped in to EKO in Carabanchel recently to see the assembly discuss the future of the project, and indeed of all Madrid’s okupas – esp., social centers in occupied buildings. EKO is 12 years old. Now it is on the brink of extinction (bolded text is glossed below).
This month saw the 15 year commemorations of the 15M movement. The huge encampment by indignados in the central Puerta del Sol spread over Spain during that extraordinary year. 15M was just one of the “movement of the squares” throughout the West and beyond. Here it spurred the rise of the Podemos electoral party. Now it is a distant memory of optimism and forward progressive movement, a faint voice of bygone history amidst the ceaseless propaganda of a new era of reaction.
Program of the recent festival at EKO, @eko_carabanchel on Instagram
The revanchist counter-democratic movement of capital and its governnment partners is bursting with brio. And, with their control over most legacy media of communication, they are eager to let us know. It’s TINA† time again.
I’ve started out a few times to blog the slow-rolling repression of citizen initiatives since the electoral defeat of the left in Madrid. My blog folder is full of false starts which I never posted. It always seemed to require more clarity, more research, and closer attention to the wails of those whose lives were being impoverished. More sadness.
Over time, years, decades, the autonomous movements have accommodated to the rising pressure of rent-seeking capital and its government partners. In some European cities – Amsterdam, Zurich, Paris – governments have given these movements room to maneuver. That is only sensible, in the interest of preserving their creative contributions to the fabric of the metropolis. Capital makes money, yes, but without knocking the stuffing out of striving young people. That’s part of an enlightened technocratic governance, which has never been a feature of the Spanish rightwing.
Madrid is like a Big Cruise Ship…
Here in Madrid today there is zero tolerance for what goes against the civic whims of big capital, and the incessant commercialization of every aspect of life.
Madrid now is going in full for touristification; the degradation is everywhere. More and more trashy chain stores open where neighborhood locales used to be. Crowds so thick you can't walk the streets in the center. Drunks yell and bash into tavern doors in the evening.
The masters of the revanchist city don't suffer this. Their residential districts are quiet. On weekends and holidays they leave for their second homes in the mountains, or jet off to a resort.
To be sure, Madrid is still a great city, and the pleasures of this town, cafes, bars, plazas and more, still glimmer on summer evenings.
… Captained by Pirates
But it’s more and more about hustle and making money. The pace is picking up. Young salarymen in a hurry shove past on the street. And it’s emulating New York City in another way, where the model of exploiting artists' districts for high-end real estate value began.
Urban development based on pure destruction is back. (Gaza is the ghastly paradigm.) Organic urban fabric, the lived texture of neighborhoods, communities and creative districts is conceived by bronco-busting capital as terrain vague to be made over into consumer zones for the bourgeoisie.
How to stand against this?
That’s the urgent question facing the partisans of the EKO social center in the barrio of Carabanchel.
The rightwing mayor campaigned to crack down on okupas, squatters, very broadly construed. His campaign was animated by vivid lies. He has fulfilled his promise. As the fascist Vox councillors in partnership with the ‘moderate’ right took office around the city, they first closed all the legal citizens’ projects around Madrid. (Those are the blog post reports I couldn’t finish.) Now the city has moved aggressively against the social centers in the gentrifying barrio of Carabanchel. [FN – Distrito 11]
We’re Coming for You, Punk
And they have been booming it. Some 50 police broke down the door of CSO Diskordia in February. The eviction, ordered in secret, was assisted by dogs and helicopters. This state terrorism was directed at a persistent collective of anarcho-punks which had previously run La Gatonera in two other buildings. They do punk concerts, but the group has a strong activist bent, working for Palestine and against gentrification. [FN – Spanish Punk[ These are not popular causes in the echelons of government and big capital.
Next it was the turn of the CSO Vetades. That was a real April drama. The eviction followed a fire which erupted during an attempted demolition of the building with the people inside. The owners, a company dedicated to luxury development, had bought the entire block, and are building artist residences and art gallery spaces. So artists with money can prance around unconscious of the ruins beneath their feet of their former fellows.
CSO Diskordia in action in January (via @Dalevuelta, Facebook)
The eviction of CSO Vetades eviction; photo from El Salto
The EKO now is the big potato hovering over the boiling oil.
The capital group which bought up the vast building (at a bargain price because – yes, it was occupied) has a foot in Miami. There the blood of exiles is running hot at the prospect of a “reconquista” of Cuba. And true to form this bunch has called on the thuggiest elements of Madrid’s rightwing (they’re called Desokupados) to hang around EKO and try to fuck with the okupas, force the door, glower ogreishly, etc.
“These aren’t people from the neighborhood, are they?”
No, they are not. They’re internationally networked thugs for hire working for fascist capitalists.
Deep Roots in Bloody Ground
EKO isn’t only a big building. It’s in a barrio with a deeply resonant past for the left in Madrid.
Since its founding, EKO has been the home of the Ateneo Libertario Carabanchel Latina, a group of elder anarchists which has its roots in the experience of prisoners at the Franco-era political prison in Carabanchel (1944-1998). The English anarchist Stuart Christie was imprisoned there for years. [FN – Christie] Many of his fellow prisoners were shot. Leah Patten tells the story of the vast panopticon prison which was squatted by artists after it was abandoned, and demolished in 2008.
Stuart Christie's jailhouse friend Miguel Garcia in London (1976; photo Phil Ruff). Garcia founded the Centro Iberico anarcho-punk music venue there. A new book has the story….
EKO has been occupying on Calle del Ánade for 12 years, and I met some of these Ateneo men when the project began. They talked and moved slowly, but very deliberately. Like tai chi.
Big Arty Party
The EKO of today shares another thing with the final years of that long gone house of detention – it's full of artists.
As I sat with the assembly, a noisy crowd of folks entered the EKO's big ground floor, moved slowly past the mercadillo of artisans with t-shirts, ceramics, embroideries and zines, and paraded up the stairs behind the bar. They were on their way to an art show on the 2nd floor, having its opening that day as well. This was the 3rd “Encuentro de Arte y Creatividad en Carabanchel”, an indigenous counterpoint to the barrio's city-sponsored art gallery festivals.
The EKO assembly on the ground floor heard a statement of support read by a rep from CSO La Rosa (@cso_larosa), called the “chic okupa” in by El Mundo. It’s bursting with activity groups, and English is spoken among the internationals who come there. I recently attended a weekly drawing party there in the studio of an artist who was away, showing in NYC.
The rep told us the experiences he had at EKO inspired the programs at La Rosa, which is principally a cultural center. He learned how to “do projects with little money”, a reminder that youthful creativity thrives if exercising it doesn’t cost its makers money they don’t have.
Another solidarity statement came from “La Enre de Tetuán”* (@la_enredadera_de_tetuan). The name means “the ivy”; it rhymes with the title of a recent touring exhibition of political posters and other designs at Reina Sofia museum, “Giro gráfico: como el muro en la hiedra” (“like the wall [covered in] ivy”).
“La Enre” was the site of the zine event Pichifest in 2023, in which this blogger disported himself dressed as a Polish elf (in tribute to the Orange Alternative movement, a surrealist underground during the 1980s). I sold squatting research books, as well as posters from the JustSeeds Peoples’ History series, printed off from the website. Few sales, but some interesting conversations. I blogged the experience here.
The Spanish are stoics, but the mood at the gathering on Friday evening seemed glum.
After we heard fullsome declarations of support from other okupas, the assembly went round-robin with emotive statements of the value of the EKO experience.
They spoke of the feeling of belonging they experienced at EKO as they “shared this small ideal world”, bidding “adios a la sistema” as they did so.
A young woman* who grew up with EKO being available over its many years of existence observed, “Everywhere you have to pay now. All the cultural spaces.”
The sheer injustice of closing EKO was expressed in one clear observation about the city’s intent to remake Carabanchel – “The artists are here.”
The EKO assembly circulated a sheet asking for suggestions, and I made some. (Illustrated below.) The key challenge (IMHO) is to overcome the hangover habit of self-isolation, what the Italian movements call auto-ghettizzazione (self-ghettoization). That’s a rejection of anything outside of the movement, be it parliamentary politicos, city officials, business owners, conventional cultural and political organizations – all of that great outside, la sistema. Which, as a consequence, remains ignorant of the many achievements of the social centers, ignorant of their increasing importance in the cultural and social life of young people in this city.
The special experiences they shared, the camaraderie, the joys and pains enfold the okupas like a blanket. They are precious, these lived moments, but they are also not really public. They take place in a place apart, as if in – as the name of the ur-okupa of Madrid has it – a Laboratorio (1997-2004).
“Lobby lobby lobby”, I wrote to them. And, historian that I am, “Above all, don’t leave without a book.” Record and claim your histories. They will stand as proof of the gravity of the crime, the official murder of proven potentials that is in process.
Fuck All Those Fucking Fuckers
Are you sad or angry?
Both. I’m angry because the people who built EKO are not being respected for what they have accomplished. They’re being thrown to the dogs.
And I’m sad too, which drives my impulse to call for monuments, to make books of record that make memory concrete.
It is in the nature of most okupas to end. Like very sick children, only a very few projects pass into a longer life, or lend their energies to something else.
What else? In Madrid, Caixa Forum, run by a foundation, was inspired by early okupas, as a recent historical exhibition there acknowledged. Tabacalera autogestionado may recompose itself alongside Tabacalera official after construction is done -- MNCARS is standing by during the renovations. These two are in the center, in the ‘cultural strip’of institutions intended to gentrify Lavapies.
Now new okupas in the center are not allowed in Madrid. Patio Maravillas and La Ingobernable were evicted, and re-occupations squelched. So collective projects have been pushed out to the surrounding barrios of Madrid. But out there they sren’t given the chance to turn into something useful for their communities. They are simply evicted, and their energies scattered to the winds.
Anarchist forces are gathering for the next assault on vacancy. That’s a good thing. It needs pointing out that while they are allies, these are not always the same people who made EKO what it became. That delicate mix of forces political and cultural was a long time in composing. That it is to be snuffed out in Carabanchel is a crime against culture.
In 2017 Santiago Sierra affixed a plaque to EKO during an exhibition declaring it a monument to civil disobedience (the JACA group show; Monumento a la Desobediencia Civil). The plaque has disappeared, and soon as well may the place it commemorated.
Real human energy, as it expresses itself in projects like EKO, builds monuments in sand in a hyper-capitalist society. These oaeses of freedom and creativity arise; they cannot be legislated. They are not understood in conventional terms, and consequently they are rarely respected. It is utopian to hope that this meatheaded city government would consider turning EKO public, like Rue de Rivoli in Paris, Rote Fabrik in Zurich, or even Caixa Forum in Madrid central. That takes vision; current leadership has only coins for eyes.
EKO manifesto handed out in the assembly
My scribbled suggestions in Spanglish
NOTES
“on the brink of extinction”
Susana Albarrán Méndez, “El EKO detiene un nuevo intento de desalojo del centro social por parte del fondo Midtown Capital Partners SL”, 13 mar 2026, @elsaltodiario.com
“movement of the squares”
Can search “movement of the squares political: for articles reflecting on this moment. I worked a bit with the Austrian artist Oliver Ressler in Madrid for his 2012 video project “Take The Square” (see https://www.ressler.at/take_the_square/).
† TINA is the acronym ascribed to British PM Margaret Thatcher for “there is no alternative” to capitalism.
[FN - Distrito 11]
Carabanchel is being promoted by official tourist websites as a ‘bohemian creative hub’, the new hip barrio. The full wonder which is unfolding in this residential working class barrio is explained by this city hall website as “La revolución creativa de Carabanchel ya tiene nombre propio: DISTRITO 11”, https://diario.madrid.es/blog/2024/05/13/la-revolucion-creativa-de-carabanchel-ya-tiene-nombre-propio-distrito-11/
[FN – Spanish Punk[
A new book in English by David Vila Diéguez, Spanish Punk: Screaming for Democracy in a Postdictatorial State (P.M. Press, 2025) clearly explains the imbrication of politics and punk music in Spain since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975.
On the evictions of Diskordia and Vetades, see:
Diskordia – Laura Prieto Gallego, “Un refugio cultural menos en Madrid: desalojan Diskordia, centro de ocio y apoyo vecinal de Carabanchel”, 5/2/2026, @publico.es
Vetades – Susana Albarrán Méndez, “Amenazas, acoso, policía y un incendio: integrantes del CSO Vetades se ven forzados a abandonarlo”, 30 abr 2025, at @elsaltodiario.com
Ateneo Libertario Carabanchel Latina
https://radar.squat.net/es/madrid/ateneo-libertario-carabanchel-latina
[FN – Christie]
After his release, Stuart Christie became a leading figure in English and Scottish anarchism, and a favorite target of UK police persecution. Christie’s book tells the story of his 1964 arrest and imprisonment. (Stuart Christie, Granny Made Me an Anarchist: General Franco, the Angry Brigade and Me; multiple editions; see AK Press; online at https://archive.org/details/grannymademeanar0000chri). A brief review of the book discusses the UK context – https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/zkh2cv. Christie was an active publisher, and a key networker with the exiled Spanish anarchists. Since his death new books have appeared on these connections, esp. Nick Soulsby's Born of Struggle, Living in Hope: The Anarcho-Punk Lives of the Centro Iberico, 1971–1983 (PM Press, 2026), and anthologies of Christie’s writings.
On the prison of Carabanchel
Leah Patten, “Madrid No Frills” website, 16 February 2018, “The story of Madrid’s most controversial prison” https://madridnofrills.com/madrid-prison/ Photographs © Mark Parascandola.
“chic” CSO La Rosa
Daniel J. Ollero, “La Rosa, el edificio okupa 'chic' de La Latina con clases de baile y talleres de costura donde rusos y ucranianos charlan amistosamente”, 5 julio 2025, @elmundo.es
* A confession: Despite years in Madrid, my Spanish remains weak, and my comprehension of the speaking events I attend is spotty. Hope I got it right!
“blogged it here”
See “Art + Squat = Pichifest”, at https://occuprop.blogspot.com/2023/11/art-squat-pichifest.html
Enredadera/hiedra
“Giro gráfico: como el muro en la hiedra”
PDF catalogue here:
https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/Publicaciones/giro_grafico.pdf
video of the "Giro Grafica" https://www.museoreinasofia.es/multimedia/giro-grafico
#CentroSocialesOcupados
#EKOCarabanchel
#CSODiskordia
#CSOVetades
#CSOLaRosa
#AteneoLibertarioLaLatina
#MadridNoFrills
Zine documenting a recent facade exhibition at La Rosa (@la_multiusos). The show was attacked with lawfare by the Zionist lobby Action and Communication on the Middle East (ACOM), and had to be taken down.
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